The European Court of Human Rights has today issued a very important ruling which puts something of a brake on the worst kind of surrogacy. The case involved an Italian couple who used a surrogate mother in Russia to have a child to whom neither of them were biologically related. The Court has ruled that the...
The speech delivered today by Education Minister, Richard Bruton (pictured), signalling changes to the admissions policy of faith schools, is part of a wider pattern of moves against faith schools. It is a pattern that amounts to a hostile attitude. Iona Institute Director, David Quinn, said in a press statement: “There are certainly too many...
Should Muslim schoolgirls be required to attend swimming lessons with boys, against the wishes of their parents? According to the European Court of Human Rights, the answer is yes. Was that the right answer? On balance, I don’t think it was. The case involved two Muslim girls attending school in Switzerland. According to a BBC...
Divorce is a very tricky topic to write about it because those who have experienced divorce have experienced something very painful and feelings can be very raw. This was brought home to me again when I wrote a piece dealing with divorce for The Irish Independent last Friday. The piece was prompted by the release...
In a study reported on in the Daily Mail this week, a researcher finds that women who have had none or only one sexual partner before marriage are the least likely to divorce. Those with ten or more partners are most likely to divorce. Nicholas H. Wolfinger of the US based Institute of Family Studies is...
According to a recent newspaper report, an IVF clinic in the Netherlands may have impregnated up to 26 women with a stranger’s sperm due to a mix-up. The question is, in an age when we are told that the natural ties don’t matter, why we should be concerned about this? As we reported in an...
Each Christmas we celebrate the birth of Christ. Even if we leave aside the claim that he was God made Man, his birth, argues David Quinn in his Irish Independent column this week, “was the start of an immense, culture-changing series of events that have resonated through history, and in almost all parts of the...
What is the status of a frozen embryo? This is the question at the heart of a dispute between actress Sofia Vergara (pictured), star of the hit TV show, ‘Modern Family’, and her former-fiancée Nick Loeb. Has an embryo the rights and dignity of a human being, or should it be regarded merely as a...
There was always a danger that the trial of Bernadette Scully for the manslaughter of her severely disabled daughter, Emily, would lead to calls for euthanasia and so it has happened. The fact that Bernadette was acquitted of the charge has made no difference to this. Writing in The Sunday Independent yesterday, Donal Lynch, usually...
A new law has been passed in Ontario that strikes the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from the law and replaces them with the word ‘parent’. This places a lie right at the centre of the law because every child without fail has a mother and a father or could not exist. But this is what...
