Large numbers of Americans favour certain restrictions on access to abortions, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
The study was conducted in March – after the US Supreme Court’s oral arguments on a Mississippi case that largely banned abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, but before it was reported the court had decided to over-turn Roe Vs Wade, something that has not yet been officially declared. Roe Vs Wade was a 1973 decision that imposed a very liberal abortion law on all 50 US states.
The survey found “nearly two-thirds of the public thinks abortion either should be entirely illegal at every stage of a pregnancy or should become illegal, at least in some cases, at some point during the course of a pregnancy”.
The survey data shows that as pregnancy progresses, opposition to legal abortion grows and support for legal abortion declines. Americans are about twice as likely to say abortion should be legal at six weeks than to say it should be illegal at this stage of a pregnancy. 44% of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal at six weeks, 21% say it should be illegal at six weeks, and another 19% say whether it should be legal or not at six weeks “depends.” (An additional 14% say the stage of pregnancy shouldn’t factor into determining whether abortion is legal or illegal)
But “at 14 weeks, the share saying abortion should be legal declines to 34%, while 27% say illegal and 22% say ‘it depends’.”
A study purporting to show that non-religious teachers in faith-based schools are hiding their identity to preserve their career prospects lacks adequate evidence to force a change in policy, according to a leading educationalist.
In a letter to the Irish Times, Professor Eamonn Conway, Head of Theology and Religious Studies, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, said the cross-Border study consulted only 15 teachers in Ireland, five from the North and 10 from the South. Moreover, he added, all 15 were all recruited through “snowballing” or “chain-referral”, a method whereby one respondent recommends another, very often of like mind.
“Therefore, contrary to what the study contends, the findings are far from generalisable and provide no basis for advocating changes to law or policy”, he wrote.
He also said that teachers may hide their identity for a multiplicity of reasons, including hiding their faith, even in nominally faith-based schools. Citing a recent meeting of Catholic educators at Mary Immaculate, several teachers reported how challenging it can be “to acknowledge their religious convictions openly and sincerely, whether in the classroom or the staffroom, and this even in schools which purport to have a religious ethos”.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin has branded as “short-sighted” a recommendation by Dublin City Council chief executive Owen Keegan against zoning church lands for housing.
The archdiocese earlier this year made submissions on the city development plan seeking residential zoning for more than 30 churches sites across the city.
Mr Keegan has recommended city councillors reject the majority of these submissions. In most cases, any residential development on the site was likely to require church demolition, while a number of the churches were protected structures which would limit development in their grounds, he said.
In a strongly worded statement, the archdiocese said Mr Keegan’s recommendation was “short-sighted and unnecessarily restricts the diocese’s efforts to assist in meeting the city’s housing needs”.
The archdiocese said the requested rezoning would “more robustly support our stated objective regarding the delivery of much-needed housing” and it was “disappointed that the flexibility available under the status quo will no longer exist”.
Last March, the Government asked the Church to co-operate in addressing the housing crisis by making surplus land and buildings available for housing development.
The ethos of schools must not be allowed to prevent pupils’ access to education on sex and relationships, Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris has said.
Under the Education Act (1998), schools are free to determine what they consider to be appropriate sex education in line with the “characteristic spirit of the school”.
Speaking at the Oireachtas committee on gender equality, Mr Harris said access to sex education “can’t be down to the luck of the draw, the ethos of the school or where you live”.
“I worry that in the absence of proper, factual information being accessible in a school setting that young people may develop attitudes to sex and expectations around sex from social media. We’ve got to call this out. We’ve got to get real on this and get on with it,” he said.
He said he was undecided about whether legislation was needed to oblige all schools to provide this information, but said it was vital that children have access to ‘impartial’ education on sex and relationships.
“I defend to the death the right of a parent to decide the ethos of the school [they send their child to] … but it is a separate and distinct issue to be able to access age-appropriate, impartial, fact-based information on sex and consent,” he said.
European human rights laws are slowing down the Scottish government’s ability to ban pro-life gatherings outside abortion clinics, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed.
Campaign groups have repeatedly called for fast action to introduce 150m (500ft) buffer zones outside clinics.
The Scottish First Minister said that progress was being stalled because any law would have to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights. She has previously said that the right to protest is a key consideration when it comes to introducing the buffers.
“On all legislation we have to ensure that legislation is ECHR compliant and when you are, as some people would say, interfering in the right to protest there’s just a complex legal issue that we have to work our way through,” Sturgeon said.
A report on “The persecution of minorities on the grounds of belief or religion” that human rights experts denounced as “openly hostile towards religion” has been adopted by the European Parliament.
While the initial draft of the report referred to religion as a “human right” and “often a last bastion of liberty” in society, the adopted report describes religion as a threat to a free society by criticising it as “an important driver of conflict worldwide.”
The Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) of the European Parliament amended the draft report in such a way that the scope and tone of the report have completely shifted. Defenders of religious freedom have even described the report as openly hostile to religion in some paragraphs. The persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Africa was omitted and all but one reference to Christians was deleted. The report does include multiple references emphasizing protections for atheist, secular or humanist belief minorities.
Experts also criticised that the victims who were supposed to be protected by this report ended up being painted as aggressors. They also note that the adopted report goes so far as to condemn religions for their stance on marriage and the protection of life from conception until natural death, which goes far beyond the scope of the report.
“While I welcome the EP’s report on the persecution of religious freedom, I cannot help but express my dismay at the way this report has been hijacked to stigmatise religion itself,” said Miriam Lexmann, Member of the European Parliament from Slovakia.
The newspaper initially agreed to publish the bishops’ statement on today’s elections in the North, “Make Your Voices Heard”.
However, they subsequently asked that sections highlighting abortion and religious freedom be taken out.
In one example, in a section about the rights of the unborn, the paper objected to the line saying that the unborn are “being increasingly relegated – culturally, politically and legally – to the realm of the worthless and sub-human”.
Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin, called the move “disturbing” and said it amounted to “editorial interference” and “censorship”.
Another newspaper, the Irish News, carried the ad in full.
A study purporting to show that non-religious teachers in Church-run post-primary schools are ‘suppressing’ their beliefs to preserve their career prospects is based on a tiny sample of just 15 people.
The cross-Border study by Dr Catherine Stapleton of Mary Immaculate College and Dr James Nelson of Queen’s University Belfast interviewed five teachers in the North and ten in the South.
The researchers had difficulty recruiting people to the study, which admits: “Initially, a number of established humanist organisations and social network groups were contacted. However, it proved challenging to find participants and the researchers asked the organisations to re-advertise.”
Snowball sampling was utilised, whereby participants were asked at interview if they had colleagues who may be interested in participating in the research.
The participants, who described themselves as non-religious, said they felt unprepared for the religious expectations they encountered in schools and the assumption that they would uphold the ethos of the school. This, they claimed, caused a range of ethical and professional dilemmas.
One in three hundred Canadians identify as transgender or non-binary according to data from a new census by Statistics Canada.
The results showed, of the nearly 30.5 million people in Canada aged 15 and over living in a private household, 59,460 were transgender and another 41,335 were non-binary.
Broken down by age and sex, the data found that young people are much more likely to identify as transgender. Statistics Canada labels it a “generation gap”.
The two sexes follow quite different patterns. While the proportion of transgender women — i.e., biological males — fell from 0.18% (aged 20 to 24) to 0.08% (aged 65+), transgender men were far more heavily skewed to the younger age groups. Among biological females, those aged 15 to 24 were over five times more likely to identify as transgender than those over 40.
A Catholic couple say they will go to jail rather than pay a €300 fine for travelling 70km to attend Mass during a covid lockdown. Public worship was banned for 42 out of 60 weeks in the various lockdowns, the longest of anywhere in Europe.
Retired firefighter Jim Ryan (64) and his wife Ann (59), a retired nurse, found themselves in court for the first time in their lives earlier this month on a summons for breaching the 5km limit on Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021.
The couple were convicted of the offence by Judge Raymond Finnegan at Cavan District Court but immediately appealed – and have now vowed to go to jail if they cannot get it overturned.
“I will go to jail before I pay it. I would rather go to jail, without a shadow of a doubt,” Jim told the Sunday World.
“I have no intention of paying them a fine for me going to Mass – for doing what I have done my whole life.”
