Reacting to the decision by the Mater to comply with our new abortion law, a nurse tutor at the hospital, Sr Eugene Nolan, made a very interesting comment that reveals the contrast between a pro-life hospital and one that is not. Referring to the fact that five seriously ill pregnant women were transferred for treatment...
It’s interesting that in most jurisdictions that have introduced same-sex civil partnerships/marriage it is most men who avail of them at first. I wonder why that is. More interesting, however, is the average age of those entering civil partnerships. New CSO data tell us it is in the mid-forties. For opposite-sex couples the average age...
Officially at least, the Mater hospital has decided to comply with the new abortion law. This means we now have two Catholic hospitals in Ireland – the other one being St Vincent’s – that have raised no ethical objection to carrying out abortions on certain grounds. In his Irish Independent column this week, David Quinn...
One would think from much of the media coverage of the Pope’s big interview that he was telling Catholics to take a step back from politics and pro-life and family issues most of all. What received far less coverage were remarks he made a few days earlier that Catholics ought to “meddle” in politics. At...
The Department of Education have launched a consultation process to ascertain the views of parents as to how Catholic schools, when they are the only one in a given area, should become more ‘inclusive’ towards children from other religions and none. A leaflet will be sent to parents and it draws on the recommendations, published...
The new Growing Up in Ireland study, published yesterday, acknowledges the importance of family structure and cites research that saying having two parent is generally better than one. Given the huge reluctance on the part of ‘official Ireland’ to ever own up to this research, this has to count as something of a breakthrough. The...
Australia recently recently threw the Labour party out of office after six years in government. One of the major planks of Labour’s election campaign was a promise by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to legalise same-sex marriage. It got him precisely nowhere. According to the blog, Mercatornet, “[Rudd] pushed it all the way to election eve...
What happens when you marry outside your belief system, whether that be a religious belief system or a secular belief system? The answer, frequently, is trouble as ‘Til Faith Do Us Part’, a new book by Naomi Schaefer Riley from Oxford University Press makes clear....
Last week, the Iona Institute released a report detailing the extent of marital breakdown and the proliferation of new family forms in Ireland, including a surge in the number of children raised by lone parents. Iona Institute representatives debated this issue on a number of programmes and came up against a flat-out denial that there...
Gay couple David Tutera and Ryan Jurica have gone their separate way just months after taking delivery of half-twins via a surrogate mother. Tutera is biologically the father of one child and Jurica is father of the other child. Advocates of sperm and egg donation and surrogate motherhood constantly tell us that the biological tie...
