Extensive details on abortions carried out in hospitals across the country, including post-operative complications, will be made available by the HSE for the first time. However, the big majority of terminations are facilitated by GPs via the abortion pill.
The move comes as there are growing concerns about the risk to women’s health for those undergoing the procedure in Ireland.
The HSE confirmed the scale of the expanded detail in a parliamentary response to Independent Ireland TD Michael Collins.
Up to now, the brief annual report has been limited to statistics and to what section of the law abortions fell under.
The wider detail will initially be focused on hospital-based procedures and will include patient demographics including age, previous pregnancies, contraception use and previous terminations.
It will detail the mode involved such as through drug-induced, surgical or surgical under general anaesthetic.
It will also include the gestation at the time of the procedure and any post-termination complications and the care provided.
These will include suspected or confirmed infection, suspected incomplete termination, heavy or prolonged bleeding and presentations to hospital following early medical abortion in the community or following a termination carried out abroad.
The Government has rejected a UN recommendation that surrogacy be abolished and is instead determined to implement legislation to widely facilitate the practice.
Earlier this month, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, described surrogacy as a “system of violence, exploitation and abuse against women”, and called for its global abolition.
On Tuesday, Independent TD, Carol Nolan TD, questioned Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill about the intervention.
The Minister replied that the report highlighted “some legitimate concerns”, but she disagreed with its central recommendation that all forms of surrogacy should be prohibited.
Rather, she said, the Government will stick to the approach that “it is preferable to seek to regulate surrogacy rather than enforce a blanket ban”. Almost all European countries ban commercial surrogacy and some ban all surrogacy. Ireland will facilitate people who enter into commercial surrogacy arrangements overseas.
“The aim is to provide for surrogacy which is ethical, altruistic and, most importantly, protects the health, safety and welfare of the two most vulnerable parties: the surrogate mother and the children born as a result of surrogacy”.
She further claimed that policy has “wide, if not near-unanimous, agreement across political parties and groupings in the Oireachtas”.
A Spanish law mandating the creation of a registers of doctors who, for reasons of conscience, prefer not to perform abortions is meeting resistance from the regional Governments tasked with implementing it.
The Central Government say the lists are not made public, but they will enable medical personnel to be redistributed so that access to abortion is made available everywhere.
However, the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has refused to compile what she calls a ‘blacklist’.
Manuel Martínez-Sellés, president of the Madrid College of Physicians, said: ‘This is difficult to see as anything other than an attempt to restrict freedom of conscience [and] to discriminate against doctors who refuse to take part in acts they consider morally wrong.’
It has been suggested that it would make more sense to publish a list of doctors who do perform the procedure.
The Government is planning to commemorate the bicentenary of Catholic emancipation in 2029.
This aligns with the commitment given in the Program for Government to mark the 250th Anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell in 2025 and, following that, “the bicentenaries of some of the most pivotal moments in his career”.
Wicklow-Wexford Fianna Fáil TD Malcolm Byrne, who sought a specific commitment on marking the end to discrimination against Catholics in the nineteenth Century, said: “I believe strongly that we should mark this important social, political and religious historic milestone. “
In response to a parliamentary question from Deputy Byrne, Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan said the 200th anniversary of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 2029 has been identified by the newly formed Commemorations Advisory Committee, chaired by former RTÉ newscaster Bryan Dobson, “as worthy of recognition and remembrance”.
“My Department will work with our project partners to develop a programme that will be shared in a Memorandum in due course. The aim will be to ensure that this anniversary is remembered appropriately, following the established commemorations framework”.
There is a return to faith among teenage boys tired of the emptiness of virtual reality, according to the new principal of St Vincent’s Castleknock College, secondary school in Dublin.
Elaine Kelly has previously worked in coeducational and all-girls schools.
Aware of the different challenges facing boys and girls, she said, “Really what boys need is to feel that they have a purpose.”
And one of the things that attracted Kelly to St Vincent’s is its Catholic ethos.
“Gen Z – that cohort of young male boys – they are returning to their spiritual lives, to their faith, to their own spirituality; that sense of reflection. Because there’s nothing actually else out there for them. There’s nothing at the end of a mobile phone. It’s vacuous. It’s empty.”
“You can keep scrolling. The dopamine fix, it isn’t actually sustaining young men any more. I’m actually struck here in the school by the strength of faith that I see among the young students in the school,” she adds.
The US has called for the release of 30 leaders of one of China’s largest underground church networks who were reportedly detained in overnight raids in various cities.
The Chinese Communist Party promotes atheism and tightly controls religion – still, some Christian groups are calling this the most extensive crackdown against the faith in decades.
Christians have long been pressured to join only state-sanctioned churches that are led by government-approved pastors and toe the party line.
Urging China to release the church leaders, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement on Sunday that “this crackdown further demonstrates how the CCP exercises hostility towards
Christians who reject Party interference in their faith and choose to worship at unregistered house churches”.
The parish priest of Gaza called on his flock to forgive even as the war refugees return to find a “tsunami” of destruction.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians started to make their way back to the northern Gaza Strip, but instead of returning to homes, there is mostly only rubble left, with Father Gabriel Romanelli, saying the entire enclave has experienced a “tsunami” of destruction.
During Sunday Mass, Romanelli invited those present to participate in an act of reconciliation and forgiveness, inspired by the teachings of St Pope John Paul II. “To forgive all those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, have failed, and ask forgiveness for our own shortcomings,” he recalled.
The Christian community of Gaza has mourned the loss of at least 57 people during the war.
At the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV called for the warring parties to lay down their weapons.
“Disarm your hands and, even more importantly, your hearts. As I have said before, peace is unarmed and disarming,” Pope Leo said. “It is not deterrence, but fraternity; it is not an ultimatum, but dialogue. Peace will not come as the result of victories over the enemy, but as the fruit of sowing justice and courageous forgiveness.”
An activist academic who has has long backed radically liberalising Ireland’s laws on surrogacy and assisted human reproduction has been appointed the chairperson of the board of the new fertility regulator.
The regulating body’s purpose is to police Ireland’s burgeoning fertility industry to ensure that exploitative practices do not become endemic.
Deirdre Madden, of the School of Law at University College Cork (UCC) is a specialist in healthcare law and ethics, holding a Master’s degree in surrogacy and a PhD in the law relating to assisted human reproduction (AHR).
Health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill said: “Establishing the AHRRA [Assisted Human Reproduction Regulatory Authority] brings essential oversight to this important part of the health service.
“Professor Madden has extensive expertise in healthcare law and ethics, including assisted human reproduction and surrogacy, bioethics, patient safety, and healthcare regulation”.
Surrogacy is comparable to prostitution and should be banned, the UN’s most senior expert on violence against women and girls has urged.
Reem Alsalem, a United Nations special rapporteur, submitted a report to the body on Friday calling for an end to the practice, describing it as a “system of exploitation and violence”.
Ms Alsalem argued that there had been a “rush to normalise” surrogacy arrangements in recent years, driven by powerful lobbying groups that have created a false impression of the practice.
“There’s a very embellished view that it’s altruistic, that it’s a sign of love, that you’re doing something amazing because you’re providing an opportunity for others that don’t have the chance to become parents, but there’s very little talk about the dark side of surrogacy,” she said.
“Humans do not have a human right to have children. This argument that you have a right to form a family, and therefore you have a right to rent out a womb and then remove a child from their mother, it’s just insane how this has been allowed to happen.”
Faika El-Nagashi, a former Austrian Green MP who heads the European Athena Forum said the new LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy 2026–2030 “places gender identity and ‘self-ID’ at the centre of EU equality policy, while neglecting the sex-based protections of women and girls”.
At a broader level, gay rights would be defined by attraction on the basis of gender identity, as opposed to sex.
Any government that tries to introduce age limits or resist the switch to gender, rather than sex-based, equality, could face action in the European Court of Justice, which has the power to assert the primacy of EU law over national legislators.
Both Ireland and the present EU proposal backs self-identification, in contrast to Britain, which requires a doctor’s approval to allow people, including children, to claim a gender identity different from their biological sex.
