I wonder what the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) believes a woman to be? There used to be a very easy answer to that; you’re a woman if you’re biologically female and a man if you’re biologically male. The question is prompted by the fact that at its #femfest at the weekend, the NWCI...
It is worrying that the topic of assisted suicide is even before our politicians, because it means some of them want us to legalise it, but the matter was considered by the Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality on Wednesday. Fortunately, it heard from an excellent witness in the form of Dr Regina Mc Quillan...
Health Minister Simon Harris intends passing a law that will regulate ‘rogue’ pro-life agencies that give bad advice to women. We don’t have any abortion clinics here and hopefully never will, but Minister Harris might like to pay attention to the scandals engulfing abortion clinics overseas, for example in the Netherlands and Britain. There is...
Identity politics is killing critical thinking in the university. I have been in UCD for fifteen years, first as a PhD student, then as a tutor and currently as a lecturer. I am also research officer for the Iona Institute. If you believe in rumors or conspiracies theories, I should qualify as the best candidate...
Universities are becoming more and more hostile places for those with a pro-life point of view. Pro-life societies are being refused official recognition. We saw what happened to Katie Ascough at UCD. Now we have an incident at Oxford where a pro-life event was disrupted by pro-choice demonstrators and almost had to be called off....
Church attendance in Ireland is one of the very many things tracked by the European Social Survey, one of the biggest polls of its kind anywhere. It has been conducted every two years since 2002. The 2016 edition came out last week and one of things it has found is that while the numbers attending...
Are you or have you ever been a member of the Iona Institute? Are you or have you ever been associated with The Iona Institute? These were basically the questions hurled at Katie Ascough in two student papers hailing her ‘impeachment’ last week as President of the Students’ Union at UCD. Need I labour the...
The 50th anniversary of the passage of the 1967 Abortion Act in the UK came and went last week. Since then, almost 9 million abortions have taken place. A number of programmes were aired to mark the event. One was ‘Abortion on Trial’, presented by Anne Robinson. In fact, abortion wasn’t on trial at all....
Two doctors, one of them being Peter Boylan, told the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment last week that when a country’s abortion law is liberalised, abortion rates decline. This is not true. Abortion rates and trends vary considerably by geographic region. In discussing Ireland, we should look at countries that are socially and culturally...
A conference on the topic of ‘Abortion, Disability and the Law’ was held in Athlone last Friday. It was jointly hosted by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Britain, and the Consultative Group on Bioethics of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The subject matter could hardly have been more topical because it is precisely the lives of...
