MANY doors have opened the past several decades for women in education and employment, but little has been done to support women as mothers and wives, a US expert in family law said.
Western Europe is advanced, “but is not joined by many, many countries in the degree of its policies that allow women to work and to take care of their children,” Helen Alvare, professor of law at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said.
Alvare and others spoke at a news conference September 20, highlighting some of the issues being discussed at a September 19-21 international congress sponsored by the Pontifical Council for the Family. Nearly 200 jurists also attended the gathering, which focused on family rights and challenges.
“There has been great focus on policies that essentially allow the woman to enter into the world on the terms of a man without children,” she said.
“‘We will be very strong on guaranteeing your right not to have a child through either contraception or abortion. But we will do comparatively little to assist you if you do have a child,’” she said.
She cited the lack of paid maternity leave, maternity leave that is of adequate length and affordable child care as some examples where assistance is lacking.
The little support for women when they have kids is coupled with the “obsessive promotion” of contraception and abortion, which are meant “to assure the woman that she can enter into whether it is education or the labor force without children, and abortion is the back up for this,” she said.
Easily available contraception and abortion help lawmakers “get off the hook and not be held responsible for providing a package of policies” that are family friendly, but harder to pass, she said.
The Church has a great opportunity to promote its teaching, she explained, because it offers a balanced view of “women’s dignity and her proper place in the family and the public sphere. The church also demands respect for the child before birth as well as after.”
The church also has a balance approach “to the male-female relationship and to the family and to the child,” she said.
