UK government plans for ‘mitochondrial replacement therapy’ could lead to children with genetic material from three parents being born in 2015. According to the Daily Telegraph, the new rules will allow clinics to replace an egg cell’s defective mitochondrial DNA with material from a donor egg. Though children born from such a procedure would only...
One in five births were to cohabiting couples and more than 35% in total were outside marriage in the third quarter of last year, according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office. Of the 17,729 babies born in July to September 2013, 6,243 were to unmarried parents – an increase from the same period...
Church teachings on marriage and family are poorly understood, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told a group priests and members of parish councils at Clonliffe college yesterday. He was commenting on the results of a survey of lay people in the diocese, conducted ahead of a Synod on the family that will take place in Rome in...
A new US report into state and government programmes designed to encourage and stabilise marriage has found that these programmes can have a positive effect, particularly on lower-income families. However, the report also found that the level of success varied considerably depending on the programme, and that many of the initiatives suffered from a lack...
The government have proposed lowering the age at which a person can change their legal gender from 18 to 16. Under the proposed law a person can be biologically male or female in every detail but still be declared a member of the opposite ‘gender’. In the initially published draft heads of the proposed Gender...
A Swedish nurse who refuses to assist in performing abortions claims that she has been denied employment because of her religious beliefs. She says it is a violation of her freedom of conscience and has made a formal complaint to the Swedish Discrimation Ombudsman. In addition, complaint has been filed with the Council of Europe....
Independent Senator Ronan Mullen today called for a “lucid debate” on gay marriage in the *Irish Times *today, saying that there exists “real hatred about towards people who defend marriage as presently constituted.” “It would be strange” he wrote “for gay rights supporters to argue that the term homophobic was not defamatory. They, more than anybody else, have reason...
Children have a right to know the identity of their genetic parents, writes Deirdre Madden, lecturer in Law at UCC. Writing in The Irish Times, she said that it was “unfortunate” that in Justice Minister Alan Shatter’s proposed Family and Relationships Bill 2014 “nothing is said about the child’s right to discover the identity of the...
The Catholic Bishops Conference of Poland have criticised “gender ideology” which holds that there are no fundamental differences between men and women and that our ‘gender’ is chosen. In a pastoral letter, the Bishops write: “Confronted with increasing attacks against different aspects of family and social life coming from this ideology, we are compelled to speak...
The success of the film Philomena has lead to a ‘significant increase’ in the number of people trying to trace their birth parents, Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald has told the Daíl. She said that the film, which is based on the struggles of Philomena Lee to make contact with her son, who was adopted...
