One in three women cannot afford to have a baby, or another child, while a quarter will delay having children until they’ve reached certain financial or career goals. In addition, only 51pc said they would like to start a family and 20pc said they definitely do not want children.
That’s according to The Irish Examiner Women’s Health Survey of 1,078 women over 16, carried out by Ipsos B+A.
This is occurring while Ireland’s fertility rate is just 1.5, well below the replacement level of 2.1.
The survey found that a third of women feel they cannot afford to have a baby, or another child, with younger women in particular putting family plans on hold.
To the statement, “Financially I don’t feel I am in a position to have a child/another-child”, 20pc of respondents said they agree strongly; 15pc agree somewhat; 13pc neither agree nor disagree; 6pc disagree somewhat; 5pc strongly disagree; 40pc don’t-know/not-applicable.
A quarter of women surveyed will delay having children until they’ve reached certain financial or career goals. This jumps to 65pc of women aged between 18-24.
The survey also found that just under half of mums would like to have more children. Younger mums and those from less affluent backgrounds were most keen to extend their families.
Moreover, 20pc of women have difficulty getting pregnant, with half of those considering fertility treatment.
Family sizes continue to fall, with just half of mothers with a single child saying they would like to have a second. The average Irish family is now 2.29 children, reflecting falling fertility rates worldwide.
Meanwhile, a poll in the US shows those in their 20s and 30s plan to have fewer children than in the past. The desired number of children averages out at 1.8 per couple.
The future of many care homes and hospices will be in grave doubt if an assisted suicide/euthanasia bill becomes law in England and Wales, according to the local Catholic hierarchy.
The Bill which is due to be voted on in the House of Commons tomorrow enables terminally ill adults aged 18 or over the right to request medical help to kill themselves.
In a statement, the Bishops said that a right to assisted suicide “is highly likely to become a duty on care homes and hospices to facilitate it. We fear that this Bill will thereby seriously affect the provision of social care and palliative care across the country”.
They added: “Institutions whose mission has always been to provide compassionate care in sickness or old age, and to provide such care until the end of life, may have no choice, in the face of these demands, but to withdraw from the provision of such care.
“The widespread support which hospices attract from local communities will also be undermined by these demands which, in many cases, will require these institutions to act contrary to their traditional and principled foundations.
Meanwhile, new polling reveals widespread concern that introducing assisted suicide will have a negative impact on disabled people and many will die early as a result.
The House of Commons has voted 379 – 137 to remove all criminal sanctions from pregnant women who induce an abortion at any point in their pregnancy.
Pro-life advocates had fiercely opposed the move and condemned the result.
It now goes to the House of Lords where it must pass before it can become law.
New Clause 1 (NC1), proposed by Tonia Antoniazzi MP, would disapply the crimes of ‘unlawful procurement of miscarriage’ (Offences Against The Person Act 1861) and ‘child destruction’ (the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929) from women who cause their own abortion. This means that no woman could be prosecuted for aborting her own child at any stage of pregnancy, including immediately before birth, and for any reason.
A still more extreme proposal would have repealed the two crimes altogether, meaning that abortionists, whether or not medically qualified, would face no penalties for causing the death of an unborn child at any stage of pregnancy, but this was withdrawn.
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre said the change would increase the danger of coercion of women into abortion and the risk of dangerous late-term abortion without medical supervision.
Just over 40pc of children experiencing deprivation live in lone parent households, according to research by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). Raising a child alone is regularly linked with poverty partly because a maximum of one income will be coming into the household.
Its latest study found the number of children defined as deprived but not at risk of poverty has increased, with 17pc of children defined as such in 2023 compared to 12pc in 2020.
The biggest risk factor identified was lone parentage with disability following close behind:
“39% live in households where at least one person over the age of 16 has a disability, and 41% live in lone parent households”.
Regarding policy implications, the authors said the findings suggest that “efforts to address child poverty need to address the substantial risks faced by lone parents and people with disability.”
Up to 200 Christians were reportedly killed by Islamic militants in a brutal attack in the central Nigerian state of Benue on Friday night.
Details of the atrocity has been reported by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Genocide Watch, and Amnesty Nigeria.
ACN spokesperson, John Pontifex, said the militants targeted displaced families, setting fire to their buildings as they lay asleep inside and macheting any who tried to flee.
The IDP families were in buildings repurposed as temporary accommodation when the militants stormed in, shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“God is great”), before killing people at will.
Initial reports confirmed that at least 100 people died in the three-hour killing spree but later data collected by Diocese of Makurdi’s foundation for justice, development and peace (FJDP) estimated a full total of 200.
The death toll makes it the single-worst atrocity in a region where there has been a sudden upsurge in attacks amid increasing signs that a concerted militant assault is underway to force an entire community to leave the region.
UK MPs are set to vote next Tuesday on an amendment that would reinstate in-person consultations with a medical professional prior to an abortion taking place at home.
New polling shows widespread public support for the law change, with two-thirds of women supporting the move and only 4% wanting the status quo.
Additionally, only 16% of the public support a proposal that would render it no longer illegal for women to perform their own abortions for any reason, up to birth.
The amendment (NC106) has been signed by a cross-party group of over 30 MPs from six parties including former leader of the Conservative Party and cabinet minister Sir Iain Duncan Smith, former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, and former health minister Neil O’Brien.
According to Right to Life UK, this amendment “would protect women by ensuring they have an in-person consultation with a medical professional before they could take abortion pills at home. This would enable an accurate assessment, in person, of any likely health risks for a woman taking abortion pills, her gestational age and the possibility of a coerced abortion”.
The findings come from a massive new global survey of over 14,000 people by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – spanning 14 countries on five continents: four in Europe, four in Asia, three across Africa and three from the Americas.
The UNFPA used to be one of the main global organisations warning against overpopulation but now most people live in countries with below replacement level fertility and ageing populations.
More than half of respondents said financial factors such as affordable housing, childcare options and job security were things that had limited, or would limit, their ability to grow their families.
One in four said health issues were holding them back, while a fifth of respondents mentioned fears about global issues including climate change, wars and pandemics.
“Vast numbers of people are unable to create the families they want,” said Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of the UNFPA.
“The issue is lack of choice, not desire, with major consequences for individuals and societies”.
The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously held that the state of Wisconsin violated religious freedom when it denied a tax exemption to a Catholic charity after claiming that the group’s undertakings were not “primarily” religious.
The state allows organizations “operated primarily for religious purposes” to be exempt from paying into the state’s unemployment system. But the charity was denied this status because it offers its services to people of all faiths and does not focus its efforts on converting the people it serves to Catholicism.
The Catholic Charities Bureau is the social ministry arm of the Catholic diocese in the city of Superior and it provides “services to the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled, the elderly and children with special needs”. It does not discriminate on the basis of religion or require the recipients of its charity to be Catholic.
The ruling means that religious freedom doesn’t apply narrowly to the worship and evangelising aspect of churches, but also applies to their social outreach.
A lawyer from an international firm was arrested in Brussels Friday for peacefully displaying a sign that read: “Children are never born in the wrong body.”
Lois McLatchie Miller, a Senior Legal Communications Officer with ADF International, was detained alongside Canadian child protection advocate Chris Elston while surrounded by an angry mob.
Despite the pair’s peaceful conduct, police chose to arrest them rather than address the aggression of the crowd that had encircled them. The two were then transported to separate police stations where they were ordered to remove their clothes and were searched.
They were ultimately released without charge after several hours but police said the signs were going to be destroyed despite neither person being charged or convicted of any crime.
Paul Coleman, Executive Director of ADF International, said: “This is the type of authoritarianism we challenge in other parts of the world, and it’s deeply disturbing to see it here in the very heart of Europe. While we are grateful our colleague has been safely released, we are deeply concerned by her treatment at the hands of the police in Brussels.”
Many children who do not live with their fathers have little contact with them, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has found.
Researchers interviewed close to 10,000 (9,793) households with a three-year-old child as part of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) longitudinal study.
1,172 or 12pc reported the child had a non-resident parent. Contact details were provided for almost 400 (all of them fathers) and responses were obtained from 137 of them. They presented a mixed picture.
Less than half (46.7pc) of non-resident parents reported spending seven nights or less with the three-year-old in a typical month.
Of the primary resident parents who provided contact details, almost four in ten (37.2%) reported that the other parent had daily contact with the child, whilst 13.6% reported that contact occurred less often than weekly (every second week, monthly, less than monthly, or never).
Of those primary resident parents who did not provide contact details, approximately one in eight (12.7%) reported that the non-resident parent had daily contact, and 55.8% reported that the non-resident parent had contact with the child less than weekly.
