A high-level ministerial meeting to advance legislation on international surrogacy has taken place. This comes despite commercial surrogacy being banned or not recognised anywhere in Europe, except Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

The Ministers for Health, for Justice and for Children, together with officials from their departments, examined the recently published report of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on International Surrogacy.

They reiterated their broad welcome for the report and discussed how to advance its recommendations, including in legislation.

“The departments will finalise an agreed Policy Paper which can then form the basis for the development of legislative options, including consideration of whether some can be inserted into the Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Bill 2022 at Committee Stage,” according to a press release.

“Key principles underpinning any new legislative measures will be the protection of the rights of all children born as a result of cross-border surrogacy arrangements and the safeguarding of the welfare of surrogate mothers”.

A circuit judge in Kentucky has blocked abortion restrictions from taking effect — in part because he said they adopt “a distinctly Christian and Catholic belief” about when life begins.

This is despite those same Churches maintaining that the beginning of life is a matter for science, not scripture.

The Kentucky laws would have banned abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, around the sixth week, and made exceptions for the life of the mother or disabling injuries.

“The laws at issue here adopt the view embraced by some, but not all, religious traditions, that life begins at the moment of conception,” Judge Mitch Perry of the Jefferson County Circuit Court wrote in an opinion issued Friday.

“The General Assembly is not permitted to single out and endorse the doctrine of a favored faith for preferred treatment. By taking this approach, the bans fail to account for the diverse religious views of many Kentuckians whose faith leads them to take very different views of when life begins,” he said.

“There is nothing in our laws or history that allows for such theocratic based policymaking,” he added.

The Catholic Education Partnership (CEP) has welcomed proposed changes to the Junior Cycle SPHE curriculum, which will see more of a focus on “human relationships” and less on “mere biology”.

The changes drew controversy after The Irish Independent reported that pornography would be taught in classrooms, but CEP CEO Alan Hynes said the reports were “misleading”.

“We’re quite happy that it can be harmonised with the ethos of any Catholic school”, he said.

It’s important that young people develop “a critical sense” in dealing with “the flood of pornography”, Mr Hynes warned, quoting from Pope Francis’ encyclical Amoris Laetitia.

He added that he was aware there are pro-pornography use campaigners out there, “but that’s not what’s being proposed here at all”.

The CEP, an umbrella group for Catholic primary, secondary and tertiary institutes, also welcomes the new focus on the relationship element of RSE, Mr Hynes said.

“It’s based on feedback from students themselves. I think a lot of the feedback came to a request to move away from a mere biological treatment and to more human relationship focus,” Mr Hynes said.

Plans are currently underway for the Church to develop its own RSE curriculum for second level education, to compliment the Flourish programme used in Catholic primary schools.

Free contraception will be available for women aged 17-25 from September. This comes despite a 2019 Working Group on Access to Contraception, under the then Health Minister, Simon Harris, say the proposal would probably be a waste of public funds.

The legislation providing for the free contraception scheme was signed into law last Thursday by President Michael D Higgins.

The measure is scheduled to come into operation by “early September”, the Government said.

Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said: “Free contraception is a cost-effective measure, reducing both crisis pregnancy and termination of pregnancy rates.

“Given that the costs of prescription contraception are typically faced by women, the scheme will impact positively on gender equity, reducing costs for women, but also benefitting their partners and families, starting with women aged 17-25.”

Religious freedom is under attack all over the world, according to experts gathered in Rome this week for a conference organized by the University of Notre Dame.

“Religious violence has risen to historic levels over the past decade affecting nearly all religious groups,” said Samah Norquist, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

“Believers of nearly all faiths — Christians, Muslims and Jews, Buddhists, Yazidis, Baha’i — have faced discrimination, harassment, repression, and, of course, persecution by state and non-state actors, as well as ideological movements,” Norquist said.

Nury Turkel, the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, sounded the alarm on the deterioration of religious freedom in China, where the government continued to “vigorously implement its ‘Sinicization of religion’ policy” and demanded that religious groups and adherents support the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule and ideology.

Over one million Uyghurs have been placed into concentration camps for no other crime than the fact that they worship Allah rather than Xi Xinping. They have been victims of many abuses, including torture, rape, forced labor, and murder said Turkel, a Uyghur American attorney.

A listener to the Ronan Collins Show who complained that playing the Christmas hymn ‘O Holy Night’ was discrimination against non-Christians has had his complaint thrown out.

The male complainant told the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) that by playing the hymn on the RTÉ Radio 1 show on December 8, last year, the national broadcaster had stigmatised him and other non-Christians, inappropriately and unjustifiably, on the basis of religion.

He highlighted the lyrics “fall on your knees” which he said is disrespectful of human dignity and that to order someone to their knees amounts to an abuse of power.

He also stated that the lyric “and in his name all oppression shall cease” is inappropriate and unjustifiable, noting examples of historical oppression carried out in the name of Christianity.

The complainant accused the national broadcaster of actively condoning and sponsoring the lies, false promises, stigmatisation and abuse of power contained in the lyrics by repeatedly playing the hymn.

Rejecting the complaint, the BAI’s Executive Complaints Forum found “no basis” to believe that broadcasting the hymn “would cause harm” as it is characterised in the authority’s code of programming standards.

School ethos is not the barrier to teaching Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) it can be perceived to be, the Dáil Committee on Gender Equality has been told.

Following a review, “what we found was that the biggest barriers to inclusive effective and child-centred RSE was teacher confidence and competence,” said Dr Patrick Sullivan, deputy chief executive of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA).

“What can happen is that, with a teacher who is feeling unconfident and maybe a little bit unsure of themselves in the classroom, that they can think about, ‘maybe I can’t address that particular issue, maybe it’s not age and stage appropriate for me to speak about this issue with these groups of children,’” he said.

NCCA education officer Annette Honan told the Committee how “we met groups of teachers, students, school leaders and parents across 20 schools as part of the review of a variety of types of schools and we didn’t fudge it. We directly asked: ‘Is school ethos a barrier to more effective RSE or is it inhibiting you in any way in addressing topics across the curriculum?’ It didn’t come up unprompted,” she said.

A special Oireachtas Committee to examine legalising assisted suicide is expected to commence in October, according to People Before Profit TD Gino Kenny.

The formation of the committee was recommended in July, following the passage of the so-called Dying with Dignity Bill in the Dáil last year.

That legislation would give a medical practitioner the legal right to assist a terminally person to end their life.

The Oireachtas Justice Committee recommended the formation of a special committee on the issue earlier this year, after finding that the proposed legislation had “serious technical issues” and warranted more detailed examination.

Committee chair James Lawless also said at the time that the gravity of the topic would benefit from more thorough consideration.

Couples in England and Wales could soon be able to get married on beaches, in gardens and on ships under the biggest overhaul of wedding law since the 19th century.

The Law Commission proposes that weddings should be able to take place in “any safe and dignified location”, such as family homes, gardens, beaches, forests, parks, village halls and cruise ships.

The officiant, not the location, would be regulated, and couples would have more freedom to personalise the content of their ceremony.

The proposed changes would enable couples to wed in “smaller and cheaper” venues, with increasing demand for more affordable, personal options.

The commission says a set of universal rules would apply across religions and civil weddings, and could also include legalising non-religious belief ceremonies such as humanist weddings.

A 76-year-old English grandmother who was fined for praying near to an abortion clinic has successfully overturned her financial penalty, but human rights campaigners still fear that the initial fine represents “a worrying trend in law enforcement” regarding certain beliefs.

Rosa Lalor, from Liverpool, England, was issued the fine during the country’s lockdown in February 2021 after a policeman questioned why she was outdoors. She replied that she was “walking and praying.”

The officer involved said that this was not “a reasonable excuse,” that she was in fact protesting, and so she was then arrested, detained, and fined.

As a result of a legal challenge, supported by the organization ADF International, Merseyside Police have now conceded that Lalor should not have been detained due to the fact she was firmly within her rights to silently pray while out walking and that her actions were reasonable and acceptable under COVID-19 regulations.