Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organisation, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” the group have said.

Ms. Sanger, a public health nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn in 1916, has long been lauded as a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer.

But her legacy also includes supporting eugenics, a belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of colour.

“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board, said in a statement.

A Dutch MP has submitted a long-awaited bill to offer healthy Dutch over-75s a right to euthanasia.

Pia Dijkstra, medical ethics lead for D66, a party in the coalition Government, promised to go forward with the controversial bill at the end of January, after government research revealed that around 10,000 people over 55 have a serious death wish.

But it is unclear whether Dijkstra’s bill would win over the majority of MPs as it would be a free vote.

Her proposed law would mean healthy over-75s with a strong death wish for at least two months could have the assistance of an ‘end-of-life supervisor’ to die. But opponents of the law – including the KNMG Royal Dutch Medical Association – believe it could undermine the strict due care conditions of the existing euthanasia law, arguing that lonely and impoverished older people should have help, not the choice of an early death.

The ChristenUnie – a government party with five seats – has said the proposal is insensitively timed and completely unacceptable. Gert-Jan Segers, party leader, said he found it “extraordinarily painful that at a time when old people feel extra vulnerable, D66 submits a proposal that we know will cause many of them increased insecurity and worry.’ He added: ‘This is a path that the ChristenUnie absolutely will not tread.’

The CDA, the other Christian party in government with 17 seats, is also against the proposal, suggesting it could undermine existing euthanasia law. When the research on the unhappy older people was published, now-CDA leader and health minister Hugo de Jonge made an appeal to tackle loneliness and social problems. ‘This group’s death wish is serious and the report underlines the need for action,’ he wrote in a parliamentary briefing. ‘It is our task to make every effort to ensure that these people find the meaning of life and meaning in life again.’

China’s Communist government is aggressively consolidating dominance over its tens of millions of Christians, according to a leading religious freedom expert.

The director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, says the moves should trouble all China observers, whether Christian or not.

Writing in National Review, she says these churches have constituted the largest nationwide movement with a culture and belief system distinct from that of the Chinese state. “Courageous doctors, lawyers, scientists, and journalists dissent, but they can do so only individually or in small groups outside any national institutional support. Since the 1980s, the church — Protestants and Catholics, open and underground — had survived with more ideological independence than any other civil-society organization in China”.

She added: “Christians have long been persecuted and restricted, but the current comprehensive push to meld churches with the CCP, under penalty of eradication, threatens to be devastating to the faith. It signals the advance of totalitarianism, just as China is rising as a world power”.

The Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, has refused to say that the system of remote or home access to abortion will cease to happen after the Covid-19 crisis comes to an end.

The Minister was responding to a Parliamentary Question submitted by Independent TD for Laois Offaly Carol Nolan. Deputy Nolan asked if “the revised model of care for the termination of pregnancy which currently permits the use of telemedicine will be maintained beyond the period of the Covid-19 emergency.”

In response, Minister Donnelly said that the arrangement allowing access to abortion via telemedicine “will be reviewed” once the public health emergency is declared over.

Dr Fuller continued: “Minister Donnelly needs to issue a more explicit statement clarifying that he intends to cease the practice of telemedicine abortions, a practice that as well as ending the lives of unborn babies also potentially puts the lives of pregnant women at risk as it does not involve a face to face consultation between the woman and her doctor before the abortion.

A series of arson and vandalism attacks have been sustained by Catholic Churches and their property across the United States over the last week. The Ancient Order of the Hibernians, the United States’ oldest Irish association, has questioned the “deafening media silence” over the attacks and asked whether the media “has double standards of newsworthiness when intolerance targets Catholics.”

The latest incident was a fire that destroyed the roof of the San Gabriel Mission in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The Mission was being renovated as part of its 250-year anniversary celebrations.

In a statement the Order said the absence of national reporting was at stark variance with past coverage of similar attacks against other faiths.

“This absence of coverage is particularly glaring given that this attack is only the latest in a wave of wanton destruction targeting Catholics including the vandalism of a Catholic church in Boston, a Catholic school in New York and the ongoing investigation of a fire that destroyed the historic 249-year-old San Gabriel Mission and over the same weekend”.

“The Hibernians ask why such an outrageous attack targeting Catholics is less worthy of reporting than an attack on a house of worship of another faith or a public institution? The News Media needs to take accountability for its apathy and blatant double standard and the creation of a shameful ‘hierarchy of outrage’ in which hate targeting Catholics is not ‘newsworthy’. “

They added “We would remind National News editors of the Latin legal maximum ‘qui tacet consentire videtu’ (silence implies consent); their silence on the rising tide of anti-Catholic violence is shameful.”

A call has been made for the Government to “immediately condemn the barbaric measures being used by the Chinese Government to slash the Uighur Muslim population in China”. Aontú Leader & Meath West TD Peadar Tóibín said the campaign has been labelled a ‘demographic genocide’ by international experts.

He has circulated a letter calling on an Taoiseach to speak out on China’s policy and to lobby other nations to do so as well. This letter has received the support of several TDs and Senators from parties and independents all across the political spectrum.

In the letter, Deputy Tóibín said: “We are deeply concerned about the ‘detention camps’ to which women are being sent if they have more than the ‘permitted’ number of children”.

“News outlets are now reporting that China has subjected ‘hundreds of thousands of women’ to forced pregnancy tests, forced birth control, sterilisation and forced abortions”.

“We are deeply concerned at drone footage that shows hundreds of men and women being led blindfolded onto trains. We are very concerned at reports of men and women being detained without charge or conviction for indefinite lengths of time in “thought transformation camps”.

“We are asking the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister Coveney, to urgently intervene and make Ireland’s opposition to this torture known. We feel it would also be beneficial if the Irish government were to lobby other western and European countries to join us in condemning these practices”.

Witnesses will no longer be required to swear before God or make an affirmation when filing affidavits under proposals agreed by Cabinet .

Under the present system, witnesses must swear upon a Bible or other religious book before a solicitor or notary public that the contents of their affidavits are true.

A non-religious litigant can make an affirmation which does not mention a higher being but only after they explicitly decline to take a religious oath.

Under the proposed system, witnesses can make a non-religious “statement of truth”, without having to declare if they believe in a god or not. This will also be done remotely without having to appear before a solicitor or notary public.

Welcoming the proposal, Law Society director general Ken Murphy said the oath and affirmation system places witnesses “in a position of embarrassment and indignity” and is “contrary to the right to privacy”.

Jurors and witnesses appearing in court will still have to take an oath or affirm and newly appointed judges will still have to swear before God.

Mr Murphy said, “given the diverse nature of contemporary Ireland” it would have been better to replace the oath-based system in its entirety.

As the city of Buenos Aires inches closer to legalising abortion, the Catholic bishops of the region have released a statement on the dignity of life.

This enables abortions in cases where its not explicitly criminalised by Argentina’s penal code, including pregnancies from rape or when the life of the baby is said to threaten that of the mother.

The latter point is contentious as critics say it is loosely applied and used to justify 88 percent of the abortions in the country. For some, it includes the “physical, psychological and social” health of the mother, and ranges from actually life-threatening medical conditions to a consensual relationship between two adults coming to an end.

The bishops of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, including Cardinal Mario Poli, handpicked by Francis as his successor in leading the country’s largest archdiocese, and Bishop Gustavo Carrara, who lives in the slums of the city, released a statement titled “Life is always dignified.”

In their statement, the bishops note that the protocol “contradicts the constitutional guarantees in favor of the most unprotected life,” and added they are not against the rights of women, but they are “in favour of life as it arrives, in every circumstance”.

The HSE considered allowing nurses to give the Last Rites to patients dying from Covid-19 as emergency preparations were made for a surge in deaths, internal documents reveal.

Minutes of a meeting of the Covid-19 Mass Fatalities Expert Group show the HSE considered the move after a discussion with its Chaplaincy Council on the need to avoid contact in clinical settings.

The records, released under Freedom of Information and marked “confidential”, state that the HSE and the Chaplaincy Council discussed “the possibility of nurses to be decreed to give Last Rites in some circumstances”.

In a statement, the HSE said it “worked in close collaboration with chaplains and a range of faiths during the Covid-19 pandemic”.

Despite the issue being discussed at the high-level meeting of the Covid-19 Mass Fatalities Expert Group, “nursing staff were not trained in the practice of giving Last Rites”, it added.