Is ‘porn literacy’ something we should be teaching in schools? If so, at what age? What is ‘porn literacy’? Is there such a thing as ‘ethical porn’? To what extent will these things be part of the planned new Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) course? For clues, we might look to Kate Dawson who is...
David Quinn was on Spirit Radio to ask some hard questions about a new law governing Assisted Human Reproduction and surrogacy.
Health Minister Simon Harris has announced that he is ‘commencing’ sections of the Children and Family Relationships Act for the first time. This law, passed in 2015, governs, among other things, the legal relationships between children conceived via egg and sperm donation, and the ‘intended parents’. Harris is almost guaranteed soft questions from journalists on...
Every two years a major survey is published called the European Social Survey which investigates the attitudes of people from a range of countries, including Ireland, to issues like religion, politics, immigration, sexuality and so on. The latest findings are out, and faith in religion remains at a low ebb in most countries surveyed, but...
Our new paper is a critique of the liberal philosophy of sex education and how consent is treated as the only necessary condition a couple has to fulfil before having sex with each other. It is a response to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment which is currently conducting a review of Relationships and...
Irish media often present surrogacy as an uncontroversial option for couples who struggle with infertility but we rarely hear reports about children who have been abandoned by commissioning adults, or about the poor women who have acted as surrogates and regret it. A new documentary by the Australian ABC TV covers the story of baby...
The attack on the natural ties is getting closer to its logical endpoint now. The Children and Family Relationships Act, buttressed by the upcoming legislation on Assisted Human Reproduction already tremendously downgrade natural family ties, but influential voices want Irish law to go even further in this direction. For example, they want surrogate mothers to...
Check it out. As religion declines in a society, rationality and tolerance go up, and a good thing too. This, at least, seems to be the barely concealed message of the latest British Social Attitudes report (BSA). Since 1983, the National Centre for Social Research has been charting the decline of religion in British society,...
Breda O’Brien appeared on Spirit Radio’s Morning Show to discuss a new report from the Oireachtas Health Committee on the fertility industry. In particular she attacked a proposal that would allow surrogate mothers to become pregnant with their own babies and and then hand them over to a commissioning couple or individual, possibly in return...
The Oireachtas Joint Health Committee has just issued a report on Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR). The report is extremely inadequate in its treatment of the ethically questionable aspects of AHR but for the sake of simplicity, let’s examine what seems to be the least problematic forms of AHR: so-called altruistic egg and sperm donation and...
