The Argentine government will be postponing its bill to legalise abortion until 2021.

President Alberto Fernández vowed to legalise abortion during campaigning for last year’s election and committed in his March 1 state-of-the-nation speech that a bill would enter Congress within the following 10 days.

In the ensuing months the government announced more than once that the bill was ready for presentation, despite the coronavirus pandemic, but there was no consensus within the Cabinet, according to reports.

On Monday, Cabinet Chief Santiago Cafiero said that “although the government’s intention was always clear with respect to abortion,” the idea was to debate the bill without restrictions in either Congress or the public arena, with full social participation.

Until the pandemic could be brought under control, the legalisation of abortion could not be a priority for the government, said Cafiero, underlining that this position was supported by Vice-President Cristina Fernández Kirchner, as well as the Cabinet.

Last Saturday marked the second anniversary of the Senate’s rejection of the abortion bill previously approved by the lower house Chamber of Deputies. The initiative enjoys considerable social support, but is also strongly resisted by pro-life sectors.

A leading human rights group is warning that the persecution of Christians in Africa is getting worse during the Covid-19 crisis.

Open Doors, a leading charity working to help persecuted Christians around the world, says the pandemic has also created more opportunities for persecutors to target believers where they are already vulnerable, leaving them even more exposed.

“Though many factors determine the vulnerability of populations to Christian persecution and to Covid-19, a common thread between the two vulnerabilities has surfaced in Niger,” explained Open Door’s Paige Collins.

“Here, some Islamic extremist voices have propagated the message that the coronavirus is a Western invention against Islam or Allah’s punishment against those who have accepted Christianity and departed from Islam. Christians are reporting increased harassment as a result of the rumors, which are likely driving additional exposures to the virus as well,” she told Crux.

“While Christians in many African countries, including Nigeria and Ethiopia, have experienced discrimination for some time, their need for food, shelter, and medical care has significantly increased due to the coronavirus. Relief discrimination is making a bad situation worse for Christians and other religious minorities,” Collins said.

The outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic has exposed the limits of science and the capacity for technological solutions to all problems, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.

Up to this, people felt “that the progress of modern science and culture would quickly be able to respond to any global health crisis by rapidly producing a cure or a vaccine that would resolve the question and allow us to continue in the way we lived,” he said.

“Now we realise that a pandemic can emerge and spread and indeed reappear. We also have realised that in public health terms, medicine, cures and vaccines, actions from somewhere in society cannot alone resolve our problems,” he said.

Speaking in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral, he advised that “in the months and years to come we will have to face and live with the challenges that the pandemic has brought and will leave us with. People will be insecure. Jobs will be lost at all levels in society. Precariousness will affect so many of the things that in the past gave us a sense of security.”

In such a scenario, the church “must find ways of witnessing to the fact that society needs care and love,” he said.

Two Catholic Cardinals and a former archbishop of Canterbury are among more than 70 faith leaders publicly declaring that the Uighurs are facing “one of the most egregious human tragedies since the Holocaust”, and that those responsible for the persecution of the Chinese Muslim minority must be held accountable.

The incarceration of at least a million Uighurs and other Muslims in prison camps, where they are reported to face starvation, torture, murder, sexual violence, slave labour and forced organ extraction, is a potential genocide, say the clerics.

The statement, signed by five serving Church of England bishops, the Coptic archbishop of London, the Dalai Lama’s representative in Europe, plus cardinals, imams and rabbis, says the plight of the Uighurs “calls into question most seriously the willingness of the international community to defend universal human rights for everyone”.

It adds: “The clear aim of the Chinese authorities is to eradicate the Uighur identity. China’s state media has stated that the goal is to ‘break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins’ … High-level Chinese government documents speak of ‘absolutely no mercy’. Parliamentarians, governments and jurists have a responsibility to investigate.”

The faith leaders say: “After the Holocaust, the world said ‘Never Again’. Today, we repeat those words ‘Never Again’, all over again…. We make a simple call for justice, to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity.”

Their statement comes after comparisons were made last month between the Holocaust and atrocities against the Uighurs in a letter from the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl, to the Chinese ambassador in Britain.

Pro-life voices in the US have criticised the selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as former vice president Joe Biden’s running mate for the 2020 election.

Fordham University professor Charles Camosy, who left the Democratic Party earlier this year over the party’s stance on abortion, said that for Catholics “in favor of prenatal justice, and of government defending these children from terrible violence, we must say that Harris is a deeply flawed candidate”.

“Unreserved praise of her VP candidacy is, in effect, yet another example of erasure of the prenatal child,” Camosy said on Twitter.

Democrats for Life of America said in a statement that she “does not provide pro-life Democrats with any assurances and will, in fact, further alienate 21 million Democratic voters who have been left out of the party for quite some time.”

Michael Sean Winters, a writer for the National Catholic Reporter, was critical of Harris’ 2018 questioning of a judicial nominee over his membership of the Knights of Columbus, calling her treatment of Brian C. Buescher “embarrassing in both its ignorance and its bigotry.”

National Review writer Alexandra DeSanctis made a similar observation, saying Harris’s time on the Senate judiciary committee had shown “reprehensible anti-Catholic bigotry, and there’s no reason to believe her views have changed.”

Several commentators from across the political divide also noted Harris’ noted support for unlimited access to abortion.

A Belgian study has shown overwhelming support among doctors surveyed for infanticide when a newborn baby has a serious disability.

Medical personnel involved in abortion decision‐making at eight Neonatal Intensive Care Units in Flanders were surveyed for the research.

Almost nine out of ten respondents (89.1%) agree that “in the event of a serious (non‐lethal) neonatal condition, administering drugs with the explicit intention to end neonatal life is acceptable”.

Additionally, the research showed that “Behavioural intentions indicate that even in situations with an unclear diagnosis and unpredictable prognosis, 85.6% of professionals would still consider late TOP [termination of pregnancy]”.

Catherine Robinson of Right to Life UK called the findings “profoundly disturbing”.

“Less than ten years ago, there was a strong condemnation of the idea of ending a baby’s life after it had been born, regardless of whether or not it had a disability, when this idea was floated by academics in the British Medical Journal.

Tragically, she added, “it now appears to have gone from an outlandish academic thought experiment to be seen as something that is morally acceptable”.

“It is profoundly disturbing that these healthcare professionals, who should be upholding the right to life and giving every baby the best possible chance at life, are hugely in favour of ‘after-birth abortions’ and infanticide of babies with a disability.”

The nuns at St Benedict’s Priory in Cobh say the apples from the Bible Garden are a vital source of income for the upkeep of their convent.

The apples are used to make chutneys, which are sold at the convent’s Oasis Tea Room.

The Prioress of the Mount, Mother Catherine, said she and her fellow nuns are distraught following the theft.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Drivetime, Fianna Fáil TD for Cork East, James O’Connor, said he has spoken to gardaí about the theft.

“Our understanding is that a number of other gardens in the area have experienced similar incidents over the weekend,” he said.

The Office of Public Works has agreed to “step in and provide assistance” to the nuns by replacing the stolen fruit with apples from a nearby orchard on an OPW-owned site at Barryscourt Castle in Carrigtwohill.

This assistance will help plug the funding gap for the nuns, he said.

Knock Shrine will not open its grounds on what would normally be its busiest day of the year due to fears about the spread of Covid-19.

In a statement the rector of Knock Shrine, Fr Richard Gibbons, said the Co Mayo venue will not open for the Feast of the Assumption on 15 August due to the escalation of the virus around the country.

Fr Gibbons said during discussions with Church and State bodies it was decided the shrine did not have the resources to deal with the large numbers of people expected.

He said: “As the National Marian Shrine, we have been extra vigilant in living up to our responsibilities amid this pandemic in placing people’s physical and spiritual well-being to the fore.

“I would ask for your understanding and patience at this time.”

The Feast of the Assumption attracts over 20,000 people to Knock every year.

The shrine and its grounds will be closed from 8pm on Friday 14 August to 7am on Sunday 16 August.

Masses will be celebrated online only and behind closed doors at 12pm, 3pm and 7.30pm.

The HSE spent €2.9 million providing abortions through GPs in 2019.

This refers only to abortions that took place in the first nine weeks of pregnancy, using drugs prescribed and dispensed by a GP, and does not include surgical abortions which occur only in hospital settings and cater for pregnancies beyond nine weeks.

The figure was confirmed by Geraldine Crowley, Assistant National Director, Primary Care Strategy and Planning in response to a parliamentary question from Carol Nolan TD.

Commenting on the News, Deputy Nolan called the figure “staggering”, especially considering that “an almost equal amount of funding (€3.1million) was allocated for the implementation of the entire National Women and Infants Health Programme (NWIHP) in 2019”.

She continued: “When you put this information, and the recent annual report on the number of abortions that took place in 2019 together, what we now have is an emerging sense of how much abortion is going to ‘cost’ in terms of the loss of human life and the financial resources that could be better spent at the community level”.

“It is also clear however that the fees of €2.9 million do not represent anything like the true financial cost because that number only refers to abortions which took place at 9 weeks or under in a community setting. It takes no account of the costs associated with the delivery of abortion ‘services’ beyond 9 weeks and which have to take place in our maternity hospitals.”