A Mexican pro-life group dedicated a shrine in Guadalajara last month in memory of aborted children. Called Rachel’s Grotto, it also serves as a place for reconciliation between parents and their deceased babies.

In an August 15 dedication ceremony, the archbishop emeritus of Guadalajara, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, blessed the shrine and emphasized the importance of promoting “awareness that abortion is a terrible crime that frustrates the destiny of many human beings.”

Brenda del Río, the founder and director of Los Inocentes de María (Mary’s Innocent Ones), said the main goal, “is to combat violence against children, both in the womb and in early childhood, newborns and up to two, five, six years old, when lamentably many are murdered,” some are even “thrown into sewers, onto vacant lots.”

So far the association has buried 267 preborn children, newborns and infants.

Del Rio said that the parents of aborted babies can give their child a name, handwriting it on a small piece of paper to be transcribed on a clear plastic tile placed on the walls next to the shrine.

This is intended to help grieving parents “to reconcile with their child, [and] to reconcile with God.”

Government spending on services and tax breaks for families in Ireland is below the OECD average, according to new research from Unicef, the UN body set up to promote the welfare of children worldwide.

The findings are contained in UNICEF’s latest report card research, which has been running for two decades. It uses national pre-Covid data from EU and OECD countries to compare them across several measures of childhood wellbeing and development .

Teenagers in the Netherlands were the most satisfied with life, while those in Turkey had the lowest levels of satisfaction at 53 per cent, according to the research.

A doctor of Uigher origin who fled China has given a harrowing testimony of her own participation in the communist state’s brutal repression of ethnic minorities, in particular its Uighur Muslims.

Speaking to ITV News, she says that for much of her career she worked for the Chinese government as part of what she describes as its population control plan to curtail the growth of the Uighur population.

She speaks of participating in at least 500 to 600 operations on Uighur women including forced contraception, forced abortion, forced sterilisation and forced removal of wombs.

Speaking on camera to ITV News Correspondent, Emma Murphy, she said that on at least one occasion a baby was still moving when it was discarded into the rubbish.

It follows an appeal from the Frontline Emergency Security Services Éire Forum (FESSEF), which organises the annual National Services Day, to show solidarity with people in the frontline services.

FESSEF has asked that church bells around Ireland ring out to mark the day show appreciation for frontline emergency and security services.

The theme of this year’s celebration is ‘Remembering with Dignity’ and will commemorate all who have died from Covid-19 and their grieving families, as well as all who became ill with the virus and those frontline workers who have fought it.

Christians in India are facing horrific levels of violence from Hindu radical extremists as the government advances an agenda to turn the country into a Hindu nation.

A new report by a human rights group claims that despite a four-month coronavirus lockdown, Christians in India are facing an uptick in religiously-motivated persecution.

According to Persecution Relief, the four states of Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Chhatisgarh are now the most dangerous places for Christians, where beatings, arrests, church destruction, and at times death, are regular occurrences.

“The police will be called and at times the Christian will be arrested and accused of creating communal disharmony, accused of causing problems by being a Christian,” Todd Nettleton of Voice of the Martyrs told CBN News.

“Prime Minister Modi was elected last year and he promised to make India more Hindu,” Nettleton said. “They believe that India is a Hindu nation, literally the soil is Hindu soil, and if you want to live there you should be a Hindu.”

For more than seven decades, India has been held together by its secular constitution, rich culture, and pluralistic values.

Now, human rights groups say all that is under threat as Modi and his political party pursue an aggressive and deadly agenda of trying to turn India into a Hindu nation.

A naturalized American citizen and pastor’s son has been charged with “inciting secession” and “colluding with foreign powers” under Hong Kong’s new national security law.

Samuel Chu is a pro-democracy activist and managing director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, based in Washington DC.

A warrant for the arrest of the activist, who is now in Los Angeles, has been issued by Hong Kong police, NBC News reports.

Writing in the New York Times, Chu warned that no one was beyond the law’s reach.

“It doesn’t matter that I’ve been an American citizen for 25 years — having left Hong Kong in 1990 to live in the United States,” he said.

“Nobody is beyond the law’s reach, not me in the United States, and certainly not the estimated 85,000 Americans living and working in Hong Kong itself,” he warned.

A leading Catholic voice has called on Pope Francis to speak out against China’s brutal suppression of its Uigher Muslim minority, and its authoritarian crackdown on Hong Kong.

Writing in the Washington Post, George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that in the past, under Pope John Paul II, the Holy See was uncompromising in defense of fundamental human rights.

Two years ago, the Holy See signed an accord with China, but the situation of believers seems to have deteriorated rather than improved. State efforts to ‘Sinicize’ religious communities have intensified, with Catholic and other churches now compelled to teach the thought of Xi Jinping. Church buildings continue to be stripped of external religious symbols. Catholic schools in Hong Kong have been ‘advised’ to extol the virtues of the new national security law Beijing recently imposed on the city. “Even more gravely, a horrific persecution of more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs is being conducted in Xinjiang, using concentration camps, forced sterilizations and other terrors that reek of Nazi practice.”

As the Chinese-Vatican accord is up for renewal, Weigel says the Holy See negotiators should press their Chinese interlocutors on Hong Kong, the genocide of the Uighurs, the persecution of Protestant house-church Christians and Falun Gong devotees, and the continuing assault on Tibetan Buddhists.

More than 13,500 abortions were carried out last year in Scotland, according to Public Health Scotland figures.

It is the second highest total on record and the most abortions since 2008.

More than half of the 13,583 procedures involved mothers in their twenties.

Scotland’s abortion rate also saw a significant increase, with 13.2 per thousand women aged 15 to 44 aborting their unborn children. This is up from 11.4 per thousand five years ago.

The figures remain higher in England and Wales, at 18.6 per 1000 in the same age group.

Public Health Scotland also revealed that 581 of the abortions were for women over 40, a record number for this age group.

Andrew Mitchell, MP for Sutton Coldfield and the newly appointed co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for choice at the end of life, said he believes a law legalising euthanasia could be passed before the end of the current parliament in 2024.

However, Lord Alton, a long-time pro-life advocate, disagrees.

“Too often statements like these are not predictions but indicative of a determination to make the wish father to the deed,” Lord Alton told The Catholic Universe.

“The proponents of euthanasia drip, drip, drip the thought that changing the law to permit lawful killing is inevitable. But what is it they want to make lawful?

“They argue that euthanasia should be allowed in limited circumstances to alleviate pain when someone is dying.

“But we all know this is a monumental deceit,” Lord Alton said.

CervicalCheck campaigner Vicky Phelan said wants a law enabling people with terminal illnesses to die by assisted suicide.

In an interview with Virgin Media One aired on Monday, Ms Phelan said she feels people who are terminally ill should have a choice in deciding how and when they should die.

“I’d actually had a phone call from Gino Keny, a TD who was bringing this bill forward again. It was brought forward in 2015. And then it didn’t go through like a lot of things. And he had asked me would I help him support it.

“I said , ‘Absolutely.’ I have huge invested interest in this, I think people should have a choice. Because unfortunately, in my position, I wouldn’t be able to get on the plane now and go to Switzerland or Oregon because I wouldn’t get there because I’m known at this stage,” she said.

“And as well as that, I wouldn’t like to do that. Because I want to die at home in my own country. I don’t want to have to go somewhere else and have my poor family travel over and then travel back with a coffin.”

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/i-want-to-die-at-home-in-my-own-country-vicky-phelan-on-assisted-suicide-ruth-morrisseys-passing-and-spending-time-with-her-children-39493634.html