The national birth rate rose last year for the first time in 12 years compared with the year before when Covid-19 broke out.

According to the National Women and Infants Health Programme (NWIHP) annual report, the national birth rate rose by 6.5 per cent in 2021, when compared to 2020, with 60,551 babies being born last year.

This is the first time the birth rate has increased since 2009, the report adds. It is 14,000 fewer births than in 2011.

The report also said that at the end of 2021, 10 Maternity Hospitals and 405 GP services were providing or administering abortions.

Citing the second annual report of the Department of Health on the provision on abortion, it said a total of 6,577 abortions were carried out under the country’s abortion legislation in 2020.

A new policy document launched by Sinn Féin outlined the party’s proposals to invest heavily in institutional childcare so as to ensure mothers’ participation in the workforce. This is despite polling showing only a minority of parents state day-care is the first choice for their children during the working day.

It is estimated that parents are currently spending approximately €400 million annually on childcare fees across the State. The childcare package proposed by Sinn Féin would provide two-thirds of this cost (€270 million) in additional public investment on the condition that providers reduce fees for parents.

The policy would offer childcare facilities the option of entering the scheme. Parents would still have to make a contribution but would pay two-thirds less on average than they currently pay under the proposals.

Speaking at the launch of the proposals on Thursday in Ringsend Irishtown Community Centre in Dublin, Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on children Kathleen Funchion said the high cost of childcare had resulted in women being “locked out of the workforce” in recent years.

There had been “lip service around encouraging women into various roles and posts” but “often the support is not there” due to the cost of childcare preventing women from being able to go to work and juggle careers, Ms Funchion said.

Twelve out of Ireland’s 13 Members of the European Parliament have voted in favour of a non-binding resolution that would enforce abortion across the EU by inserting a ‘right’ to abortion into the Charter of Fundamental Rights and remove the matter from voters and national parliaments.

The resolution was a direct response to the US Supreme Court’s decision in overturning the Roe v Wade case in the United States that enforced a liberal abortion law across all 50 states.

It also calls for full decriminalisation of abortion. It was passed by 371 votes to 161.

One human rights expert, Dr. Adina Portaru, of ADF International in Brussels, said the resolution is “fundamentally inaccurate and misleading“.

“There is no ‘right’ to abortion – on the contrary, Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union upholds the right to life for everyone”, she said.

The Pro-Life Campaign called the text “extreme in tone” and said if ever implemented, “it would strip away even the most basic protections for unborn children against abortion across the 27 EU member states”.

The Irish MEPs who voted in favour of the resolution were as follows: Clare Daly, Mick Wallace, Luke “Ming” Flanagan, Chris MacManus, Grace O’Sullivan, Ciarán Cuffe, Frances Fitzgerald, Seán Kelly, Maria Walsh, Colm Markey Billy Kelleher and Barry Andrews. Deirdre Cline was not present for the vote.

A teacher has brought a High Court challenge to a disciplinary process over social media posts expressing traditional views on social issues such as the importance of having a mother and father.

His posts expressed his personal views on the treatment of women under Islam, the need for a mother and father, the binary distinction of male and female, and transgender issues.

Between 2015 and 2016, he was subject to almost daily complaints to his then employer, Dublin ETB, even though he did not mention the college in his posts, or express his views in the classroom.

He said he was wrongly denounced in his former workplace as a ‘homophobe’ ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobe’ and was subjected to false accusations.

He claims that in late 2017 he was the subject of bullying claims by the school which he denied and which he said were an attempt to punish him by those persons who had complained about his posts.

The ETB ruled against him on the bullying claims and lodged a further complaint against him to the Teaching Council based on his social media postings.

That complaint alleged that Mr Johnson did not appear to be committed to ‘equality’ and ‘inclusion’ or respect diversity arising from gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and other grounds.

Justice Anthony Barr granted Mr Johnson leave to take his case which will now return to the High Court in October.

The government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has expelled 18 Missionaries of Charity from the Central American country.

According to the newspaper El Confidencial, the nuns were taken by the General Directorate of Migration and Immigration and the police from the cities of Managua and Granada, where they had been serving the poor, to the border country of Costa Rica.

Of the 18 sisters, there are seven Indians, two Mexicans, two Filipinos, two Guatemalans, two Nicaraguans, one Spaniard, one Ecuadorian, and one Vietnamese.

The dissolution of the Missionaries of Charity and another 100 NGOs in Nicaragua was approved June 29 by the National Assembly on an “urgent” basis and without any debate.

An Oireachtas committee has called for a change in law to facilitate international surrogacy arrangements including a regime of ‘compensated surrogacy’ for women who carry a child to birth on behalf of others. In practice, this can run to thousands of euro and is often little different from commercial surrogacy.

The Special Committee on International Surrogacy released its report yesterday following three months of hearings. Almost all the experts it heard from were in favour of the practice despite the fact that almost no European country recognises it.

Among the recommended, it supported a form of commercial surrogacy whereby the surrogate mother could be “compensated” for legal advice, counselling and medical advice; loss of earnings due to not working; specific dietary requirements or supplements; and payments to cover domestic labour such as housework or childcare (pages 31—32).

Surrogacy agencies and fertility clinics can also be paid for their “professional services”.

One committee member, Independent Senator Sharon Keogan, objected to the conclusions, saying that surrogacy is “harmful” and “exploitative”, and the report “unbalanced”. She said potential witnesses with dissenting views were excluded from hearings.

In a statement, Ms Keogan said there is a power imbalance between the “commissioning parent and the surrogate”.

In a closely-watched case, a UK court has ruled that a tax expert, Maya Forstater, should not have been dismissed from her job for believing that men cannot become women.

A tribunal found yesterday that Forstater had faced discrimination and victimisation at work over her views on trans people.

The decision means that Forstater could receive damages in the tens of thousands of pounds after she was wrongly dismissed from her role at the London office of a US think tank.

Forstater’s legal triumph yesterday over the Centre for Global Development came after a higher court ruled last year that her views were legally classed as a “philosophical belief” and protected by equality legislation.

The tax specialist, who has co- founded the campaign group Sex Matters, said that the latest ruling was a victory “for everyone who believes in the importance of truth and free speech”. She added that “we are all free to believe whatever we wish. What we are not free to do is compel others to believe the same thing, to silence those who disagree with us or to force others to deny reality.”

Advanced genetic screening of embryos created through IVF is allowing parents pick only the healthiest ones to be brought to birth, a practice that amounts to eugenics.

Wired magazine, an American monthly on new technology and culture, says embryonic selection is not new, but past methods were limited to very few chromosomal abnormalities, or the more or less arbitrary method of how one embryo looked against another.

Now, however, companies such as Genomic Prediction are taking this process much further.

Preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) means “each embryo is given a health score based on the existing mutations in its genes which could potentially one day be life limiting, and the would-be parents are shown how that score compares against the population average. The ranking takes into account the severity of conditions, if shown, as well as the ethnicity of the embryo, since this can also have an impact on disease incidence.”

Genomic Prediction works with around 200 IVF clinics across six continents. But, cofounder, Stephen Hsu’s, innovations have not always been welcomed, even within the academic-scientific community.

In fact, by mid-2020,” the outrage among graduate students at Michigan State University was loud enough to force Hsu out of his position as vice president at the institution”.

Ongoing, brutal attacks on Christians in Nigeria, including murder, are being ignored by the Nigerian Government while the Irish, EU and other governments do little to respond.

That’s according to the leader of an Irish missionary society that has worked for years in the country.

“[The Militants] savagely attack Christian-populated villages, shoot and use machetes to kill all in sight including children, kidnap and demand high ransoms, which even when paid do not assure safe release. They often circulate menacing videos of beheadings, allow public lynching for supposed “blasphemy”, make travel by road and even by rail totally insecure, attack and burn churches and other Christian symbols of identity,” she writes.

Despite this, she says the reality that Christians are being routinely targeted is denied by the Nigerian administration. She adds that this “should not continue to be ignored by Irish, EU and other governments”.

An Oireachtas special committee to examine the issue of assisted suicide is likely to be established following the completion of a parliamentary committee on international surrogacy, according to the Times, Ireland.

The proposed committee, which will have a reporting deadline of nine months, is expected to be set up after the Dáil’s summer recess.

An Oireachtas spokesman said this week that it was “not possible to give an exact timeframe” for the establishment of the assisted suicide committee.

Last July the Oireachtas justice committee recommended that a special group of TDs and senators be appointed to examine assisted suicide after a failed attempt by Gino Kenny, the People Before Profit-Solidarity TD, to get a ‘Dying with Dignity Bill’ on the statute books.