Briefing on how Church and right wing resist women's rights Country a political battleground The most intense battleground between the global movement to liberate women and the forces of reaction from their conservative jailers may well be Poland, judging from the account of one insider last night at the New School. Wanda Nowicka is the Deputy Speaker of the Polish Parliament celebrated for her two decade fight for women's reproductive rights in Poland, for which she won the University-in-Exile award from the New School in 2008. Since then her determined efforts to advance the cause of women's rights in the economy as well as health and reproduction have continued in an increasingly right wing environment in Poland, where the Roman Catholic church continues to have a powerfully reactionary influence. Speaking at a small university meeting of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the New School, Nowicka, in New York City as an observer in the Polish delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in its annual consideration of violence and other torment of women around the world (4 - 15 March 2013), made it plain that Poland's remarkable speed in modernizing its economy (happily without sharing in the Euro) following its historic achievement in being the first of the Eastern European states to break free of Soviet rule is only one side of the political coin in that remarkable country. The other side is the continuing influence of the members of the fallen Communist regime and the Roman Catholic church, which has resulted in two political parties right of center and heavy resistance to allowing Polish women the full freedom and opportunity they deserve, even though the proportion of women in Parliament is no less than 24%. In one striking example of the pitfalls faced by the women's movement in which she has been a long time leader as the cofounder of the Federation for Women and Family Planning, as well as ASTRA, the Central and Eastern European Women's Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Ms Nowicka mentioned the problems raised by the use of the word "gender" in the UN formulation of its prospective law for reproductive rights and against violence against women. Contrary to the helpful adoption of the word in cases argued in the Supreme Court by Ruth Ginsberg before she became a Supreme Court Justice, when "gender" was famously substituted for the word "sex" in the phrase "sex discrimination" at the suggestion of a Clerk of the Court who said that it would otherwise provoke the wrong kind of thoughts in the male Justices considering her cases, the use of the word "gender" has apparently excited right wing fears of advancing the cause of gay marriage in the Polish nation, where lesbian and gay advances are strongly resisted by the right. So the use of "gender" has interfered with the adoption and ratification of the UN law on reproductive rights by the Polish government. Thus recently Lech Walesa the trade union hero of Solidarity, Nobel Peace prize winner and former President, was said to have risked indictment by the public prosecutor for hate crimes for making remarks judged homophobic to the effect that minorities such as gays and lesbians deserved only proportional influence in politics and government and that they should "sit at the back of the room or even behind the wall". On the other hand Polish society at large was not so polarized as the politicians, Nowicka stated, and the ruling right wing party seems open to change from time to time. There is also resistance at the grassroots level which can be successful against initiatives such as the recent proposed international trade agreement on copyright and counterfeit goods. This resulted in heavy agitation on Facebook against possible infringement on privacy and freedom of expression, which led to the Polish president promising not to ratify the pact.