An Oireachtas committee has called for a change in law to facilitate international surrogacy arrangements including a regime of ‘compensated surrogacy’ for women who carry a child to birth on behalf of others. In practice, this can run to thousands of euro and is often little different from commercial surrogacy.

The Special Committee on International Surrogacy released its report yesterday following three months of hearings. Almost all the experts it heard from were in favour of the practice despite the fact that almost no European country recognises it.

Among the recommended, it supported a form of commercial surrogacy whereby the surrogate mother could be “compensated” for legal advice, counselling and medical advice; loss of earnings due to not working; specific dietary requirements or supplements; and payments to cover domestic labour such as housework or childcare (pages 31—32).

Surrogacy agencies and fertility clinics can also be paid for their “professional services”.

One committee member, Independent Senator Sharon Keogan, objected to the conclusions, saying that surrogacy is “harmful” and “exploitative”, and the report “unbalanced”. She said potential witnesses with dissenting views were excluded from hearings.

In a statement, Ms Keogan said there is a power imbalance between the “commissioning parent and the surrogate”.

In a closely-watched case, a UK court has ruled that a tax expert, Maya Forstater, should not have been dismissed from her job for believing that men cannot become women.

A tribunal found yesterday that Forstater had faced discrimination and victimisation at work over her views on trans people.

The decision means that Forstater could receive damages in the tens of thousands of pounds after she was wrongly dismissed from her role at the London office of a US think tank.

Forstater’s legal triumph yesterday over the Centre for Global Development came after a higher court ruled last year that her views were legally classed as a “philosophical belief” and protected by equality legislation.

The tax specialist, who has co- founded the campaign group Sex Matters, said that the latest ruling was a victory “for everyone who believes in the importance of truth and free speech”. She added that “we are all free to believe whatever we wish. What we are not free to do is compel others to believe the same thing, to silence those who disagree with us or to force others to deny reality.”

Advanced genetic screening of embryos created through IVF is allowing parents pick only the healthiest ones to be brought to birth, a practice that amounts to eugenics.

Wired magazine, an American monthly on new technology and culture, says embryonic selection is not new, but past methods were limited to very few chromosomal abnormalities, or the more or less arbitrary method of how one embryo looked against another.

Now, however, companies such as Genomic Prediction are taking this process much further.

Preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) means “each embryo is given a health score based on the existing mutations in its genes which could potentially one day be life limiting, and the would-be parents are shown how that score compares against the population average. The ranking takes into account the severity of conditions, if shown, as well as the ethnicity of the embryo, since this can also have an impact on disease incidence.”

Genomic Prediction works with around 200 IVF clinics across six continents. But, cofounder, Stephen Hsu’s, innovations have not always been welcomed, even within the academic-scientific community.

In fact, by mid-2020,” the outrage among graduate students at Michigan State University was loud enough to force Hsu out of his position as vice president at the institution”.

Ongoing, brutal attacks on Christians in Nigeria, including murder, are being ignored by the Nigerian Government while the Irish, EU and other governments do little to respond.

That’s according to the leader of an Irish missionary society that has worked for years in the country.

“[The Militants] savagely attack Christian-populated villages, shoot and use machetes to kill all in sight including children, kidnap and demand high ransoms, which even when paid do not assure safe release. They often circulate menacing videos of beheadings, allow public lynching for supposed “blasphemy”, make travel by road and even by rail totally insecure, attack and burn churches and other Christian symbols of identity,” she writes.

Despite this, she says the reality that Christians are being routinely targeted is denied by the Nigerian administration. She adds that this “should not continue to be ignored by Irish, EU and other governments”.

An Oireachtas special committee to examine the issue of assisted suicide is likely to be established following the completion of a parliamentary committee on international surrogacy, according to the Times, Ireland.

The proposed committee, which will have a reporting deadline of nine months, is expected to be set up after the Dáil’s summer recess.

An Oireachtas spokesman said this week that it was “not possible to give an exact timeframe” for the establishment of the assisted suicide committee.

Last July the Oireachtas justice committee recommended that a special group of TDs and senators be appointed to examine assisted suicide after a failed attempt by Gino Kenny, the People Before Profit-Solidarity TD, to get a ‘Dying with Dignity Bill’ on the statute books.

The body is examining Ireland’s compliance with the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights .

Minister for Equality and Children, Roderic O’Gorman was in Geneva, Switzerland, leading a high-level delegation of senior civil servants to respond to the committee.

Hélène Tigroudja, a member of the body, said the 2018 abortion act placed “very many barriers, both legal and practical” to “safe, legal and non-discriminatory access to abortion”.

She said the three-day wait period was “a disadvantage for women living in rural areas, women in poverty and women experiencing violence [who] simply cannot return several times”.

She also attacked the rule that women carrying a child with a serious disability could access abortion only where the child was likely to die within 28 days of birth: “This is a problem for women who are less well off. They have to continue with their pregnancy … This is inhuman treatment and this is discrimination on the grounds of economic status,” she said.

Fine Gael TD Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has heavily criticised the length of time being taken to change Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) and claimed it could be five years before a new curriculum is rolled out in primary schools. The TD believes RSE should be compulsory.

Education Minister Norma Foley had told Ms Carroll MacNeill in a parliamentary answer last month that work on the curriculum would be completed in early 2025 before being given to the minister.

“A primary curriculum framework that only comes back to the minister in 2025 means no roll-out until when — 2027? That means that any kid born already can be certain not to have it ready for their entry into junior infants,” Ms Carroll MacNeill told the Sunday Independent.

“I think we need more urgency than that. I hope the third strategy publication will put a fire under the department in delivering this. I don’t know what else will.”

“Five years from now is simply too much,” Ms Carroll MacNeill said.

Representatives of the Catholic Church at the EU have again vigorously protested attempts to assert a right to abortion.

The President of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE), Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, met with the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, last week.

Cardinal Hollerich insisted that the attempt to see abortion as a fundamental right, “not only goes against the respect of the dignity of every human being, which is one of the pillars of the EU, but it will also gravely endanger the right to freedom of religion, of thought and conscience and the possibility of exercising conscientious objection.”

His meeting anticipates the European Parliament’s response to the overturning of Roe v Wade in the USA. It is expected to call for safe access to abortion, and condemn what it considers a “backsliding in women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights in the US.”

Up to 2,000 Christian girls are raped, forcibly converted and married off to older Muslim men in Pakistan every year, according to a leading academic.

These crimes have helped earn Pakistan its ignominious designation as a “Country of Particular Concern” on the U.S. Department of State’s Religious Freedom Report. Representing only 2% of the population of Pakistan, Christians are also often victims of the country’s harsh blasphemy laws and mob violence.

NGOs often estimate that 1000 young women and girls are subject to forcible marriage. However, Shaheed Mobeen, a Pakistani professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome and an advocate for religious freedom in Pakistan believes the true figure is far higher.

“The government of Pakistan doesn’t accept [the number of victims as] 1,000 a year, but in the last two years, what I have seen, and what volunteers, nuns and lawyers have found, is that there are about 2,000 forced conversions and marriages a year,” Mobeen told Aleteia.

In addition to Christians, Hindu, Sikh, and Shia Muslim families are being victimized and forced into marriages with Muslim men, he said.

Organisers said the chief aim of the Rally For Life was to urge the public, and the Government, to rethink abortion.

A campaign to retain the three-day waiting period before undergoing an abortion was launched at the rally.

Megan Ní Scealláin, a spokesperson for the Life Institute, said: “Voters were guaranteed that women would have a three-day period to reflect between a first abortion appointment and the doctor giving the abortion pill, and it is appalling to see abortion campaigners now push to have that time to think scrapped.

“We know from figures released to Carol Nolan TD that between 800 and 1,000 women did not proceed with an abortion after that initial appointment.

“Scrapping the requirement for those three days to think might mean another 1,000 abortions a year.”

Pro-life TDs, Independent Carol Nolan and Peadar Tóibín of Aontú, also addressed the rally.