The HSE licence for the new National Maternity Hospital (NMH) will include legal measures requiring it to provide all medical procedures allowed under Irish law, including abortion. The hospital has agreed to this anyway, despite being on land gifted to it by the Religious Sisters of Charity.

Critics have said, without evidence, that the nuns would try to stop the new NMH from carrying out abortions.

The revised provisions follow recent Government moves to reopen a draft agreement in which the Elm Park site in south Dublin will come under State control for 299 years after its transfer to the NMH from St Vincent’s Healthcare Group.

The Irish Times has reported that the agreement, which has still to go to Cabinet for approval, will be changed to include specific provisions to reflect the fact that procedures at the new hospital will include “anything permissible within Irish law”.

The text of that agreement between the HSE, the NMH and St Vincent’s would then be incorporated directly into the licence under which the hospital will operate. The talks are well advanced and the parties are working towards a final settlement in coming weeks.

Pope Francis has said that the dying need palliative care, not euthanasia or assisted suicide.

At his general audience in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall yesterday, the pope said that this ethical principle was valid not only for Christians but for everyone.

He expressed gratitude for palliative care, which seeks to improve the quality of life of people suffering from severe illnesses.

“However, we must be careful not to confuse this help with unacceptable drifts towards euthanasia,” he said.

“We must accompany people towards death, but not provoke death or facilitate assisted suicide.”

He went on: “I would point out that the right to care and treatment for all must always be prioritized, so that the weakest, particularly the elderly and the sick, are never discarded. Indeed, life is a right, not death, which must be welcomed, not administered. And this ethical principle applies to everyone, not just Christians or believers.”

Catholic bishops across Europe have expressed “deep concern” at French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal for abortion to be added to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

In a statement this week, the presidency of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE) noted that there is no “right” to abortion enshrined in European or international law.

“Attempting to change this by introducing a supposed right to abortion in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union not only goes against fundamental European beliefs and values, but would be an unjust law, devoid of an ethical foundation and destined to be a cause of perpetual conflict among the citizens of the EU,” it said.

Macron told members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, on Jan. 19 that the EU rights charter needed to be revised.

“We must update this charter to be more explicit on protection of the environment, the recognition of the right to abortion,” he said.

Mr Justice Colton rejected a challenge by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) to Brandon Lewis’ powers to impose a deadline on Stormont for putting in place a centralised system.

The group claimed that only elected representatives in Northern Ireland should be able to decide on the issue, but the judge disagreed.

“Not only was the secretary of state empowered to make regulations, but he was obliged to do so and remains obliged to do so where it appears to him further changes in the law of Northern Ireland are necessary or appropriate for complying with his duties,” he said. “Only parliament can change this.”

MPs in Westminster passed legislation in 2019 to impose an even more liberal abortion regime on Northern Ireland than exists in England and Wales. This was done while power-sharing at Stormont was going through a long hiatus. But a model for operating a system across Northern Ireland is yet to be put in place.

A Swiss man reportedly exploited a loophole in the country’s new simplified sex-change legislation and registered as a woman so that he could become eligible for a pension a year earlier than it would otherwise be due.

From January 1, a ten-minute-long interview and a payment of 75 Swiss francs (about €71) is enough for a person in Switzerland to change their sex on paper. Such procedures as a physical examination and hormonal testing have been eliminated.

In Lucerne, where the retirement age for men is 65 years, compared to 64 for women, and the pensions are generous, one man decided not to wait another year for the money, by simply going and registering as a female with the authorities.

The sex change only occurred on paper, with the claimant later confirming to family and friends that it was done only to speed up the retirement, according to local media reports.

A family is asking the High Court to declare that the State’s failure to provide retrospective recognition of parentage of children born through commercial surrogacy, a practice banned in almost all European countries, amounts to “invidious discrimination”.

The court heard the biological and legally-recognised father of the young boy is arranging his will after receiving an advanced cancer diagnosis.

The child’s genetic mother is not recognised as his legal mother, because she did not give birth to him, though she is currently the boy’s legal guardian, but that will cease when he turns 18.

The family’s counsel, Mark Lynam BL said the case raises significant constitutional issues regarding people who have engaged in international, commercial surrogacy. The couple used a Ukrainian woman to carry and give birth to their genetic son under a commercial arrangement.

The genetic mother said her family’s situation has now become urgent, as the boy’s “only legal parent is battling a life-threatening illness” and attempts to put together a will that would safeguard his financial future has been “close to impossible”, she added.

Mr Lynam said there is no practical route to legal parentage for the genetic mother, as the Adoption Authority of Ireland does not want to engage in the area until proposed legislation has been passed.

A global campaign group that lobbies for radically expansive euthanasia legislation has officially launched in Ireland.

Exit International was formed in 1997 by Philip Nitschke, an Australian doctor and creator of the Sarco pod, a euthanasia device. The organisation says “a good death is a fundamental human right of all rational adults” and they want assisted suicide for anyone who finds life ‘unbearable’.

Exit’s aim in Ireland is to lobby for right-to-die legislation to be passed, and not be limited to seriously ill people. “Exit advocates for the introduction of a Swiss-style law where help depends upon the motive of the person assisting, rather than the terminal illness status of the patient requesting medical help,” its website says.

Tom Curran, the partner of the late right-to-die campaigner Marie Fleming, is to lead the Irish branch.

Curran has been Exit International’s Europe co-ordinator since 2010. Fleming, his late partner, lost a landmark legal challenge to overturn the ban on assisted suicide in 2013. Fleming had advanced multiple sclerosis and argued that the law infringed her constitutional rights because the severity of her disability prevented her from ending her own life without assistance.

New evidence suggests couples who marry without ever having cohabited divorce at a lower rate, even when they marry before the age of 30.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, researchers Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone say there is an interesting exception to the conventional wisdom that waiting until 30 to marry is best, if you want to avoid divorce.

“In analyzing reports of marriage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government’s National Survey of Family Growth (NFSG), we found that there is a group of women for whom marriage before 30 is not risky: women who married directly, without ever cohabiting prior to marriage. In fact, women who married between 22 and 30, without first living together, had some of the lowest rates of divorce in the NSFG”.

While the idea that cohabitation is risky is surprising to some, they write that a growing body of research indicates that Americans who live together before marriage are less likely to be happily married and more likely to land in divorce court.

“In looking at the marital histories of thousands of women across the U.S., we found that women who cohabited were 15% more likely to get divorced. Moreover, a Stanford study indicates that the risk is especially high for women who cohabited with someone besides their future husband. They were more than twice as likely to end up in divorce court”, they write.

The number of divorces among same-sex couples rose by over 40 percent in England and Wales in 2020 despite an overall decrease in courts dissolving marriages of 4.5%.

The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show in 2020, there were 1,154 divorces among same-sex couples, increasing by 40.4% from 2019.

Of these, the majority continued to be accounted for by female same-sex divorces (71.3%).

There were 102,438 opposite-sex divorces in 2020, decreasing by 4.8% from 107,599 in 2019.

For same-sex divorces, ‘unreasonable behaviour’ was the most common reason for divorce in 2020 for both female and male couples; unreasonable behaviour accounted for 55.2% of female divorces and 57.0% of male divorces.

In 2020, the average (median) duration of marriage at the time of divorce was 11.9 years for opposite-sex couples, a decrease from 12.4 years in 2019.

For same-sex divorces in 2020, the average (median) duration of marriage at the time of divorce was 4.7 years for female couples and 5.4 years for male couples. Divorces among same-sex couples have only been possible since 2015 following the introduction of same-sex marriages in March 2014.

A court in the German city of Münster has ruled that seriously, as distinct from terminally ill people do not have the right to acquire lethal drugs that would enable them to kill themselves.

The decision was the result of a case in which three chronically ill people requested special permission from the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM) to be allowed to buy the drugs needed to die by suicide.

The regional higher administrative court said the institute was not “obliged to allow seriously ill people who have decided to commit suicide the purchase” of lethal drugs for this purpose.

The ruling added that it is up to a democratically elected government to change the law on acquiring lethal drugs, but that in the meantime such a practice would remain illegal.

BfArM, with its headquarters in the western city of Bonn, has so far rejected 225 requests for suicide-assisting medication, according to Catholic news agency KNA.

Germany’s Constitutional Court overturned a law two years ago that had outlawed assisting those seeking to kill themselves However, a law permitting assisted suicide for the terminally ill has not yet been passed by parliament.