Hospitals are no place for protest, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said, following comments by Archbishop Eamon Martin against banning pro-life gatherings, including prayer, outside hospitals and GP clinics administering abortion.

Archbishop Martin had said that abortion exclusion zones “would be tantamount to enforcing a ban on pro-life activity including prayer and respectful witness” and would further “silence” the voice of unborn children.

The Taoiseach was responding to a question from People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy who described the gatherings, without evidence, as “intimidatory, misogynistic protests”.

Mr Martin said the last thing people going to hospitals need to see “is someone protesting, any agitation or anything to do with that. It just runs counter to what hospitals should be all about.”

Separately, in response to a question from Aontu leader, Peadar Toibin, the Taoiseach said he had a “fair point” in asking, in the interest of balance, if the State has ever made any effort to quantify the positive contribution by the Churches in this State.

During the Covid crisis, when many people were dying on their own and isolated from their families, Deputy Toibin cited the support they got from many religious in this State. “Many religious buried people during the Covid crisis at great threat to themselves. They were the only group the State never thanked for the help provided during Covid”, he said.

A report in the New York Times details the case of a prosperous Chinese businessman, Xu Wenjun, who wanted a son to continue the family line. In Cambodian court testimony, Xu said his wife could not bear a child. But Xu’s friends said he had no wife and was open about being gay.

In 2017, Xu signed a contract with an agency agreeing to pay €70,000 for surrogacy in Cambodia, using a “Russian model” as an egg donor, and a Cambodian woman to carry the child to birth. This was despite the Cambodian Ministry of Health announcing a ban on the practice the previous year.

“Surrogacy means women are willing to sell babies and that counts as trafficking,” said one Cambodian official. “We do not want Cambodia to be known as a place that produces babies to buy.”

In 2018, about 30 surrogates, all pregnant, were nabbed in a police raid on an upmarket housing complex in Phnom Penh. Dozens of surrogates were arrested, accused of trafficking the babies they were carrying.

Xu’s surrogate gave birth in prison, but was given a suspended sentence on condition that she raise the child herself, even though she has no genetic connection to the boy.

Xu himself was later arrested in a police sting and has now spent the last three years in prison.

A High Court judge has said he is not convinced legislators appreciate the “true need for expedition” when dealing with the introduction of a law to recognise international surrogacy.

Mr Justice John Jordan said legislation to address legal lacunas arising from surrogacy arrangements was “flagged as necessary” by the Supreme Court as long ago as 2009, and again in 2014 that court said Irish legislation had failed to address deficits.

The Judge is presiding over a case of an Irish couple who used a surrogate in Ukraine in a commercial arrangement to bring their child to birth.

The case could be made moot if proposed Government legislation were to be passed into law. Last month the Judge expressed dissatisfaction that he heard about the legislation in media reports rather than in his court.

On Tuesday, the judge said he asked the State for its position on Monday, and there was no update available.

Senior Counsel Mary O’Toole, for Ireland and the Attorney General, said the State parties will “obviously” advise the court as soon as a decision has been made, but many of the matters discussed are subject to Cabinet confidentiality.

The court could not “effectively direct” the executive, she said, adding that there “may or may not be information to circulate” by next week.

The Biden administration can’t force a group of Catholic hospitals and doctors to perform so-called gender transition surgeries under a Health Care rule barring nondiscrimination, a US federal appeals court ruled.

A three-judge panel unanimously found the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) violated the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs, which included a group of nuns who run health clinics for the poor and an association of Catholic health care professionals.

The judges said if the administration applied the rule to the Catholic groups, it would violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The panel upheld a lower court’s permanent injunction preventing HHS from enforcing the rule.

The judges said the lower court was correct in determining that “intrusion upon the Catholic Plaintiffs’ exercise of religion is sufficient to show irreparable harm.”

The European Court of Human Rights has condemned the government of Bulgaria for violating the right to religious freedom of Evangelical Christians in the country. The Court held that a 2008 campaign by government officials to warn children and families away from Protestant churches constituted a violation of human rights.

In reference to the “pejorative and hostile expressions” used by authorities to discredit the church, the Court ruled that the government had “disproportionately infringed” on the religious freedom of the Pastors and their churches.

“The fundamental right to religious freedom belongs to every person, regardless of faith or denomination. The European Court of Human Rights has affirmed that the government of Bulgaria was wrong to target these Christians with an alarmist campaign designed to suppress the freedom to live out their beliefs. This ruling sends a clear message that government efforts to stamp out religious freedom are unacceptable and fundamentally incompatible with democracy”.” stated Robert Clarke, ADF International director of advocacy and co-counsel in the case.

New research data has revealed that a woman was more likely to have a high-risk pregnancy when acting as a surrogate rather than when she becomes pregnant naturally.

The paper “A Comparison of Surrogate Pregnancies and Spontaneous Pregnancies” by Jennifer Lahl, Kallie Fell and others was carried in the peer-reviewed journal, ‘Dignity’.

A surrogate pregnancy had three times higher odds of resulting in a cesarean section and was five times more likely to deliver at an earlier gestational age.

Women in this study were significantly more likely to experience postpartum depression following the delivery of surrogate children than after delivering their non-surrogate children, and overall, they were more likely to have adverse outcomes during a surrogate pregnancy.

The imposition of zones that ban pro-life activity, including prayer, near facilities providing abortion is a further attempt to silence the voice of unborn children, according to the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Dr Eamon Martin.

He was responding to a decision by the UK Supreme Court last week that found legislation creating exclusion zones outside centres in Northern Ireland that provide or facilitate abortions was not unconstitutional.

Archbishop Martin said: “This is tantamount to enforcing a ban on pro-life activities, including prayer and respectful witness, outside such settings.  Buffer zones will further silence the voice of the innocent unborn.  Given that the law already prevents harassment and intimidation, I believe the new legislation represents a disproportionate response with potentially wide implications for freedom of religion and speech”.

A massive forced abortion program on the victims of rape by Islamic insurgents has been carried out by the Nigerian military on at least 10,000 women since 2013, according to a report published by Reuters.

The report’s findings offer further evidence of the use of rape as a weapon of war carried out by Islamist insurgents on Nigerian civilians.

7 Division, the Nigerian military force in charge of countering the insurgents, has been forcing chemical and surgical abortions on tens of thousands of women who have been raped by Islamist insurgents such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State-West Africa Province (ISWAP), a self-proclaimed regional “caliphate” of ISIS.

Soldiers told Reuters that the reason for the program was that the unborn children are believed to be “predestined” to be insurgents like their fathers, necessitating that the government “destroy (these) insurgent fighters before they could be born.”

Reuters verified that the Nigerian military has beaten and coerced women, some as young as 12, into abortions in the most unsanitary conditions.

Any law banning a pro-life presence outside hospitals and clinics administering abortions could face legal challenges, according to the Iona Institute.

The warning came as the UK Supreme Court yesterday ruled on Wednesday that a similar law in Northern Ireland was not unconstitutional.

David Quinn of The Iona Institute, said it was “disappointed” with the ruling.

“It interferes with the right to peacefully protest, or even to silently pray outside facilities that conduct abortions,” he said.

“No real evidence has been provided that exclusion zones are necessary. There are few, if any, reports that bear real scrutiny of people being obstructed or intimidated entering hospitals or GP surgeries. Where that happens it is already against the law.

“If and when a similar law is introduced in this jurisdiction, its constitutionality may need to be challenged.

“That is something pro-life groups will have to take advice on when the time comes,” Mr Quinn said.