Pope Says Women Should Have All Rights Extended to Men in Society

Pope John Paul II, in a message Friday for a U.N. women’s conference, dismissed feminist assertions that motherhood is oppressive and said women who stay home to raise children should not be made to feel like failures.

The Pope also served notice to the United Nations that the Vatican, which showed its diplomatic teeth at a population conference last year, will oppose any pro-abortion stand at the international conference on women in Beijing in September.

He told conference Secretary-General Gertrude Mongella that while women should have all rights granted to men in society, their femininity was deformed when they strove to be the same as men.

“No response to women’s issues can ignore women’s role in the family or take lightly the fact that every new life is totally entrusted to the protection and care of the woman carrying it in her womb,” he told Mongella.