Wednesday marked the 54th anniversary of Great Britain’s Abortion Act coming into effect in 1968.

Since then, a staggering 9,900,961 unborn babies have lost their lives to abortion across England, Wales, and Scotland — in 2020, more than one baby was lost to abortion every two and a half minutes; 25 lives were ended every hour.

Over 1 in 4 (25.2%) pregnancies in England and Wales now end in abortion, according to the most recent Government statistics.

The number of abortions in England and Wales reached a record high with 210,860 taking place in 2020, while the number performed in Scotland was the second-highest on record at 13,815.

This significant rise in abortions accompanied Governments introducing a temporary measure in March 2020 allowing ‘DIY’ home abortions in England and Wales, and Scotland.

Abortion statistics released by the Department of Health and Social Care show that 209,917 abortions were performed for English and Welsh residents in 2020.

This is 2,533 more than in 2019, which was until now the highest number on record.

‘Education Equality’ spokesperson David Graham believes that the religious ethos of Lacken National School in Blessington was at the root of the advice. He told Newstalk Breakfast that a majority of parents at the school last year signed a letter calling for Relationships and Sexual Education (RSE) to be “fact-based” and “free from the influence of religious ethos”.

He added that the school’s idea of contacting parents when a child asks a question about contraception or same sex relationships is ‘totally inadequate’.

A priest in France was stabbed multiple times but was saved by the intervention of a 72-year-old nun who has been praised for her “extraordinary courage” after stopped the attacker going further at a church in Nice, in the southeast of the country.

She received a wound to the forearm and was taken to a hospital along with the 57-year-old priest.

Father Rudziński, originally from Suchowola, northeastern Poland, is believed to have been stabbed up to 20 times, mainly in the chest.

The Diocese of Nice said in a statement that neither the sister nor the priest suffered life-threatening injuries in the incident, which police said was not related to terrorism.

The number of reported cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) has risen significantly since Covid-19 restrictions were lifted.

At least 45pc more cases are being reported now compared with a year ago.

Figures provided to the HSE by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) that cover the first 12 weeks of the year show HIV diagnoses are up more than 84pc from 71 to 131 and gonorrhoea cases are up more than 61pc from 368 to 594. Reported chlamydia cases went from 1,441 to 2,075, an increase of 44pc, and syphilis was up more than 30pc, from 159 to 207 cases.

The HPSC said the number of chlamydia and gonorrhoea cases includes some batch notifications of cases confirmed through the online STI testing service that may contain some numbers from last year.

An HSE spokeswoman said that with restrictions lifted and social activity increasing, it is expected sexual activity will “have returned to pre-pandemic levels, resulting in an increase in the numbers of people in need of or seeking STI testing”.

On the increase in testing availability, she said: “As normal services resume, there is at least an expectation that increased testing will bring increased diagnoses.”

Vulnerable children are wrongly being given gender hormone treatment by the NHS, the UK’s Health Secretary believes, as he prepares to launch an urgent inquiry. Irish children are sometimes taken to British clinics for such treatments at the expense of the HSE.

Sajid Javid thinks the system is “failing children” and is planning an overhaul of how health service staff deal with under-18s who question their gender identity.

Javid is understood to have likened political sensitivities over gender dysphoria to the fears of racism in Rotherham over grooming gangs mostly run by men of Pakistani descent.

Critics have accused England’s only specialist services for children with gender dysphoria of rushing the underage patients into life-altering treatment and being too willing to give puberty blockers to young teenagers.

Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, has been leading a review into NHS gender identity services for children. In interim findings last month, she said children were being affected by a lack of expert agreement about the nature of gender identity problems, a “lottery” of care and long waiting lists.

Javid is said to be particularly alarmed by her finding that some non-specialist staff felt “under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach” to transitioning and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised.

The US Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday on the case of a high school football coach fired from his job for having allegedly prayed with his football players after a game. The court’s decision, expected by June, could revise earlier understandings about when prayer is permitted in public schools, the rights of government employees and what counts as pressuring students to participate in religious activities.

Joseph Kennedy in Bremerton, Washington State, would habitually kneel and offer prayers after games. As time went on, many of his players joined him in the routine. But after the school board in Bremerton, Wash., told him to stop mixing football and faith on the field, he left the job and sued, with lower courts rejecting his argument that the board had violated his First Amendment rights.

He says he sought only to offer a brief, silent and solitary prayer, little different from saying grace before a meal in the school cafeteria. However, from the school board’s perspective, the public nature of his prayers and his stature as a leader and role model meant that students felt forced to participate, whatever their religion and whether they wanted to or not.

A meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on International Surrogacy was suspended twice after a Senator was attacked for  questioning witnesses about criticisms that commercial surrogacy involves the commodification of children and the exploitation of women.

The committee met on Thursday morning to hear from parents who engaged in international commercial surrogacy.

Independent Senator Sharon Keoghan said she “wholeheartedly objects to the commercialisation of the human child and the relegation of women to the status of simply incubator or wombs for hire irrespective of whether you are heterosexual, single, lesbian gay or trans”.

“Surrogacy I believe is harmful, it is exploitative and it is unethical. I don’t believe it is everyone’s right to have a child. It is a privilege to give birth and it can be dangerous even to those with the best medical attention.”

She said she did not want to see the birth mother “airbrushed” or “whitewashed” out of the process.

Senator Lynn Ruane said it took an emotional toll for the witnesses to tell their story.

She told Ms Keoghan to “check your Christian values when you walk in every day. Respect, compassion, love. You don’t show it. You are crude and cold, and it is not OK.”

Ms Keoghan replied that Ms Ruane’s comments were “very personal” and said “this is not an echo chamber for one view. It has to be a chamber for all views”.

Sinn Féin TD Kathleen Funchion, who was chairing the session, suspended the meeting after she demanded that Senator Keoghan apologise to a witness for saying he was “lucky” to be there given the potential countervailing witnesses the committee refused to hear from.

China’s population is expected to decline this year, more than a decade earlier than initially forecast, according to a government-backed scholar.

The number of people aged 65 and older surpassed 14 per cent of the total in 2021, making China an “aged” society, rather than an “ageing” one, Zheng Bingwen, director of international social security studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said.

“The adverse impact of ageing is the slowdown in economic growth,” he told a finance conference in Beijing. “Ageing will lead to declines in savings, which in turn lead to falls in investment, which will be a huge thing in China.”

A leading Professor of Psychiatry has said that the Catholic Church cannot be blamed for the largest institutions in Ireland used by communities to lock people away from society.

Brendan Kelly of Trinity College Dublin has just published a new book, ‘In Search of Madness: A Psychiatrist’s Travels Through the History of Mental Illness’.

Speaking to Ryan Tubridy on RTE Radio 1, he said in the 1800s, large mental asylums were built all over the world and societies and communities used these institutions to fill them with people with mental illness, with the intellectually disabled, or with those who were simply odd or eccentric. Ireland was no different in that respect where, he said, “we used so many institutions, mother and baby homes, industrial schools, Magdalen laundries”.

However, he added: “but interestingly, the Roman Catholic Church did not run our mental hospitals which were the biggest institutions of all of these, by a very long chalk. So the usual, the current narrative in Irish history, which is that we blame the Roman Catholic Church, and indeed it is blameworthy in many respects, but we don’t have that for the largest institutions in our history, which were the mental hospitals”.

He also commented on the programs of sterilisations that were introduced in some European countries in the 1930s for those in mental asylums. Such programmes existed in Scandinavia and in Germany in 1939, he said it escalated to a program of killing people with mental illness and neurological disorders.

He added: “This was consistent with eugenics, which was a movement in psychiatry at the time, but not interestingly in Ireland. The idea of eugenics didn’t particularly catch on among the Irish asylum doctors”. He did not elaborate as to why but the Catholic Church was consistently opposed to eugenics.

Two “British experts in domestic and international surrogacy” appeared before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on International Surrogacy on Wednesday to advocate against a ban on commercial surrogacy.

She told the committee it is “naive to paint domestic or altruistic surrogacy as wholly desirable and international or commercial surrogacy as wholly undesirable. There are no such bright lines”.

She added. “In truth there are a range of approaches to surrogacy involving good and bad practice everywhere. A far more useful question is what makes surrogacy ethical and how to promote it.”

Fine Gael senator, Mary Seery Kearney, who had her own child through a surrogacy arrangement in India, said that “There is an idea that Irish women are able to make fully informed decisions, and be supported in making those decisions, to become surrogates. But somehow, women in other jurisdictions are not able to do that either because of the country that they’re in, their socio-economic background, or different cultural dimensions? The idea that they are somehow not able to make informed decisions is, I think, borderline racism”.