Women should not take abortifacient drugs, the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) has warned. More than 250 abortion pills have been seized since the beginning of the year. Abortifacients are not legally available here and it is not legal for anyone to supply or receive such medicines through an online source, the Irish Times reports. A...
Religious freedom claims should not extend to publicly funded hospitals and are probably not protected by the Constitution, a legal academic has claimed. Writing in The Irish Times, Dr Eoin Daly, a law lecturer in UCD, said the claim that the Constitution protects the religious freedoms of institutions as well as individuals is based on...
California has become the fifth state in the US to allow students claiming to be a different gender from their biological sex to use bathrooms, showers, locker rooms, and changing rooms designated for children of the opposite biological sex. It means that a student who is, for example, male in every physical way, will be...
Politicians and the media have been accused of subjecting the Church to “attack and ridicule” by the Bishop of Meath, Michael Smith. Speaking in Knock he said: “Over recent times our Church has been the object of sustained attack and ridicule, It is interesting that it is only the Catholic Church that seems to be...
Religion does not belong in the private sphere only but in the world of public discourse, the Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin has said in a speech in Belfast at the weekend. Referring to the abortion debate, he said that, “the tendency in public debate is to relegate discussion about the natural identity of...
A new study confirms the increasingly strong link that exists between marriage and social class. It shows that marriage is becoming a ‘privilege’ of the middle-class. The study’s authors say that the “marriage is becoming a distinctive social institution marking middle-class status”. It is in decline in working class communities. The study was conducted by...
A legal expert has said that the new law on abortion may be unconstitutional because it forces Catholic hospitals to perform abortions under certain circumstances that would be against their ethos. Dr Mark Coen, a lecturer in law at Durham University made the comments after Fr Kevin Doran, a board member of the Mater hospital,...
The Mater hospital in Dublin will not carry out abortions according to Fr Kevin Doran, a member of the board of governors and its board of directors. The hospital is one of 25 hospitals in the country that is required to carry out abortions under the terms of the new abortion law. This is despite...
George Osborne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has been accused of insulting stay-at-homes mothers after he called their decision to look after their children at home a ‘lifestyle choice’. The Chancellor wants to encourage women back into the workplace by giving families where both parents work up to £1,200 of taxpayer-funded child care for...
New figures show that 85pc of Irish women who went to England for abortions in 2012 were single and 15pc were married. This confirms that single women are far more likely to have abortions than married women. The new data for 2012 also breaks down by region the number of Irish women who travelled to...
