Minister Simon Harris has confirmed that the abortion legislation will allow general practitioners to abstain from providing abortion pills, but a duty to refer patients to pro-choice doctors will stay. This is a plain contradiction because duty to refer involves complicity with wrong, to such a degree as to significantly undermine the provision for conscientious...
We often hear that Ireland has a low divorce rate compared to the rest of Europe and particularly to the UK. This is correct, but we can’t afford to be complacent because for every four couples who marry in Ireland each year, roughly one couple go their separate ways. That is probably higher than many...
The abortion rate continues to increase in England and also the number of women from Northern Ireland who travel for a termination. Abortion statistics for England and Wales in 2017 were published yesterday. There were 194,668 abortions carried out in 2017, an increase of 2.3% since 2016 (190,406). Of those women, 3,092 had an address...
A few months ago, The Iona Institute submitted a document to the Oireachtas Committee on Health regarding the General Scheme of a Bill to regulate Artificial Human Reproduction (AHR). It is co-written by Dr Joanna Rose, who is herself donor-conceived. Two weeks ago, The Irish Times reported our submission. The report said our submission “claims”...
The pro-choice movement in Ireland won as emphatic a victory on Friday as the pro-life movement did in 1983. What was the response of the pro-choice side to their heavy defeat back then? Was it to go away? It was not. Instead they took the long view and immediately began the work of repealing the...
By Jim Stack MSc PhD The abortion law proposed by our Government should the 8th be repealed would be close in kind to the Portuguese law. Post-liberalisation of its law in 2007, the prevalence of abortion in Portugal jumped very substantially. It does not augur well for what will happen in this country, to put...
An issue in the current abortion debate is the effect the proposed law will have on abortion rates of unborn babies with non-fatal abnormalities. Two things are worth noting. First, is that several very senior doctors seem to have no objection in principle to the law allowing abortion in such cases. The second is that...
The pro-life side had an excellent outing last night on RTE’s Claire Byrne Live. Maria Steen (pictured), the rest of the panel and every pro-life person in the audience was superb. Despite the bias of much of the media, despite Google banning all referendum ads (to the delight of the Yes side), last night hundreds...
Dr Jennifer Donnelly, an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, has called for the repeal of the Eighth amendment to allow for abortions in case of ‘complex’ foetal abnormalities. On the face of it, this would appear to include abnormalities such as Down Syndrome that would not result in the inevitable death of the baby. Speaking at an...
By Dr Tom Finegan A group of English-based lawyers argue in a letter (Irish Times, 23/4) that the “health ground” under the U.K.’s 1967 Abortion Act sets a much lower threshold for legal abortion than that set by the health ground under the Irish Government’s General Scheme for abortion legislation. The group point out that...
