A hospital in New Jersey will no longer force nurses to perform abortion against their will after it backed down in a legal battle with nurses who were suing for forcing them to violate their consciences. Instead the hospital will hire additional staff to help perform abortions. In a statement, Jeffrey Tolvin, a spokesman for...
The Church of Ireland has expressed concern at proposals to alter a rule which allows denominational schools to permeate the school day with their ethos. In its response to proposals last month by the Advisory Group of the National Forum on Primary School Patronage, the Church of Ireland’s Board of Education said that its “major...
Clear majorities of Americans, Britons and Canadians believe that parents not schools should be mainly responsible for teaching their children about sex, according to a new survey. The poll, conducted by American polling company Angus Reid, found that Americans were the most likely to believe that parents should be primarily responsible for sex education. It...
Parents must not use children as ammunition in divorce cases, the leading family law judge in the UK has said. Sir Nicholas Wall, the president of the Family Division, is a persistent critic of the way in which divorcing couples often conduct themselves. In a speech in London entitled ‘Changing the Culture’, he said: “Too...
Less than a third of three year olds and just one in ten nine month olds are placed in day-care by their parents according to the latest report from the Growing Up in Ireland study, which is tracking the lives of 11,000 Irish children over time. The study found that only 11 pc of nine...
Prime Minister David Cameron (pictured) has said atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins “just doesn’t really get it” on the issue of faith schools. Mr Cameron made the comments as he answered questions from well-known figures for a Guardian newspaper article. Mr Cameron said he thinks faith schools are “very often good schools” and he noted that...
Single-parent families are about four times as likely as married-couple families to be in poverty, according to new US figures. A study produced by think tank Child Trends showed that 37.2pc of single parent families were in poverty, while only 8.8pc of married families were in poverty. This difference has important implications, given that the...
There are now a record number of unmarried adults in the UK, with one in six people cohabiting, figures have disclosed, with 53 the most common age for divorce. According to new figures from the the Office of National Statistics (ONS), married couples now make up less than half the population with the trend for...
There is no anti-Catholic bias in the media “in general”, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin (pictured) has said. Speaking on yesterday’s Morning Ireland programme on RTE, he criticised the station over the time it took to admit it had wrongly accused Fr Kevin Reynolds, parish priest of Ahascragh, Co Galway, of raping a minor and fathering a...
A Christian worker in the UK who was fired when she accused a group of fundamentalist Muslims of conducting a campaign of “race hate” is set to take her case to court. Nohad Halawi, who worked at Heathrow Airport, is claiming that she was unfairly dismissed and that she and other Christian staff at the...
