Swedish women’s organizations stand up against female erasure

Sweden is reportedly considering replacing the terms “father” and “mother” with the simple, neutral term “parent” in all documents issued by the state administration. The “parent code,” a reasoned summary of the rights and duties of parents and the family, should become gender-neutral. This is the opinion of some left-wing Swedish politicians who would thus like to “sterilize” the concept of parent and remove if not only from the notion of “mom and dad,” but also from the “idea of natural procreation.” And so they proposed replacing the terms “father” and “mother,” but nothing is decided yet.

In a government report, several proposals were made to make the Swedish Family Code more gender-neutral, one of them being that concepts such as father and mother should be replaced with the term “parent.” In cases where it is necessary to distinguish between the two, the words “parent who gave birth to the child” and “parent who did not give birth to the child” can be used, writes the Varlden Idag daily newspaper.

However, a large number of women’s organizations are up in arms against these possible changes in language and definitions, Sweden’s “women’s organizations are very concerned about the way Swedish public administration and legislation seem to be turning back the clock and returning to gender blindness,” they wrote in an open letter in Svenska Dagbladet daily, adding that the law proposes to replace “mother” and “father” with the word “parent,” despite the fact that the rules for female and male parenting differ in content. “Motherhood is determined on the basis of birth, while paternity is established by confirmation of the mother, presumed on the basis of the man’s marriage to the mother or established by DNA. When the issue at stake is reproduction itself, it is impossible to ignore the biological differences that exist between women and men,” write representatives of some 30 groups, including Unizon, the Fredrika Bremer Association and Women in the Church of Sweden. To avoid the word woman, phrases such as ‘menstruators’ or ‘uterus carriers’ are already being used in various contexts, thus directly dehumanizing women and girls.” According to Swedish women’s organizations, however, it is “impossible to ignore the biological differences between males and females.”