By Jim Stack The good news first. Nearly 20% of Irish women changed their minds about abortion in 2020. That is considerably higher than in 2019. According to HSE figures obtained by Carol Nolan TD, while there were 6,455 abortions in Ireland in the first trimester of pregnancy, 8,057 women had an initial consultation with...
On Wednesday, Ireland’s human rights record will once again be under the scrutiny of a United Nations committee. As discussed in a previous blog, more pressure will be heaped on us to make our abortion law even more permissive. But our education system will come under scrutiny, with objections being raised to our mainly denominational...
I approached the new Netflix horror series, ‘Midnight Mass’, with a certain amount of trepidation. It’s not that I expected it to be particularly gory, more that I thought it would be mediocre, and it was. I also wondered if it would be full of anti-religious and anti-Catholic stereotypes, and it certainly didn’t disappoint on...
Ireland, like almost every country in the world, appears on a regular basis before this or that UN committee to give an account of how well it is meeting its various human rights commitments. Those committees have often exceeded their briefs by demanding Ireland introduce abortion. We have done that now, so the next step...
Budget 2022 increased the discriminatory effects of tax individualisation, whereby one-income married couples who earn above a certain amount pay even more in tax than their two-income counterparts than before. This can run to thousands of euro annually as we explained in a recent blog. Our argument against tax individualisation has always been that it...
The genetic selection of human embryos is reaching new levels of sophistication with the development of a technique called ‘polygenic screening’. Eugenics, which is breeding out the ‘defective’, is deepening its grip on our societies. The new method is a step above current screening processes that can detect conditions like Down Syndrome. Polygenic screening looks...
WHEN Charlie McCreevy unveiled Budget 2000 at the turn of the century there was uproar over a measure he introduced called ‘tax individualisation’. Henceforth, one-income married couples would pay more tax than two-income married couples once they earned above a certain level. It was widely condemned as discriminatory. But after the uproar, the matter was...
A Bill to introduce assisted suicide in the UK will be debated in the House of Lords this month. Prime Minister Boris Johnson will not support it, while doctors and disability rights campaigners have also criticised the Bill. Last May, Baroness Meacher introduced the Assisted Suicide Bill in the House of Lords. The Bill, which...
State restrictions on religion are at the highest level ever, according to a new world-wide study. The Pew Research Center, a non-partisan social science institute, has monitored religious freedom since 2007. Their latest report found that the interference of government in religious activities is at a new peak. In 2019, the last year for which...
Historically speaking, the fertility industry has often been like the Wild West, totally unregulated with doctors often abusing their power and the hopes of people to bring children into the world with little or no knowledge of their natural origins. The Guardian newspaper has a long article which lists many of the abuses. It is...
