Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has said a proposed new law imposing exclusion zones outside abortion facilities is not needed. In response, the Pro-Life Campaign has said Health Minister Simon Harris withdraw the proposal.
Commissioner Harris made his views known in a letter to the Health Minister that was shared at a special Oireachtas briefing yesterday (Thursday).
The Commissioner said that protests to date have not contravened the law and are peaceful, and he expressed his satisfaction with existing public order legislation.
Commenting on today’s development, Eilís Mulroy of the Pro Life Campaign said it is time now for the Government to give up on the proposed legislation: “Minister Harris should immediately scrap his undemocratic plan to introduce exclusion zone legislation. This proposed law was never about ensuring the safety of women but is about trying to suppress freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.
“People must have the right in a democracy to peacefully assemble without running the risk of being arrested or possibly even receiving a custodial sentence for simply supporting women and their unborn babies.
“The developments at this morning’s Oireachtas briefing amount to a good day for democracy, freedom of speech and common sense”, she concluded.
The United Nations has been accused of trying to assert an international right to abortion.
The charge was made in New York this week as delegates from 172 countries including Ireland gathered for a major UN General Assembly.
While most media attention focussed on climate change, there was a parallel meeting aimed at ensuring ‘universal health coverage’ for all.
And while delegates agreed upon the basic goal, some, such as Ireland’s Minister for Health, Simon Harris wanted to include sexual and reproductive rights. This has often been interpreted to include abortion.
Minster Harris said: “Ireland believes that if universal health coverage is to be genuinely universal it should and indeed it must embrace all health services including those related to sexual and reproductive health as set out in the sustainable development goals.”
He continued: “We have taken vital steps in Ireland to ensure that such services are available, are of good quality, are accessible to all women & girls throughout their lives, free of stigma, discrimination, coercion and violence. Reproductive healthcare is a basic human right and should not ever be seen as a matter of political discretion. The Irish Government’s new international development policy, A Better World, prioritises gender and equality and provides for a number of new initiatives in this area.”
On the other hand, speaking on behalf of 18 countries, including Poland, Hungary and Nigeria, Alex Azar, Health and Human Services Secretary of the United States, advised dropping that same language because it may refer to intrusive sex education and abortion, and be used to assert a universal right to abortion.
In a plea reflecting the mind of Pope Francis, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin also rejected the same language.
A transgender person who gave birth with the help of fertility treatment cannot be registered as the child’s ‘father’, the most senior family judge in England and Wales has ruled. The individual is biologically female but legally male.
In the first legal definition of a mother in English common law, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the high court’s family division, ruled on Wednesday that motherhood was about being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person who does so was considered a man or a woman in law.
Freddy McConnell, 32, went to court after a registrar insisted he be recorded as the baby’s mother on the birth certificate.
Plans by President Emmanuel Macron to permit single women and lesbian couples to use donor sperm have been attacked by the National Academy of Medicine in France because it will lead to the deliberate creation of children who will be raised without fathers.
In a report at the weekend, the Academy said the deliberate conception of a child deprived of a father constitutes a major anthropological break, which risks the psychological development of the child.
“The father figure,” it said, “remains a founding stone of the child’s personality”.
Proponents of the bill say it is unfair that some women must, at great cost, travel to Belgium or Spain to access such fertility treatment. However, Valérie Boyer, an MP for the Republican Party, said that depriving children of fathers creates inequalities. She added that the proposed new law does not take the interests of children into account.
“Until now France considered IVF not as a right but as a medical procedure to treat infertility,” Daniel Borrillo, a law professor at Paris Nanterre University, told the Financial Times on Monday. “In this new law, what counts is no longer the pathology but the desire to become a parent, be it as a heterosexual or a homosexual couple, or a single woman.”
Some of the most controversial elements have already been removed from the bill, including preimplantation diagnosis which screens embryos for serious genetic abnormalities.
Health Minister Agnes Buzyn, who supports the bill, has previously said she is opposed to widening access to preimplantation diagnosis because it marks a “clear eugenic drift” that would lead to “a society that will sort embryos”.
A pregnant woman lost her unborn child when a doctor mistakenly performed an abortion on her after medical staff mixed up her medical chart with that of another patient.
Seoul Gangseo Police Station on Monday said they arrested a gynecologist and a nurse for wrongly conducting an abortion on a six-week pregnant woman by failing to check the patient’s information before the operation.
According to investigators, the alleged victim — a Vietnamese national — who was six weeks into her pregnancy was prescribed nutritional supplements last month. When she entered the delivery room — where the hospital apparently also gave injections and conducted surgeries — neither the nurse nor the doctor checked the patient’s identity. Confusing her for the patient on the charts they were looking at, the nurse injected the patient with anesthesia after which the doctor performed the abortion.
The woman returned to the hospital the next day after experiencing bloody discharge and was told that the fetus had been aborted.
‘Do Not Resuscitate’ requests will get a stronger legal basis when a new law comes into force.
People who declare they do not want CPR, or further medical procedures as they near the end of their lives, will have firmer legal backing for their wishes when the Assisted Decision Making (Capacity) Act 2015 finally commences.
The new law, signed by President Higgins almost four years ago, continues to undergo legislative work. It was reported in the Sunday Independent that it is hoped it will be ready to commence near the end of next year.
People already have the right to make an Advance Healthcare Directive (AHD) indicating what medical treatment they do not want, in the event of them losing their capacity to make such decisions later in their lives. AHDs will be simpler to operate under the new law.
Switzerland’s highest court has ruled that parents do not have a constitutional right to provide school-aged children with private lessons at home. The verdict came after a mother in canton Basel City appealed the Federal Court, after her application to provide homeschooling for her son was rejected by the local school and cantonal justice authorities.
The court also ruled that the cantons – who are in charge of educational matters in Switzerland – could decide whether, and to what extent, homeschooling should be authorised, restricted or banned.
Figures vary but according to a recent Tages-Anzeiger newspaper reportexternal link, there are over 2,000 homeschooled children in Switzerland. And the trend is rising, experts say.
Willi Villiger, president of the Homeschool Association of Switzerland, said he was disappointed by the ruling, He had hoped that attitudes were slowly changing in Switzerland.
Villiger, himself a teacher, taught all his ten children at home with his wife. “Homeschooling allows a family to become a team, to be out and about with the children and learn, and to get on in life together,” he told SRF.
Minister Simon Harris’ rebranding of abortion exclusion zones as ‘safety access zones’ has been dismissed as ‘rhetorical game playing’ that is divisive and unhelpful.
The comments were made by the Pro-life campaign after the Minister announced a progress briefing on his plans to introduce legislation banning peaceful pro-life vigils outside centres that perform of faciliate abortions.
The briefing indicates a continued determination from the Minister to pursue his proposals despite an acknowledgement by An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, in April that the proposed new law was running into difficulties regarding ‘free speech’ and the right to ‘peacefully protest.’
Pro Life Campaign spokesperson, Maeve O’Hanlon said they entirely reject the premise that an unwillingness to support the Minister’s plans to introduce ‘Safe Access Zones’ implies an indirect support for anything resembling ‘unsafe’ access.
“The fact that the Minister’s preferred description has moved from ‘Exclusion Zones’ to ‘Safe Access Zones’ also serves to highlight the fact that an attempt is being made to present the proposed legislation in more palatable language while the substance remains essentially the same.”
Plans to appoint a State guardian for every child in Scotland have finally been scrapped. It was attacked by campaigners as a huge attack on parental rights and an unacceptable expansion of State power and intrusiveness.
The Scottish Education Minister, John Swinney, said he would repeal the legislation after an expert panel he appointed to try and salvage the plan concluded it was unworkable.
In a statement to MSPs, he said the authorities would instead use “existing voluntary schemes” to identify vulnerable children in need of support, along with further training and guidance.
But he refused an invitation to apologise to parents and teachers, whom the Tories said have endured six years of “endless bureaucracy” as the SNP tried to introduce the policy.
The SNP’s Named Persons scheme had endured withering criticism. The Law Society of Scotland said it could potentially breach European human rights laws on privacy and family life.
The Schoolhouse Home Education Association warned the legislation was “open to abuse and misinterpretation and many parents could fall foul of overzealous agents of the State or people who are just plain busybodies”.
And the Scottish Daily Express warned: “If this sinister aspect of the Bill were to be passed, the guardian could take official action if the child was not being raised in government-approved fashion.”
Pro-life students at a University in Scotland were forced to remove a stall of literature from a university freshers’ fair, in the latest episode of a long running campaign of campus censorship.
Activists had been displaying anti-abortion posters, leaflets and bookmarks, some of which featured a logo of an unborn child with the words “life is precious”, at the University of Strathclyde.
Members of the students’ union argued that the material exhibited by the Strathclyde Students for Life Society was too graphic and breached their safe-space policies.
Last year, after a protracted legal case, the university’s student association lifted a long-running ban on prolife groups affiliating with the union, which had prevented the group accessing funding. Despite that, union officials introduced a policy requiring all affiliated societies to adhere to pro-choice rules.
Catherine Deighan, 18, president of Students for Life, said that the group had no choice but to pack up and leave. “We have been entirely discriminated against and censored,” she said. “Receiving that policy was very intimidating, given that we recognised the names of those who had approved it and they are extremely hostile to our view.”
