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.
There is a ‘very real danger’ that the expression of Catholic beliefs could become a hate crime amid a ‘present culture of heightened sensitivity,’ the Catholic Church in Scotland has warned.
The comments come in the Church’s official submission to a Scottish Government consultation on proposed hate crime legislation.
In its response, the Church argued for upholding the fundamental right to freedom of expression, as “suppressing this freedom will create divisions and foster grievances across society.”
They continued: “There is a climate of heightened sensitivity in the present culture and there is a very real danger that expressing or even holding individual or collective opinions or beliefs will become a hate crime. . . . As an example, it said that ‘some people might suggest that expressing the Catholic Church’s position on marriage or human sexuality could be an attempt to stir up hatred.’”
They added: “This would obviously be wrong. There must be room for robust debate and exchange of views. Otherwise we become an intolerant, illiberal society.”
A world-renowned theoretical physicist has criticised atheism as an unscientific, dogmatic declaration. Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, was speaking after winning the 2019 Templeton Prize.
In an interview with Scientific American he said that atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method as it is merely a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. Science, however, proceeds by way of a hypothesis and then evidence for or against it.
An agnostic might say he has no evidence for God but, “on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. ‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ and all that,” he told the magazine.
Gleiser also expressed his belief in Science’s need for humility, and for scientists to be ‘honest’ in the claims they make.
He rejects the notion that science alone can lead to ultimate truths about the nature of reality.
He often describes science as an “engagement with the mysterious,” inseparable from humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Gleiser’s writings propose that modern science has brought humankind back to the metaphorical center of creation – his doctrine of “humancentrism” — by revealing the improbable uniqueness of our planet, and the exceptional rarity of humans as intelligent beings capable of understanding the importance of being alive.
A pro-life student society in Scotland has won a protracted legal battle for official recognition.
“Glasgow Students for Life” was granted affiliation by Glasgow University Students’ Union following a legal challenge to a previous decision to deny the group membership.
The pro-life students argued that the initial denial violated the UK Equality Act of 2010 and contravened the free debate of contrasting ideas.
“Freedom of speech is the foundation of every free and democratic society. Of all places, a university is where students should be free to debate and explore ideas, even those with which we may disagree. It simply does not work when a students’ body ‘picks sides’ and censors the one with which it disagrees. It is sad that it took the prospect of legal proceedings for the Representative Council to recognize this. We congratulate the ‘Glasgow Students for Life’ on their new affiliation,” said Laurence Wilkinson, Legal Counsel for ADF International in London.
