The Government’s plans to make abortion widely available has been prevented in at least three maternity hospitals or units because of conscientious objections.
According to a report in TheJournal.ie, five hospitals haven’t been able to implement abortion ‘services’ for what they termed “operational issues”, and four hospitals have had complications in relation to conscientious objection and recruitment.
The Department of Health said that individual staff shall not be obliged to carry out, or to participate in an abortion, but conscientious objection “does not extend to institutions”.
Among the hospitals or units where conscientious objections have hindered the rollout of early-pregnancy abortion services are Letterkenny University Hospital, Sligo University Hospital and Wexford General Hospital.
Various “operational challenges” are preventing the introduction of abortion in South Tipperary General Hospital, the Midlands Regional Hospital Portlaoise, University Hospital Kerry, Portiuncula University Hospital and St Luke’s General Hospital in Kilkenny.
The famous Reformation Wall in Geneva, Switzerland has been vandalised. Tourists walking through the Parc des Bastions on July 15th discovered the damage.
The monument is one of the main tourist attractions of the city in which Jean Calvin, one of the key French Protestant Reformers, developed his work after 1536. The wall, inaugurated in 1909, also honours the influence of three other famous figures of the reform: Guillaume Farel, Théodore de Bèze and John Knox.
The paint was thrown on the monument in various colours.
Police said no-one had claimed the attack. According to local website LemanBleu, the city council of Geneva will file a criminal complaint. Staff working in the park said the monument would be cleaned as soon as possible.
There have been a number of acts of vandalism against the Protestant monument in the past. According to newspaper Le Matin, in March, feminist activists wrote graffiti on the wall reading, “Where are the women?”
The number of women seeking post-abortion counselling at a sexual health clinic in Cork more than doubled last year compared with 2017, according to its annual report.
The Sexual Health Centre provided 157 sessions of post-termination counselling last year, compared with 77 in the previous year.
Some of those coming for counselling had abortions up to 20 years ago, said director of services Catherine Kennedy.
“For us there were a number of things happening last year where people really opened up a lot more about crisis pregnancies, terminations, sexual health and their concerns about all these, and to talk about them. There was obviously a lot of coverage around abortion with the referendum, people were telling their stories and talking about difficult decisions and their impact on them.
“Women and couples weren’t coming only about recent terminations, but also about terminations five, 10, 15 or 20 years ago. There was a lot of coverage of fatal foetal abnormalities. It can be a very difficult decision to have a termination in those circumstances and people came for counselling about that.”
Last Year, TDs Lisa Chambers, FF, and Kate O’Connell, FG, were both criticised for saying that abortion was a “makey-uppy” thing.
U.S. leaders called for a worldwide “grassroots” movement to fight religious persecution at a global religious freedom gathering on Tuesday.
The “iron curtain” of religious persecution must “come down now,” U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback stated on Tuesday at the opening of the State Department’s Second Annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. “Let this be the beginning of a global grassroots movement for religious freedom,” he said.
The Ministerial, held in Washington, D.C. from July 15-19, features over 1,000 religious and civil society leaders from around the world, along with over 100 foreign delegations and leaders of non-governmental organizations.
Over 20 survivors of religious persecution are also in attendance at the Ministerial, which will feature discussions of global religious persecution and on forming policies and partnerships to advance and promote religious freedom around the world.
Eighty percent of the world’s population lives in an area with religious restrictions, the State Department estimates. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday emphasized that freedom of religion is a fundamental, and public, right.
“All people must be permitted to practice their faith openly” whether at home, in public, or at a house of worship, Pompeo stated in his remarks opening the Ministerial.
Theresa May is facing a significant backlash from across the community in Northern Ireland against a vote in Westminster to redraft the abortion clause in the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill. This will remove vital legal protections, likely ushering into Northern Ireland one of the most permissive abortion laws in Europe, according to pro-life group Both lives Matter.
Baroness Nuala O’Loan and former Church of Ireland primate Archbishop Robin Eames have called on Mrs May to either scrap the Northern Ireland bill in its present form, not allowing it to complete its remaining stage and become law, or ensure that the clause is only taken forward if the people of Northern Ireland are consulted and a majority of MLAs support the introduction of any change to abortion law.
In an open letter to the British prime minister they said the move to liberalise abortion law without the support of Stormont Assembly members “treats the people of Northern Ireland with contempt”.
Over 15,000 people (as at yesterday) have added their names to the letter, including a number of other prominent leaders from across the community.
Baroness O’Loan said: “I am shocked to see that the Government has dropped their long-standing policy of neutrality on abortion and respect for devolution. In 2016 the Northern Assembly voted by a clear majority against changing the abortion law. One-hundred percent of Northern Ireland MPs who have taken their seats in Westminster voted against the amendment introduced by Stella Creasy. None of the MPs who voted for it represent constituencies in Northern Ireland.”
The final report of a UK Independent Review into persecuted Christians has been published.
Commissioned by the British Foreign Office, it has recommended that the UK government should be prepared to impose sanctions against countries that persecute Christians.
The Government should also adopt a definition of anti-Christian discrimination and persecution, similar to those applied to Islamophobia and antisemitism, the report says. British diplomats and other Foreign Office staff, both in the UK and abroad, should have mandatory training in religious literacy in order to equip them to understand the scale and significance of the issue.
The report, by Philip Mounstephen, the Anglican bishop of Truro, was commissioned by the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to examine the extent and nature of Christian persecution and assess the UK government’s response.
Hunt said he would enact all of the recommendations if he became prime minister and said he agreed with the report’s conclusion that Christians were the most persecuted religious group in the world.
Hunt said the UK must take a firmer stance on the persecution of Christians around the world. “The sense of misguided political correctness that has stopped us standing up for Christians overseas must end,” he said. “At home we all benefit from living in a tolerant, diverse society and we should not be afraid of promoting those values abroad. It is a sad fact that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in modern times. I am determined to show that we are on their side.”
An estimated one-third of the world’s population suffers from religious persecution in some form, with 80% of them being Christians, it is claimed.
A committee of inquiry has been set up by University College London to probe some of Britain’s scientific pioneers, including Marie Stopes, a big early backer of abortion, for their links with eugenics. The University is even considering if buildings, lecture theatres and libraries named after them should be re-titled.
All of the researchers being investigated were committed eugenicists who believed there were superior races of humans who should be allowed to breed more freely than those from inferior races.
A draft report of the review of Relationships and sexuality education has been published.
The report follows an extensive consultation of parents, teachers and pupils by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA).
The report calls for ‘modernising’ sex education in areas like consent and LGBT issues.
It says that while some issues will take time, there are others for which ”students cannot wait” and “schools need support now”.
The NCCA is now inviting people to comment on the draft report via an online survey on their website, or by emailing a written submission to RSEreview@ncca.ie. Feedback can be offered until Oct 25th 2019.
There is a rising phenomenon of young successful women in the US who want to become Catholic nuns.
In a piece in the left-wing Huffington Post, ‘Behold the Millennial Nuns’, writer Eve Fairbanks rhetorically asks “what on earth is going on?”.
“In 2017, 13 percent of women from age 18 to 35 who answered a Georgetown University-affiliated survey of American Catholics reported that they had considered becoming a Catholic sister. That’s more than 900,000 young women, enough to repopulate the corps of ‘women religious’ in a couple of decades, even if only a fraction of them actually go through with it.”
Fairbanks also notes, to her great surprise, that the women discerning religious life tend to be younger, more successful, and more doctrinally conservative than their predecessors.
And, despite their differences in political and religious views, she also found their reasons for choosing the strictest forms of Catholic sisterhood—profoundly relatable.
There will be a change to the way people will be asked about their religion in the next census.
The previous census, in 2016, asked: “What is your religion?” followed by a choice of faiths, with no religion as the final option.
The new wording is: “What is your religion, if any?” The first option is “no religion” followed by a list of faiths.
While no Church had called for a change, Atheist Ireland had previously called for the question to ask “whether people practise a religion” to avoid prejudicing the answer with “preprinted options”.
Michael Nugent, chairperson of Atheist Ireland, said: “It’s a step in the right direction, a slight improvement, but they’ve changed it as minimalistically as they could. Before it was a leading question, the assumption was you had a religion.”
