Rebekka Naatus: Laestadian Women Resist Big Family Pressure and Criticize the Ban on Contraception

The women rights have got a important step forward, when the  Finland’s First Conservative Laestadian Female Priest, Mrs. Mari Leppänen, was  secretly ordained as priest in 2012, in order to start her work in Lieto parish, near to Turku. Listen here the detalis of the issues in English (information on womens’ rights and bans in the Conservative Laestadian movement in general, too).

Also Mrs. Rebekka Naatus, a journalist, divorced Laestadian woman is making waves by speaking out against the treatment of women with the movement to which she belongs.

Rebekka Naatus, the PR and information officer of Evangelical Lutheran parishes in Oulu, has published an article about these questions in an  anthology Iloisen talon kellareissa (”In the Cellars of a Merry House”, not translated in English).  She has been interviewed in media on the womens’ situation in the biggest revival movement in the country, Conservative Laestadianism. Are their bodies really their own, or has the religious community colonised them to reproduction where no anyone is allowed to refuse?

The focus is in the problems following from the very tight and strict community of the religious or rather ”ethnic” group. The community has a strong power in the individual’s everyday life and in the choice of personal lifestyle. 

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