UNNATURAL EQUALITY

co-habitation is a temporary stage before marriage. But statistics do show that while at least five out of six young women in 1985 will marry, lifelong singleness (possibly in combination with one or more co-habiting relationships) is becoming more acceptable and common.21 Not only has the divorce rate soared, but the birth rate (i.e., the number of live births for each 1000 women of childbearing age) plunged — down from 118 in 1960 to 67.2 in 1988, a nearly 50 percent drop. By the early 1980s voluntary childlessness had become so acceptable and common — among married couples as well as among never-married women — that one researcher estimated that perhaps as many as 25 percent of the young women of the 1970s would in fact never have children.22 In 1990, four out of every ten American families contained children, though the presence of children was more common in families maintained by women than either those maintained by men or in married couple families. Simultaneously, the number of legal abortions has more than doubled. In 1987 in the United States, 13,54,000 pregnancies were terminated by abortion, up from 5,88,000 in 1972. Approximately 70 percent of the legal abortions are obtained by unmarried women, and these women are concentrated in the lower end of the income scales. Women with an annual household income at the poverty line or below account for only 15 percent of all American women, but they account for 33 percent of the women obtaining abortions. NATURE’S VERDICT The equality of man and woman is one of the main concepts of western civilization. It has been in vogue in the western world for the last one hundred years, but that has been quite long enough to show that, as an experiment in living, it has been a failure. In spite of women having been legally accorded equal status with men in many countries, and in spite of advances in the educational level of women and their entry into most arenas of economic and political life, in practice they have yet to achieve an equal professional status or secure an equal footing in society. And, meanwhile, the shift in women’s role and identity in society has led directly to the breakdown of the family and a serious breakdown of public morality generally in the West. Initially, supporters of the concept of equality of the sexes claimed that the differences between men and women resulted from environmental influences, but modem investigation shows that the cause must be sought elsewhere. Research carried out on a wide cross-section of society and over a broad range of different fields has established that this difference, far from having been externally imposed, by the environment, or through historical processes, is innate. That is to say, that it is biological in nature, something that women are simply born with and not something which is eradicable by legislation or the whipping up of popular sentiment. It is nature and not nurture which is to be blamed. In 1981, Newsweek magazine reported in detail on the conclusions drawn from in-depth research carried out in America by both male and female investigators on the differences in the physical and mental make-up of men and women, namely, that women are emotional in