(Name-mce) ListServ Advocates Critique 'No Sex' Ed

[Paul C. Gorski]

Advocates Critique 'No Sex' Ed

Published On 9/29/2006 2:19:53 AM

By ARIADNE C. MEDLER
Crimson Staff Writer

>From last May’s much-debated placement of condom boxes in freshman dorms
to the recent opening of the Women’s Center, reproductive rights and
women’s issues have always been a heated topic of discussion on the
Harvard campus.

Pitching in on the debate, a panel of speakers at the Harvard Law School
(HLS) discussed the effects of U.S. abstinence-only policies. The event,
entitled “Sex, Lies, and Silence,” offered a scathing critique of both
abstinence-only education and the Bush administration’s funding and
ideological support of such programs.

“Abstinence-only sets the clock back on women’s rights,” said
panelist Julie F. Kay, a staff attorney at Legal Momentum, a New
York-based women’s rights advocacy group.

Speaking to a packed lecture hall, Kay said abstinence-only programs are
designed with a “real intent to make girls fearful of sex.” She cited
“Free Teens,” a New-Jersey based program that states “Sex may make
you feel good, but it can kill you or make you sterile.”

These programs also perpetuate gender stereotypes which make girls believe
that they “are naturally chaste, and boys are the ones who’ve got to
have it,” Kay said.

In order to receive federal funding as an “abstinence-only” program,
groups must promote hetero-sexual marriage and define abstinence as “a
voluntary choice not to engage in sexual activity or any type of sexual
stimulation between two persons,” explained panelist William Smith, a
vice president at a Washington D.C. advocacy group.

“Apparently three or four is fine,” he joked.

Smith went on to say that the broad and vague use of the term “sexual
stimulation” is also problematic.

“If you look into someone’s eyes and you have a [physical] response,
apparently you’ve just become non-abstinent,” Smith said.

All panelists agreed that abstinence-only curricula contain scientifically
inaccurate data. Groups commonly distribute distorted statistics to
promote abstinence, Kay said.

One such federally funded abstinence-only sexual education program teaches
that condoms fail 14 percent of the time, contrasted to the three percent
accepted by the wider medical community and cited by medical journals,
according to Kay.

The same program’s pamphlet states that HIV/AIDS can be contracted
through tears, sweat, and saliva.

“The [current] Administration actively promotes these kinds of programs
without any sort of evidence base,” said Jodi Johnson, the executive
director and founder of the Maryland-based Center for Health and Gender
Equity.

“This issue is cash money for the Bush Administration and their
religious base,” Smith contended. “They’ve stretched beyond the
bounds of not just reality, but credibility.”

Smith said he is optimistic the government will respond to rights groups,
but that “this is a political problem that requires in part a political
solution—so vote, vote, vote!”

The panel was co-sponsored by the HLS Human Rights Program, Legal
Momentum, and the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International
Health and Human Rights.

—Staff writer Ariadne C. Medler can be reached at amedler at fas.harvard.edu.

-- 
Paul C. Gorski
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