The uncritical use of puberty blockers in the US in the treatment of gender dysphoria may be changing.

While concerns have been mounting in much of the developed world, with some countries having scaled back their use, in America doctors who work in transgender clinics routinely claim that prescribing such drugs is both “conservative”, as they claim their effects are largely reversible, and “compassionate”, because they are meant to save children with gender dysphoria (the feeling of being in the wrong body) from enormous distress.

But last week Abigail Shrier, a writer, published interviews in “Common Sense With Bari Weiss”, a newsletter, with two transgender health-care professionals who suggested that some doctors were irresponsible in the way they treated children. The women, both trans, are on the board of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (wpath), which endorses the use of blockers early in puberty in some cases. Though blockers are often described as operating like a pause button, most children prescribed them go on to cross-sex hormones. This combination can have irreversible consequences, including sterility and the inability to orgasm.

A bill to protect unborn children with significant disabilities from abortion has advanced through committee stage at Stormont.

The bill seeks to remove “severe impairment”, which could include Down Syndrome, as a ground for abortion up to birth, which includes a wide-range of conditions.

The DUP, alongside the UUP, voted for First Minister Paul Givan’s legislation in the Assembly’s Health Committee.

People Before Profit and the Alliance party opposed the bill whilst members of Sinn Féin and SDLP abstained from the vote.

If assisted suicide is legalised in the UK, people may be coerced into signing away their lives, according to doctors who treat terminally ill patients.

In a letter to The Times, experts from hospitals and universities highlighted problems in jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal.

They write: “Evidence from Oregon shows how assessment of capacity for assisted suicide is influenced by the individual values of assessing clinicians, something that is almost impossible to mitigate against.

“Patients seeking assisted suicide often have significant psychosocial distress, making them at increased risk of coercion and abuse; Oregon’s most recent official report shows that 53 per cent of patients who died under the state’s Death with Dignity Act reported feeling a burden on their families, friends or caregivers. Pain and fear of pain were less frequently cited.”

The letter continues: “In Canada emerging evidence shows that the medical assistance in dying law can worsen the quality of death, creating strain between patients and their families and impairing effective symptom control, leading to patient and provider distress.”

It concludes: “Legalising assisted suicide, without strong evidence of the effectiveness of proposed safeguards, is unwise and unsafe.”

Concern has been expressed about the Christian exodus from Lebanon and the lack of a response from Western Governments.

Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan told Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), he fears that, if this crisis continues, “it will be the end of Christians in Lebanon and the whole of the near East in a few years”.

“Normally when Christians leave, as happened in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, they don’t return. They ask, ‘Why should we return when we can’t guarantee our children a decent life nor religious freedom?’”

He also explained that the number of Christians leaving Lebanon is very alarming:

“One of our clergy went to get a residency permit and an official told him that they issue 5,000 passports a day, and that they estimate that at least 3,000 of these are for Christians who then leave. We can’t convince them to stay because they say, ‘How can we endure this situation? There is no hope for our future.’ You have to look at the problems in Lebanon and tell the politicians that enough is enough. Perhaps it’s no more in the interest of the Western politicians. They have other issues to deal with.”

The Patriarch is unhappy with the efforts made by western governments to help Christians in the Middle East. He felt that European governments were more concerned with animal rights and pandering to secular groups than helping to uphold Christian’s rights in the Middle East.

A vote to ban pro-life work outside abortion centres in Northern Ireland has been described as “diabolical” by Tracey Harkin of the Iona Institute Northern Ireland. She said there is “no justification for it”.

Two thirds of MLAs in the Northern Assembly voted in favour of the ‘Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Bill’ including the SDLP and Sinn Féin representatives.

The bill would establish areas outside clinics that would criminalise activities that seek to influence or impede people attending.

Tracey Harkin said that while everyone condemns harassment, this bill is “trying to prevent any sort of help or support or outreach.”

“For those generous souls who show up outside abortion centres and offer vulnerable women advice and support, especially financial help and just friendship – we know that we’re saving lives and that’s just Christianity in action, it’s love in action,” Ms Harkin said.

An assisted suicide Bill was not put to a vote on Friday in the House of Lords following mass opposition from Peers with over 60 members speaking against it.

The debate, which went for over seven hours, followed a very large amount of media coverage and opinion pieces from MPs, Peers, doctors, and other experts that have appeared over the last two weeks highlighting major issues with introducing assisted suicide. This has included nearly 1,700 medical professionals coming out in opposition to the Bill and an investigation by the Daily Mail into the assisted suicide process overseas, revealing that the use of fatal drugs to end life can be a harrowing experience over hours or days for the person involved.

Among the opposition, Lord David Alton said the same unanswered questions about the risks to vulnerable people remain.

“In truth, what are described as safeguards are simply a wish list for what its sponsors hope would happen in an ideal world”.

“It would be profoundly irresponsible to enact legislation without knowing how many putative safeguards might work. Asking us to do otherwise is like asking Parliament to sign a blank cheque.”

The US Supreme Court will allow a Texas law banning most abortions to remain in effect while the Court waits to take up a legal challenge to it next month.

In a novel legal mechanism, the ‘heartbeat law’ allows private citizens to sue abortion providers who perform the procedure after a foetal heartbeat can be detected, which usually occurs about six weeks into a pregnancy.

On Friday, the justices said they will decide in November whether the Biden administration has the right to sue Texas over the law. It is very unusual for the court to review a law so quickly.

The case will focus not on the abortion ban itself but on how the law was crafted and whether it can be legally challenged.

The administration argued in a brief filed earlier on Friday that if the law remains in effect “no decision of this Court is safe. States need not comply with, or even challenge, precedents with which they disagree. They may simply outlaw the exercise of whatever rights they disfavor.”

The former prime minister joined the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the most senior Roman Catholic cardinal in Britain in opposing the private member’s bill, which is due to be debated for a second time in the House of Lords.

Writing for The Times Brown, said that the focus of the medical profession should be in alleviating suffering, and that the “cold, bureaucratic directives” of the bill could change the way we view doctors and nurses.

Mike Kane, a Labour Member of Parliament, is seeking to add the amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

The Guardian newspaper quoted a spokesperson for Kane, who is Catholic, as saying that the “Amess amendment” would protect the right of Catholic priests and other ministers of religion to pray alongside the dying.

Earlier, a Catholic bishop called for greater recognition of the Last Rites as an “emergency service” in the wake of the killing.

Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury, western England, said: “Every believing Catholic desires to hear Christ’s words of pardon and absolution for the last time; to be strengthened by the grace of anointing; accompanied by the assurance of the Church’s prayer and whenever possible to receive Holy Communion.”

“This is something well understood in hospitals and care homes, yet the events following the murderous assault on Sir David Amess suggest this is not always comprehended in emergency situations.”

“I hope a better understanding of the eternal significance of the hour of death for Christians and the Church’s ministry as an ‘emergency service’ may result from this terrible tragedy.”

A Kansas City-area Baptist megachurch has reached a $150,000 settlement with the county over coronavirus restrictions, with the church claiming that the county Government treated them more harshly than secular institutions when it came to COVID protocols.

Abundant Life Baptist Church, which has locations in Lee’s Summit and Blue Springs, Missouri, filed a lawsuit against Jackson County over a year ago, arguing, as places of worship in other states have, that the county’s coronavirus restrictions treated places of worship more harshly than secular institutions such as retail stores.

Under the terms of the settlement, Jackson County vowed that in exchange for the church dropping the lawsuit, it would ensure that future enforcement measures would not impose stricter requirements on religious organizations than their secular counterparts, the Christian Post reported.