I was on Prime Time on Thursday night discussing 25 years of social change in Ireland. Prime Time has been in existence now since 1992. The video before the panel discussion took us from that year to the present and basically invited us to consider how much progress Ireland has made in that time. But...
Dr Rhona Mahony, Master of the National Maternity Hospital gave a speech to the Labour Party ‘Think-In’ a few days ago. In it, she said that while law deals with “right”, medicine deals with “risk”. She seemed to imply she does not believe that medicine also deals with “right”, a terrifying prospect. Can she really...
If, in matters of pregnancy, ‘choice’ is supreme, are there any grounds for criticising a woman who aborts one of her twins because she wants just one baby, not two? The euphemism for this is ‘foetal reduction’ and ‘foetal reduction’ often occurs when IVF results in a woman becoming pregnant with two or more babies....
Jacky Jones continues her war on domesticity in her health column in The Irish Times. Having previously wondered whether housewives are scared of ‘real work’ and accusing them of ‘completely wasting their talents’, she now laments that Irish women are more likely than men to like cooking, and also seem to like cooking more than...
Following a meeting between Catholic bishops and Government representatives last week, Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone, who was not present, told the Catholic Church that it has no right to determine our laws, and that its own teachings ought to recognise a right to abortion. That is quite a double whammy. According to The Times Ireland...
There has been much debate in the last few weeks about the ‘compulsory’ nature of the Government’s Public Services Card. Many of those concerns revolve around increased levels of State intrusion and the threat to personal privacy. This is a threat also posed to an increasing extent in the medical world as knowledge of genetics...
There is an intense debate raging within Neonatal medicine in the United States and elsewhere about whether or not very premature babies (22-26 weeks gestation) are full members of the human family. The claim that they are not, clears the path to allowing these babies to die rather than save them. This is the extension...
When Taoiseach Leo Varadkar met his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau in Montreal this week, Trudeau presumed to lecture Varadkar on Ireland’s abortion law. There was no evidence of pushback from our Taoiseach despite the fact that in Canada there is no law preventing abortion taking place for any reason right up to birth. Trudeau said:...
Some pro-life groups show pictures of aborted foetuses in public. I will try to address three questions: Is this legal? Is it appropriate? Is it effective? First of all, we need to clarify that the Director of Public Prosecutions has confirmed in a letter that showing the reality of abortion is not illegal under the...
Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent, Patsy McGarry, wrote an article last week urging the broadest use of the new techniques available in genome editing that aim to decrease the likelihood of children being born with serious genetic defects. The problem with this process is that it involves a form of experimentation on embryos which destroys...
