A plan by the UK’s National Health Service to allow women to keep stocks of the morning-after pill abortifacient at home will not reduce unwanted pregnancies or abortions, according to a leading academic. Professor James Trussell, of Princeton University, says there is no evidence that schemes that make emergency contraceptive more available to women have...
A Catholic doctor who refused to sanction a sex-selective abortion is fighting for his career after a complaint was made against him. Dr Mark Hobart could be struck off Australia’s medical register for declining to arrange an abortion of a healthy girl because her parents wanted a boy instead, the Catholic Herald reports. He was...
Children from households with same-sex parents are less likely to graduate from High School compared with children from opposite-sex married families according to a major new Canadian study. The study is based on a huge 20pc sample of the 2006 Canadian census. This allowed a much larger than usual sample of gay and lesbian families...
Justice Minister Alan Shatter (pictured) is to set up a taskforce to examine a possible new wording for the Constitutional provision relating to women in the home with a view to putting it to voters. The move comes in the wake of the decision of the Constitutional Convention that the provision should be amended rather...
A draft resolution insisting that abortion is a fundamental right, and attacking the right of doctors to conscientiously object to facilitating abortions is set to be debated in the European Parliament later this month. The resolution, introduced by Portuguese socialist MEP Edite Estrela, and adopted by the Committee on “Women’s Rights and Gender Equality” also...
Staff at University Hospital Galway failed to provide Savita Halappanavar with “the most basic elements of patient care” and failed to recognise and act upon signs of her clinical deterioration in a timely and appropriate manner, according to a new report. The report, carried out by the Health Information and Quality Authority points to 13...
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has agreed to hear an appeal against a ruling which found that a law restricting access to assisted suicide was in breach of the Convention on Human Rights because it lacked clarity. This is the same reason why the court found Ireland’s law on...
Pope Francis has called an extraordinary session of the Synod of Bishops to take place in twelve months time that will discuss the family, which the Vatican and other Catholic leaders believe is under attack by secularist trends. The Vatican announced today that the Synod gathering will take place in October 2014 under the theme,...
Doctors in the Netherlands have killed a woman by lethal injection because she could not cope with becoming blind. In one of the first cases of euthanasia for a disability, the 70-year-old was deemed by doctors to be ‘suffering unbearably’. They granted her wish to die after she had previously tried to commit suicide several...
It is a “delusion” to believe that there is a neutral value system that can replace religion in education, the head of the Church of Ireland, Archbishop Richard Clarke, has said. Writing in today’s Irish Times, Archbishop Clarke said that the idea that faith “is somehow an additional, optional appendage to ‘ordinary life’…..is a flawed...
