Despite the wish of some atheists, the religious instinct of human beings is basically ineradicable. When it doesn’t find a direct religious outlet, it will find other outlets, such as politics. By ‘the religious instinct’ I mean the wish to find meaning and purpose in life, something bigger than ourselves, transcendence, a belief in a...
Last week the Oireachtas Select Committee on Health met to discuss over 180 amendments to the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Bill 2018. One of the amendments centred on inserting a requirement on the part of the medical practitioner to perform an ultrasound of the pregnant women and subsequently offering her the choice of...
Minister Simon Harris and the Health Committee have rejected an amendment to the abortion Bill that would have allowed for a dignified disposal of the bodily remains of aborted foetuses. The rationale of the amendment is to assure that human remains are not treated as clinical waste and sent (for example) to an incinerator, as...
Does Simon Harris properly understand the abortion law he is championing? The evidence mounts that he does not. For example, at the hearings of the Health Committee yesterday he rejected an amendment to his law that would explicitly ban abortion on grounds such as sex or disability. As reported in the Examiner, he believes the...
If there is no real basis for thinking there are natural differences between the sexes, then it should be the case that in more equal societies the apparent differences disappear. We should expect that men and women will come to do much the same kind of work, and develop the same kinds of traits. Actually,...
By Patrick Fitzgerald Now that the dust has settled after the referendum, the main question on the minds of prolife people is: where to from here? How do we respond to the result and build a new prolife generation? An important task is understanding the most compelling pro-choice arguments and framing a cogent and coherent...
by David Quinn I wonder what the main campaigners against the blasphemy provision of our Constitution think of a new ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which found that is it was permissible for Austria to prosecute someone for ‘disparaging religious doctrine’, in this case by insulting the Prophet Mohammed? What does Justice...
The abortion Bill presented by Minister Simon Harris contains a provision for conscientious objection that is too limited. It should be expanded so to include all medical professionals. It should take into account the profound changes that this Bill will introduce, which require more rigorous safeguards for healthcare workers who value the lives of both pregnant women and...
Iona Institute Director, David Quinn, was the recipient of a major pro-life award in New York earlier this month. The award was given by the Human Life Foundation, publisher of the Human Life Review, a major international pro-life journal for the last four decades. Called ‘The Great Defender of Life’, it is given at the...
We often hear that Christianity, or religion in general, is unappealing for women because religions tend to be ‘patriarchal’. However, in practice women are more religious than men, and this is particularly the case among Christians. It turns out that the bigger problem Christianity faces is in attracting more men to services. Pew Research Center...
