Legislation on so-called “conversion therapy” that would outlaw some church ministries to people with same-sex attraction should proceed on an evidential basis.
Senator Ronan Mullen made the appeal in the Seanad on Thursday in response to a Private Members’ Bill by Sinn Fein Senator, Fintan Warfield.
Senator Mullen said “the highest value comes from what people want, provided it does not do harm”. He continued: “I do not know enough about it at this stage but if it can be demonstrated that this is harmful to people, there is a very good case to make it unlawful. If it cannot be shown to be harmful to people, we are back into the realm of individual choice.” He added that legislators “do not speak enough about the importance of an evidence base for proposals,” and recommended he and his colleagues should “look honestly at the current evidence”.
His remarks brought a critical response from an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at UCD. Doctor Mary McAuliffe told breaking news.ie that the Senator’s remarks “implies that people who are LGBT have some sort of disorder that needs to be corrected rather than people who happen to be that way. I think that is a disturbing and dangerous route to go down.”
A Fine Gael local election candidate has spoken publicly of acting as a surrogate mother for two childless friends. Surrogacy of this kind is very rare compared with commercial surrogacy, or surrogacy where a couple pay a stranger ‘living expenses’ to have a child for them.
42-year-old Becky Loftus Dore, who is standing in the Kinnegad electoral area in the local elections on May 24th, is a mother of four children, and is currently 35 weeks pregnant with a baby boy intended for a couple she is friends with.
The child was conceived in vitro. This took place in Cyprus.
She warned others about the precarious nature of surrogacy in that the child will be born with no legal connection to either of the two people who intend to raise him. Moreover, even if the law changed, she cautioned: “You don’t know whether people are going to switch or change. A woman could form a bond and say ‘no, I want to keep it’.”
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) might include a question on sexual orientation in the 2026 census.
A spokeswoman for the CSO said a question asking whether a person was heterosexual, lesbian, gay or bisexual was being tested for the first time as part of the quarterly national household survey.
“It has just been included in the household survey for quarter one 2019. It is a question that requires full testing to get it right. We’ll start to have the first results from that later in the year and they will feed into discussions about what questions will be included in the 2026 census. It wouldn’t be included until then.”
The CSO statement comes as an OECD report calls for the inclusion of questions on sexual orientation and gender identity in member states’ censuses to tackle discrimination.
The professional body for GPs has refused a demand from hundreds of its members for a second extraordinary general meeting on the provision of abortion services.
In a letter sent to these members this week, the board of the Irish College of GPs (ICGP) said it had come to a “considered decision” after “careful deliberation, including taking legal advice about the correct interpretation of the rules of the organisation”.
The letter added: “We are very aware of the criticism and anger that exists among some members. However, the college has undertaken a very extensive consultative process with its members . . . [and] The fact that over 300 GPs are providing termination of pregnancy services at this time and that over 500 have completed training is an indication that the college’s decision to provide clinical guidelines was appropriate.” There are roughly 3,000 GPs in Ireland.
GPs who had collected the requisite number of signatures to mandate that an EGM be called under the rules of the Companies Act reacted with astonishment and fury. Dr Valerie Morris of the Medico-Legal Alliance said the ICGP had no valid reason to refuse the EGM and are acting in an undemocratic way to silence the voices of its own members.
A fertility app that tracks the times of month when a woman can and cannot become pregnant has been found to be as, or more effective than artificial methods of contraception for avoiding an unplanned pregnancy. The app was developed as a means of helping women in the developing world to manage their fertility without having to resort to long-acting hormonal contraception or abortion.
Researchers from the Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) at Georgetown University Medical Center studied women’s use of the Dot app over 13 menstrual cycles, or about one year.
Their study, published in the European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Healthcare, is the first to test a fertility app using best-practice guidelines for assessing effectiveness of family planning methods.
Using historical cycle data and a woman’s period start dates, Dot’s algorithm predicts pregnancy risk for each day of her menstrual cycle, flagging days of high and low fertility. As the app “learns” about her cycle over time, it personalizes a user’s fertile window – the days of her cycle when pregnancy is likely.
The researchers found that the app had a typical-use failure rate of 5 percent and a perfect-use failure rate of 1 percent, which makes Dot comparable to family planning methods such as the Pill.
The Cabinet has approved plans for a divorce referendum to be held on Friday 24 May to coincide with the local and European elections.
Voters will be asked if they wish to remove the four-year minimum living apart period from the Constitution. This would allow a reduced term to be defined by legislation. The original proposal was to enshrine a new two-year wait in the Constitution, meaning the Oireachtas would not have the power to reduce it further.
Under the Constitution, a court can grant a dissolution of marriage if the spouses have lived apart from one another for a period of, or periods amounting to, at least four years during the previous five years. Couples can, in the meantime, legally separate.
The referendum will also ask voters if they want to change the constitutional position on foreign divorces. The referendum will propose deleting the section of the constitution that does not recognise a divorce registered outside the country. It would be replaced with a wording that would allow for a change in the law to recognise the “dissolution of a marriage granted under the civil law of another state”.
The US has strengthened its prohibition on supporting abortion in foreign countries by banning indirect routes to fund abortions or to fund abortion advocacy.
As before, the U.S. State Department will refuse to work with any foreign NGO engaged in the abortion business. Now, it will also refuse to fund foreign NGOs that give money to other foreign NGOs engaged in the international abortion industry. This will prevent foreign NGOs from channeling U.S. money to organisations that perform or promote abortion.
“We will enforce a strict prohibition on back-door funding schemes and end runs around our policy,” said Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, in announcing the strengthened policy.
“This is decent, this is right, and I’m proud to serve in an administration that protects the least amongst us.”
Pompeo’s second announcement broadens enforcement of a law which says U.S. funds can not go towards abortion lobbying — either for or against abortion.
The move comes after the Government here announced a new development aid initiative in the area of “Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights” that would both fund “services” and lobby for policy changes in developing countries. While the details of it are still being worked out, the Irish Times reported that it was “likely” the Govt would drop a previous prohibition on funding abortion to implement the new SRHR initiative.
Almost two million people marched in Argentina last Saturday in pro-life demonstrations at more than 200 locations across the country. There are proposals currently to make Argentina’s abortion law more permissive.
The participants marched to defend the unborn and to highlight solutions to mothers in crisis pregnancies.
While not having any religious or political affiliation, one message that issued from the stage was a warning to Argentine politicians: Abortion will be an issue in the upcoming presidential elections, and those who were out in the streets won’t vote for candidates who support overturning Argentina’s pro-life laws.
Buenos Aires drew the largest crowd, with more than 300,000 people marching across the capital. Aerial footage showed that at one point, the column of people was more than one mile long.
According to Carolina Brown, one of the organisers of Saturday’s rally, there was a “palpable spirit of celebration, of joy, with families rallying together, as well as an overwhelming presence of young people.”
The latter, she said, wasn’t the case last year, but “seeing that young people are the ones who will have to continue fighting, seeing them come out in numbers, joining friends, is a reason for hope.”
There has been a spate of attacks against Catholic churches in France since the start of the year. Vandals have smashed statues, knocked down tabernacles, scattered or destroyed the Eucharist and torn down crosses, sparking fears of a rise in anti-Catholic sentiment in the country.
Recently, the historic Church of St. Sulpice in Paris was set on fire just after midday mass on Sunday, Le Parisien reported, although no one was injured.
The Vienna-based Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe said there had been a 25 percent increase in attacks on Catholic churches in the first two months of the year, compared with the same time last year.
Its executive director, Ellen Fantini, told Newsweek that while in many cases the motive for the attacks was not known, France faced growing problems with anti-Christian violence, especially by anarchist and feminist groups against the church and its symbols.
Last month, the Prime Minister Edouard Phillipe met French church leaders and said in a statement: “In our secular Republic, places of worship are respected. Such acts shock me and must be unanimously condemned.”
An Iranian convert from Islam to Christianity has been denied asylum in the UK because an official rejected his claim that Christianity is a peaceful religion.
The unnamed official in the Home Office used extensive quotes from the Bible, such as “You will pursue your enemies, and they will fall by the sword before you,” from Leviticus, as evidence against the asylum seeker’s claim about Christianity.
“These examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a ‘peaceful’ religion, as opposed to Islam which contains violence, rage and revenge,” read a rejection letter made public by the Asylum seeker’s caseworker Nathan Stevens.
The same caseworker also shared that two years previously, another man’s claim to conversion was disbelieved for supposedly displaying a lack of faith in Jesus’ power to save him from political oppression.
”You affirmed in your AIR [Asylum Interview Record] that Jesus is your saviour, but then claimed that He would not be able to save you from the Iranian regime. It is therefore considered that you have no conviction in your faith and your belief in Jesus is half-hearted,” said the letter of refusal.
