THE Vatican’s representative at the United Nations has denounced gender ideology, saying that the approach has harmed rather than helped women.
Speaking at a UN session on gender equality on 8 March, Archbishop Celestino Migliore said that the gender ideology “is proving increasingly ideologically driven, and actually delays the true advancement of women”.
The gender approach, the Archbishop said, seeks to “dissolve every specificity and complementarity between men and women”.
Moreover, the documents produced by UN conferences in recent years have often ascribed “to a notion of sexual and reproductive health and rights which is violent to unborn human life and is detrimental to the integral needs of women and men within society,” he said.
Archbisop Migliore acknowledged that women “continue to suffer in many parts of the world” because of unjust discrimination and “violence in the form of female feticide, infanticide, and abandonment”, as well as “discrimination in health and nutrition”.
He noted, moreover, how “girls and women 15 years of age and over account for two-thirds of the world’s illiterate population”.
“It is a sad fact that three quarters of those infected by HIV/AIDS are girls and women between the ages of 15 and 24” and that, among the victims of human trafficking, “minors account for up to 50 per cent and approximately 70 per cent are women and girls”. The solution, however, is not to impose an artificial equality that disregards the true dignity of womanhood, he insisted.
“A solution respectful of the dignity of women does not allow us to bypass the right to motherhood,” the Vatican envoy said, “but commits us to promoting motherhood by investing in and improving local health systems and providing essential obstetrical services.”
Archbishop Migliore stressed the fact that the final documents of international conferences and committees often “link the achievement of personal, social, economic and political rights to a notion of sexual and reproductive health and rights which is violent to unborn human life and is detrimental to the integral needs of women and men within society”.
“Fifteen years ago the Beijing Platform for Action proclaimed that women’s human rights are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights,” he said.
“This is key not only to understanding the inherent dignity of women and girls but also to making this a concrete reality around the world.”
The Archbishop was addressing the 54th session of the Economic and Social Council’s Commission on the Status of Women, which was meeting to discuss “Item 3: Follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women and to the 23rd special session of the General Assembly entitled Women 2000: gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century”.
-Catholic World News