A court in the US state of Iowa has ordered that state’s Department of Public Health to issue a new birth certificate listing both members of a same-sex marriage as the legal parents of a 2-year-old girl. No mention will be made of the biological father. Polk County District Judge Eliza Ovrom ordered the new...
More British children are being raised by single parents because the tax and benefit system “encourages transient shack-ups,” according to a leading family expert. One in five British children live with a single mother or father. This figure is some 35 per cent higher than in Germany and 50 per cent higher than in France....
Two thousand children were taken into State care last year, the Health Service Executive has confirmed. In addition, 26 girls in State care became pregnanty, including some under the age of consent. The figures were obtained by the Irish Daily Mail under the Freedom of Information Act. An independent review into the deaths of children...
The number of marriages among American Catholics has declined along with the marriage rate of the rest of the US in recent decades, according to a spokesperson for the US Catholic bishops. Sheila Garcia, associate director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth told the US news website Catholic News...
Divorced parents in the UK will be given a legal right to see their children under plans being drawn up by ministers. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, courts will be required to ensure that both fathers and mothers are given access to children in divorce settlements. Parents who refuse to accept the...
Men and women really do have fundamentally different characteristics, according to research which has confirmed many longheld gender sterotypes. A survey of 10,000 people found that women tend to be more “sensitive, warm and apprehensive” than men while men tend to be more “emotionally stable, dominant, rule-conscious and vigilant”, experts said. Some previous research had...
Britain’s Christian heritage is no longer understood in the “corridors of power” an influential Church of England bishop has said. The former Bishop of Rochester, Rt Revd Michael Nazir-Ali (pictured) was commenting on Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent speech on the place of the Bible and Christianity in British life. In an article for The...
Ireland must take action to avoid a falling birthrate, a leading academic has said. Dr Margret Fine-Davis, Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Social Attitude and Policy Research Group at Trinity College, cited a prediction by the Central Statistics office that Ireland’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) would reach the European average of 1.5 children...
A Florida court has recognised both the birth mother and the genetic mother as the parents of a child involved in a custody battle between the two women. One of the women insisted she is the mother because she donated the egg but her estranged partner claimed she was better qualified because she had the...
“Religious people are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors, such as visiting dentists and wearing seat belts, and are less likely to smoke, drink, take recreational drugs and engage in risky sex”, compared with non-religious people, according to an article in Scientific American by Michael Shermer. Shermer, an atheist, cites a number of studies,...
