The Supreme Court yesterday struck down restrictions on abortion imposed by the state of Louisiana.
The Louisiana law required abortion practitioners to have admitting privileges at a hospital no further than 30 miles from the abortion clinic. In a 5-4 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed under George W Bush, sided with liberal justices to declare the law unconstitutional. Pro-life advocates had hoped Roberts would back a pro-life law.
Roberts and the group of liberal justices said that the Louisiana law imposed similar restrictions to those of a previous law in Texas, which the Supreme Court had struck down in 2016.
“The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike. The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law,” Roberts wrote. “Under principles of stare decisis, I agree with the plurality that the determination in Whole Woman’s Health that Texas’s law imposed a substantial obstacle requires the same determination about Louisiana’s law.”
The Government has reimposed a 50 person limit on the numbers who can attend public worship, which begins again today, regardless of the size of the church.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had announced Thursday night that churches would be exempted, saying that specific protocols would be worked out to take account of the size of churches and other places of worship.
However, The Irish Catholic reported that the Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach Martin Fraser requested a meeting with Church leaders on Friday afternoon. During the course of the meeting, Mr Fraser said that the Chief Medical Office Dr Tony Holohan had reservations about the decision of the Cabinet to give an exemption for places or worship.
He said that the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) was “strongly against” making the exemption.
The hierarchy was informed that the recommendation remains that no more than 50 people should gather for Mass.
A senior bishop told the Irish Catholic newspaper that there was “frustration bordering on exasperation that the Government seems unable to be on the same page on this issue”.
“Many of our churches can hold more than a thousand people,” he said, “and yet the approach seems to be that we must return again to a limit of 50,” he said.
The holding company being established to run St Vincent’s University Hospital and co-run the new National Maternity Hospital will be bound by Irish law and not canon law, lawyers for St Vincent’s have told the Department of Health. In practice, this means it will not have a pro-life ethos.
The company, St Vincent’s Holdings CLG, is being set up as the owners of St Vincent’s, the Sisters of Charity, cease involvement with the hospital.
The constitution and articles of the new company have been approved by the Charities Regulator and the Revenue Commissioners, according to St Vincent’s, which published the documents on its website on Friday.
McCann Fitzgerald, lawyers for St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, wrote to the department late last month in response to a request for confirmation that canon law would have no impact on the holding company once incorporated.
Donal O Raghallaigh, for McCann Fitzgerald, wrote that he had reviewed the constitution of the company, which will be incorporated pursuant to the Companies Act 2014 “shortly”.
“The company and its directors will be bound by Irish law and by the provisions of the Constitution. The Constitution makes no reference to Canon Law and Canon Law shall have no impact on the company,” Mr O Raghallaigh says in the letter.
A medical expert says people are “running around” with sexually transmitted diseases because sexual health clinics are closed for testing.
Dr Jack Lambert, a consultant in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) at the Mater hospital in Dublin, said emergency cases presenting to his team represent the “tip of the iceberg”.
“My assumption, based on the emergency cases we have seen in the last three months, is that there are a lot of people running around with STIs,” he said.
“Anecdotally, I have seen people presenting with syphilis, with gonorrhoea and chlamydia and my team at the Mater hospital have seen emergency patients presenting sick with these infections, mostly men, some women”.
Dr Lambert’s comments follow the release of new figures that show sharp falls in the rate of sexually transmitted infections in the first five months of this year.
Dr Lambert said he thinks the message that STIs are down is not quite accurate because it is more likely explained by the unavailability of sexual health clinics.
Latest statistics from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre recorded that chlamydia infections reduced by 21pc, gonorrhoea by 18pc, genital herpes by 31pc and syphilis by 25pc compared with the same period last year.
Youth workers have raised concerns about an increase in young people “sexting” during the Covid-19 lockdown.
The National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) said young people were more likely to have engaged in risky online behaviour during the pandemic because of their heavy reliance on online communication with their peers.
Rachael Treanor, NYCI’s national youth health programme manager, said that online platforms were “almost the sole method of communication” in recent months and that some young people will have sent explicit images or messages and now regret it.
“As restrictions begin to ease over the coming months, and young people begin to resume youth clubs and meet friends, some will experience anxiety due to risky sexual behaviours which they may have engaged in during the Covid-19 restrictions,” she said.
Ms Treanor added that many young people were not aware of the laws surrounding sexting.
Humanist ceremonies made up 23 per cent of the 26,007 marriages in Scotland in 2019, while Christian marriages accounted for 22 per cent.
Just under half of all marriages were civil ceremonies, at 12,635. A number of humanist groups were among religious and other belief bodies that carried out weddings, with the most popular being Humanist Society Scotland at 3,276 and Independent Humanist Ceremonies at 1,270. The Church of Scotland carried out 2,225 weddings and the Roman Catholic Church 911.
There were 912 same-sex marriages and 83 civil partnerships last year, 50 involving male couples and 33 involving female couples.
Churches and places of worship will be exempt from the 50-person indoor limit, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said Thursday evening.
Under the latest plan, most gatherings are to be limited to 50 people indoors and 200 people outdoors from Monday June 29th until July 20th, but not for Mass and other religious services.
“The Cabinet agreed that we would make an exception for places of worship. However the specific protocol is going to be worked out with churches and religious bodies to allow more people to attend religious ceremonies. It will be very much policed by them.”
He said the move was to acknowledge the fact that there are some large churches that can accommodate more than 50 people with social distancing.
A US Department has returned to the definition of sex as male or female rather than “one’s internal sense of gender” as the Supreme Court has gone in the opposite direction in a different area of law.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on June 12th that it is “returning to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology”.
This means that institutions which receive federal funding can no longer be forced to provide procedures such as gender reassignment surgery.
Gregory Baylor, Senior Counsel for religious liberty group Alliance Defending Freedom, also welcomed the revision and highlighted the impact of turning away from the “objective concept of sex” in other areas such as female-only spaces and women’s sports.
He said: “Confirming the clear meaning of sex as grounded in human biology ensures that women will continue to have equal opportunities in sports, school, and work, and it protects the privacy rights of all Americans.”
On June 15th, the Supreme Court decided that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which protects employees against discrimination because of their sex is defined as including sexual orientation and gender identity. The new HHS rule regards the definition of sex under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 of Civil Rights legislation as applied to healthcare.
Labour MP Dr Rupa Huq is introducing a bill “to restrict demonstrations in the vicinity of abortion clinics; and for connected purposes.”
If it receives the support of the House, pro-abortion MPs may change tack and add a censorship zone amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill, during that Bill’s Report Stage.
If introduced, exclusion zones, sometimes called ‘censorship zones’, would effectively ban volunteers from peacefully praying and offering support to women entering abortion clinics across England and Wales.
A spokesperson for Right To Life UK, Catherine Robinson said: “By attempting to restrict where women facing unplanned pregnancies can receive compassionate emotional and practical support, the ‘pro-choice’ lobby are removing real choice for women and revealing they’re really just pro-abortion.
Divorce is one factor that can increase someone’s risk of dying early, even more than a lack of exercise, according to a study of thousands of people in the US.
Eli Puterman and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Canada, turned to data from 13,611 US adults, aged between 52 and 104, who had filled out detailed questionnaires about their lives and then had their health tracked for six years.
Individuals who had been through a divorce were 45 per cent more likely to die within the six-year period, for example. “It was surprising to see [divorce] so high up there,” says Puterman. “But at the end of the day, our negative relationships really do have a very high impact on our daily well-being and our health, and divorce has probably emerged from years of negative experiences with a spouse.”
