In the Netherlands, a doctor has appeared in court after having performed euthanasia on a woman suffering from dementia. She had made a living will in the past and, according to her daughter, she wanted to die. Nonetheless, the 74-year woman had no recollection of it and during the procedure she struggled trying to prevent...
Maria Steen had a column in The Irish Times on Saturday which caused a big online response. The topic of her article is crucial; are liberals as liberal and tolerant as they purport to be? Increasingly, many liberals seek to shut down debate on substantive issues. Instead debates (such as they are) are intra-liberal ones,...
Irish media often present surrogacy as an uncontroversial option for couples who struggle with infertility but we rarely hear reports about children who have been abandoned by commissioning adults, or about the poor women who have acted as surrogates and regret it. A new documentary by the Australian ABC TV covers the story of baby...
The recent outcry about the poor treatment of children at a number of creches focused public attention once again on the issue of daycare. But the debate centred almost entirely on the need to better resource the sector and to regulate it more. But as Maria Steen argued in The Irish Times on Saturday, the...
By David Mullins If proposals contained in a submission to the Department of Health by the Irish Pharmacy Union are accepted; then access to an abortion will soon become more readily available than access to contraception. As things currently stand, any person aged 16 or over may access an abortion without parental consent. Those below...
In a recent decision on the abortion law of two US states, Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, wrote an opinion of his own that drew attention to the embrace of eugenics by some of the founders of the modern ‘reproductive health’ movement. As he says: “From the beginning, birth control and abortion were promoted as means...
The attack on the natural ties is getting closer to its logical endpoint now. The Children and Family Relationships Act, buttressed by the upcoming legislation on Assisted Human Reproduction already tremendously downgrade natural family ties, but influential voices want Irish law to go even further in this direction. For example, they want surrogate mothers to...
Check it out. As religion declines in a society, rationality and tolerance go up, and a good thing too. This, at least, seems to be the barely concealed message of the latest British Social Attitudes report (BSA). Since 1983, the National Centre for Social Research has been charting the decline of religion in British society,...
A spokesperson for Fianna Fáil has told the Medical Independent that the party would not oppose the referral of assisted suicide to a Citizens’ Assembly for further discussion. When something of this kind was done before it helped to pave the way for abortion. It appears that no major party is now actively opposed to...
The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission is currently running a very worthy ad campaign that uses the slogan ‘Because we’re all human. Means we’re all equal’. This is obviously correct, but it’s a philosophical point of view that needs to be argued for and justified. You can’t just pluck it out of thin air....
