Shortly after the legalization of same-sex civil unions in Chile, the nation's secretary of justice said in an interview last week that the government “is not going to oppose” a bill legalizing the adoption of children by homosexual couples. A bill has been introduced in the Chilean legislature to modify the country's adoption system to allow adoption by homosexual couples. Civil unions were approved six months ago, and will begin in October. “We’re not going to oppose it in the coming debate. This is a debate that has to take place with a view to the citizenry,” Javiera Blanco told the TV program Ahora Noticias July 7. Hernán Corral, a professor of civil law at the University of the Andes, told CNA that adoption by homosexual couples “would strike a strong blow against the family, which in its essence is composed of the permanent union of a man and a woman with children that issue from their union.” “The common good is undermined when the family properly as such is no longer recognized in the law and by public policy and the idea is conveyed to the people the idea that 'family' can be any group of persons who live together and have, even if it’s provisional, affection for each other,” he added. According to the lawyer, the presence of gender ideology behind the Chilean initiative is “unquestionable,” since “it denies the difference between man and woman is required by human nature, and along with that it rejects not only the notion that marriage as the union between a man and a woman but also the dual aspect of the conception of a child, as deriving from the motherhood (of the woman) and the fatherhood (of the man.)” “The concepts of father and mother disappear and are substituted by a neutral expression like 'parent',” he added. Consequently “the law is being presented as a right of homosexual couples to be able to have children. And this is accomplished by means of adoption [and] artificial reproduction technologies.”