Bridget Mary: I agree with Katha Pollitt that Pope Francis' blind spot is women. Until Frances embraces women as equals in every area of life including women's right to control their fertility, the Catholic Church will contribute more to ecological destruction, then lead the way forward. Women are half of the human race and the church's teaching on birth control is wrong. If women priests and married priests were decision makers, responsible family planning including artificial birth control would be a virtue, not a sin!
"According to a recent report from the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, providing family planning to the 225 million women around the world who want it but can’t get it could meet 16 to 29 percent of the necessary decrease in greenhouse-gas emissions. Doesn’t meeting a desire that women already have seem a strategy more likely to succeed than turning the world vegetarian or keeping the new middle classes in China and India from buying cars and taking vacations? Educating girls, keeping women in the workforce, and providing good healthcare for women and children are crucial human-rights goals that also reduce the number of children a woman has....
....As climate change heats up, it’s women who will bear the brunt of it, because they are the majority of the world’s poor. Especially in the developing world, they’ll be contending with drought, food shortages, flooding, and forced migration, along with increases in the usual brutalities like rape, violence, trafficking, and war. Under such circumstances, to deny them the ability to control how many kids they bring into the world is to condemn millions of women to the hardscrabble desperation that the pope says he wants to prevent."
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