The UK’s House of Lords has backed a national roll out of buffer zones around abortion clinics in a move which could turn private and silent prayer within them into a ‘thought crime’.

Peers voted in favour a move to criminalise activity that seeks to “influence” the decision of women booked in for abortions to go ahead with the procedure.

After a Report Stage debate, they also rejected an amendment tabled to the Public Order Bill to investigate the evidence that would justify so-called exclusion zones and the corresponding denial of the recognised human rights of association, conscience, freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

They supported Amendment 45, tabled by Conservative peer Baroness Sugg of Coldharbour, to make it a crime to influence “any person’s decision to access, provide or facilitate the provision of abortion services”.

Referring to recent cases of people being charged after praying near abortion clinics, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, said: “These cases further highlight the dangers to free expression and belief inherent in these buffer zones. They demonstrate how quickly the position could be that the specific act that turns someone into a criminal is whether they had particular thoughts in their head while in a buffer zone area.”

Women in Canada at the end of their reproductive years have on average about 0.5 fewer children than they desire, according to new research.

A survey of nearly 3,000 women aged 18 to 44 conducted by Lyman Stone of the Cardus think tank explored family and fertility preferences, expectations, and outcomes.

He found that the number of women “missing” births vastly outnumber those reporting “excess” births. Indeed, nearly half of all women at the end of their reproductive years have had fewer children than they wanted.

The research also showed women who accomplish their fertility desires are happier than women who have more or fewer children than they desire. Although “excess” births have a larger unhappiness effect than “missing” births individually, Canadian women lose more aggregate life satisfaction from “missing” than from “excess” births, because “missing” births are almost four times as common. In short, “missing” births are a larger social problem.

A large majority of MPs in France’s lower house voted in favour of the bill, which promises to “guarantee the effectiveness of and equal access to the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy”.

However, the bill still needs the approval of the right-leaning Senate, which rejected a similar proposition by a margin of 33 votes in October. In that instance, Republican senators argued that abortion was not under threat in France.

Now, if senators vote in favour of the proposition, it would either go to a referendum or be passed through “a constitutional bill” put forward by the government. This would require three fifths of a specially convened congress made up of members of both chambers to vote in favour of amending the constitution.

President Macron is coming under pressure from feminist groups to avoid a referendum.

Parents minding their children at home will again miss out as the Government is set to announce a new childcare subsidy scheme.

Proposed new legislation includes subsidies for parents using childminders as well as a framework for properly regulating the informal, child-minding market.

People whose children are in creches are already able to avail of subsidies under the National Childcare Scheme (NCS) but many thousands of parents using childminders are not.

The legislation also includes measures to bolster the enforcement powers of Tusla’s Early Years Inspectorate including the ability to immediately close unregistered childcare services.

There is no centralised registration system for childminders, who typically work in people’s homes, but it is estimated there are 15,000 in Ireland. Fewer than 80 were registered with Tusla as of last September.

At present most childminders are not regulated as a result of an exemption in the Child Care Act.

The woman arrested and charged with “intimidation” after she prayed silently near a closed abortion facility has asked the Scottish government to protect freedom of expression and thought.

The video of Vaughan-Spruce’s arrest went viral after she was searched, arrested and criminally charged for praying in a “censorship zone”, instituted by local authorities in Birmingham through a “Public Space Protection Order”.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce has warned that a Scottish MSP’s bill to introduce similar exclusion zones In Scotland could lead to more people being arrested for simply offering help, or even silently praying to themselves.

“It’s essential that the government protect freedom of expression and of thought for the people of Scotland. As a charitable volunteer, I strongly condemn the harassment of women in vulnerable situations. This is already illegal in Scotland – but the new proposals to install censorial zones around abortion facilities criminalise those who offer financial or practical charitable help outside abortion facilities – or, like I was doing when I was arrested – simply praying silently and imperceptibly inside our minds,” commented Vaughan-Spruce.

Just a third of those aged under 26 in England and Wales now identify as Christian, with the average age of believers leaping to over 50, census data shows.

The Church of England said that it needs to “connect with Generation Z” after figures showed that those with “no religion” now outnumber Christians across the entire population under retirement age, with a wide gap among those aged 25 and under.

Christians are by far the oldest group, with the median age increasing from 45 in 2011 to 51 in 2021. This compares to a median age for the entire population of 40, up slightly from 39 in 2011.

Muslims are the youngest group, with an average age of 27, up slightly from 25 a decade ago. The average age of those with no religion is 32, up from 30. For both Hindus and Sikhs it is 37, up from 32; for Jews is 41, with no change from 2011; and for Buddhists is 43, up from 37 in 2011.

A church pastor and three other Christians were killed in Sudan last week when suspected Islamic extremists shot them to death, an area source said.

Four of the victims’ travelling companions were wounded when the assailants opened fire on the team at the facility where they were spending the night in Kadugli, capital of Sudan’s South Kordofan state.

Sudanese-American Pastor Ibrahim Kandr, Ismail Osman, Bashir Almaak and Ayoub Ibrahim were spending the night in Kadugli en route to their home area of Um Durein when the assailants shot them between 3am and 4am, an area church leader said.

Islamic extremists, who have been terrorising people in the area since 2011, monitor movements in and out of town and likely saw the ministry team arrive for the night, said the church leader, whose name is withheld for security reasons.

A radical theory of sex and gender should not be crowbarred into Catholic schools under any guise, according to a leading Catholic education figure.

The head of the Catholic Education Partnership, Alan Hynes, made the comments on ‘The Week that Really Was’ podcast.

He said that Catholic schools have already been supporting pupils with gender dysphoria, but that pastoral outreach does not mean the Government can or should force schools to accept and teach a transgender view of sexuality as fact.

The Catholic body for primary schools, the CPSMA, sought professional advice from doctors who deal with transgender people and believe in gender dysphoria and wrote to the Ministers for Children and for Education to say that even medics working in the area deny there is any consensus or any easy way to understand and communicate the theory.

“Adults will have this debate, it might take us several years, but to simply try to crowbar it into schools, and thereby bring a matter of heated public contestation into the fora of schools, we just don’t see that as prudent”.

Hungary’s population dropped by almost fifty thousand last year while previous growth in the fertility rate was also reversed. Fertility rates all across the EU are below replacement level, including in Ireland where it was 1.63 children per woman in 2020.

The figures are disappointing news for Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which has for long deemed halting depopulation a priority. The cabinet has taken credit for positive developments in recent years, helped by generous subsidy schemes to families.

 The drop in population from 9.69mn to 9.64mn was the second-biggest decline since 1900, excluding the COVID-19 years.

The fertility rate slipped to 1.52% from 1.59% in 2021, ending years of growth. Neighbouring Slovakia had a fertility rate of 1.57 in 2020.

In 2021, the country’s population fell by nearly 60,000, the steepest decline in 145 years as the number of deaths exceeded 150,000, the highest since the end of WWII in 1945.

The death toll from or with COVID-19 stands at close 49,000, which ranks Hungary among the top five in terms of death per 1mn inhabitants globally.

The government has long advocated a “procreation over immigration” approach to deal with demographic decline and introduced a string of measures. Prime Minister Viktor Orban repeatedly said that family support programmes are his government’s answer to migration.

A string of family support schemes from state grants to preferential loans to families helped to lift the fertility rate from 1.2% in 2010 to close to 1.6% in 2021.

In 2021, it was recommended that the Committee be established to undertake an in-depth examination of the topic after an earlier piece of legislation, proposed by Socialist TD, Gino Kenny, was shelved.

The appointment of Deputy Healy-Rae as Chair of the new committee is based on the rotation system regarding chairmanships that operates in the Oireachtas between the various political parties and groupings.

The names of other committee members have still to be released but is expected to be heavily weighted in favour of euthanasia.