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Manuel Ferrer Regales, Full Professor Emeritus, Universidad de Navarra

Women, nature and feminism

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:43:20 +0000 Published in Navarra Newspaper

At the end of the 19th century, Western women (in particular European and American women) perceived and suffered the consequences of a status in which discrimination between women and men had been occurring for centuries. During the course of the 1st Industrial Revolution, which took place in the middle of the 19th century, a proposal was born to eliminate this discrimination in terms of women's right to vote, access to programs of study and participation in public life, so that at the beginning of the 20th century women were admitted to higher education and universities teaching , and achieved equality at the political level in Europe as a whole. Thus the first feminism was born.

class After the Second World War, the American Bety Friedman, whom I met at a "stand" at the Bucharest Population congress in 1974, founded the Women's Liberation Movement (her most famous book is entitled The Mystique of Femininity), which aims to hinder the birth rate by all means, including abortion; the young people of the French and American '68 revolution in turn gave free rein to sexual freedom. In Spain, the law that decriminalized abortion in 1985 culminates with the current draft bill on free abortion up to the 14th week after the age of sixteen, and considers the suppression of the new person being gestated inside her as a woman's right. Meanwhile, the most reliable data indicate the low effectiveness of campaigns promoting safe sex. The sale of the morning-after pill without a doctor's prescription further trivializes the risk of side effects and increases the issue of women who consider abortion as just another contraceptive. In addition: What idea of motherhood can a woman who started having sex as an adolescent have?

Fortunately, equity feminism has another dimension that is very noble and in line with the feminine capacity of promote its possibilities in all orders of cultural, economic and social life. An equity feminist wants for women what she wants for everyone: fair treatment and absence of discrimination.

Finally, post-feminism, associated with the so-called gender ideology, seeks to manipulate the natural order of things. This means that sexual identity is not determined by biology but by culture ("you are not born a woman, you are made a woman"). Consequently, sex is not part of the identity staff, since the distinction that has always existed between male and female derives in several genders: heterosexual female and male, homosexual and lesbian, as well as bisexual, being heterosexuality one more case of sexual internship . All this is concretized in the possibility of changing one's own body and reconverting it simultaneously into an organic and a mechanical medium in order to improve its capacities. From this derives the contempt for motherhood that goes hand in hand with the destabilization of the family as a social institution, or its multiple manipulation by technology. In this sense, gender ideology and its negative effects could be compared to the consequences that climate change is causing due to human action: aggression to physical nature and human nature, respectively. In view of its anti-human nature, the following considerations should be made: Society possesses springs and responses to aggressions. A famous singer, for example, can be a symbol of a return to sanity: she wears a ring that promotes abstinence before marriage, which is shared by her fans, who are growing by the thousands in the USA. The pretension of eliminating the distinction between the sexes, male and female, and multiplying them, is detrimental to the correct development of the human species.

In conclusion, pride in motherhood should be strengthened and the full participation of women in society should be much more strongly promoted, making it possible to reconcile motherhood and professional life work .