Sex education that is filled with ideology can do immense harm to children, Pope Francis has warned.
Speaking on a flight from Panama on Monday, the Pope said that children should receive an education in sexual matters, but the content should be ‘objective’ and not full of political ideology, as that can ‘destroy the person’. He has previously condemned as ‘ideology’ the idea that gender is divorced from the body or that sexual identity can be constructed as a matter of personal choice, or theories that fail to recognise the sexual complementarity of male and female.
The Pope also said sex education should first be given in the home by parents, and then be supplemented by schools.
An overwhelming 97.5% of parents who carried to term a baby diagnosed in the womb with a fatal condition reported that they did not regret their decision.
That’s according to a recent article from the Journal of Clinical Ethics, entitled “‘I Would Do It All Over Again’: Cherishing Time and the Absence of Regret in Continuing a Pregnancy after a Life-Limiting Diagnosis.”
The authors of the study wrote: “Absence of regret was articulated in 97.5 percent of participants. Parents valued the baby as a part of their family and had opportunities to love, hold, meet, and cherish their child. Participants treasured the time together before and after the birth. Although emotionally difficult, parents articulated an empowering, transformative experience that lingers over time.”
Commenting on the research, Christopher Kaczor wrote that other studies have found similarly positive results, often surprising the researchers who conducted the studies.
A study from the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health found that after the birth, and at the time of the baby’s death, “parents expressed thankfulness that they were able to spend as much time with their baby as possible.”
Another study, in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, noted one “surprising finding”, namely, “that many couples felt that their baby’s birth was joyful, even if the baby was stillborn or died shortly after birth.” Moreover, no obvious pattern of parent characteristics, such as their religiosity, were associated with this response. In fact, “only 12 of the 30 parents spoke specifically about their religious faith as impacting their pregnancy experience and decisions directly.”
By contrast, says Kaczor, parents who chose abortion in those same circumstances do not show the same positive results. A meta-analysis appearing in the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing found that “Couples experienced selective termination as traumatic, regardless of the prenatal test revealing the fetal impairment or stage in pregnancy in which the termination occurred.”
Former Sinn Féin TD Peadar Tóibín has announced the name of his new political movement: Aontú.
Mr Toibin told The Irish Times “Aontú means unity and consent.” He continued: “We seek the unity of Irish people north and south and to build an Ireland for everyone – Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the tradition of the United Irishmen of 1798. We’ll seek to build an all-Ireland economy to mitigate the worst effects of Brexit, economic justice for all and to protect the right to life.”
Mr Tóibín has applied to register the political movement with electoral bodies in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Some 1,400 people have signed up to join the new party, while more than 20 local Cumainn have been formed, with six of these in the north of Ireland.
Yesterday, he also welcomed another sitting councillor to his new party. Úna D’Arcy, a Westmeath councillor, relinquished her membership of Sinn Féin one week ago and confirmed yesterday that she was signing up for Mr Toibin’s new party.
Two bomb blasts during Mass at a Catholic cathedral in the Philippines have killed at least 20 people and wounded some 80. Islamic militants have claimed responsibility for the act.
The first explosion went off inside the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and was followed by a second blast outside, which was detonated as security forces raced to the scene, officials said.
The Philippine Catholic bishops have condemned the attack as an “act of terrorism” and offered their condolences to the families of the dead and the injured.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombings. Police had initially suspected the bombings were the work of Abu Sayyaf, a militant group that has pledged allegiance to Islamic State and is notorious for its brutality.
They worry that small numbers of Islamic State-linked militants from the Middle East and southeast Asia could forge an alliance with Filipino insurgents and turn the south into a breeding ground for extremists.
A law permitting abortion up to birth has been passed and signed into law by New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo. It is intended to ensure that New York will have an extremely liberal abortion law even if Roe v Wade is restricted or overturned. If it is overturned, each State will be allowed to decide upon its own abortion law.
The new law allows abortion after 24 weeks if there is a ‘threat’ to the health of the mother, or the unborn child is considered non-viable, whereas previously late-term abortion was allowed only if the mother’s life was thought to be at risk. The law also allows health care professionals who are not doctors to carry out abortions. It also entirely decriminalised abortion so that it is no longer a criminal felony for a doctor to execute an abortion beyond the limits of the law. Writing in National Review, Alexandra De Sanctis said that, through the law, “abortion will be available to women essentially on demand up to the point of birth.”
After the law was passed, abortion rights supporters assembled at the State Houses erupted in jubilant cheers. In New York City, the spire of the One World Trade Centre Building Empire State Building was lit up in pink in celebration.
The large numbers of doctors of Islamic faith staffing hospitals around the country may prove an obstacle to Government plans for abortion procedures to be easily available in all 19 of the country’s maternity units.
Large numbers of non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs) working in maternity units outside Dublin are Muslims from abroad, according to Dr Trevor Hayes of Kilkenny’s St Luke’s Hospital, who says he had been personally told that they have serious religious qualms about performing abortion. Medical Council data, quoted in The Irish Catholic this week, confirm the high number of Muslim doctors working in the country’s hospitals.
Dr Hayes, who was named Obstetrician of the Year in 2009 and 2013 by Maternity and Infant Magazine, told the Irish Catholic newspaper that a dependence on Muslim consultants is preventing Cavan General Hospital from introducing an abortion service, and that he suspects that conscientious objections from Muslims could block abortions from taking place in 12 of the country’s 19 maternity units.
A bill to remedy the situation of children who had been given false birth certificates that did not record their adopted status was unveiled yesterday. Sponsored by Labour TD, Joan Burton, the Informal Adoption (Regulation) Bill would allow those affected to make an application to the Circuit Court to register their legal adopted status.
It happens as the Government prepares to pass a law allowing ‘parent’ to appear on birth certs where a donor egg or sperm is used to have a child.
Speaking about the adoption bill, Ms Burton said: “The information provided to register the births was false and the children were as a result given false birth certificates, as the children of the ‘adopting’ couple. This is where the illegal registration occurred.”
Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone said she is aware of the bill’s publication and promised to “take a look at it and get back to you on it”.
The bill seeks to define what happened in illegal or ‘informal’ adoptions and will allow people to apply to the Circuit Court to validate their adoption. If satisfied with the evidence presented, the court may make a declaration that the applicant is deemed to have been validly adopted, on a particular date. The Registrar of Births will cancel the false birth certificate, while the Adoption Authority will issue a valid adoption certificate.
Margaret Norton is another illegal adoptee, who was given away by a GP in Co Monaghan in the seventies. She revealed it took her eight years to track down her biological parents via a DNA test because she was given a false birth cert.
Margaret said: “(We thought) we would just check the national birth registry, but there were no records for me. My birth cert was a fraud.” Luckily, she said a DNA test connected her to a cousin.
Official statistics have shown that 12 abortions were carried out in Northern Ireland between April 1, 2017, and March 31, 2018.
The data was published Monday by Northern Ireland’s Department of Health ahead of a meeting of the Women and Equalities Committee as part of its inquiry into the abortion law in Northern Ireland.
More than 900 women travelled to England and Wales during the same period, according to Amnesty International Ireland.
Now that abortion is available in the Republic, women in the North will be able to travel south of the border to end their pregnancies.
In the North, abortion is available only where there is a risk to the life of the mother, or a risk of long-term and serious harm to the mother.
On Tuesday night, RTE’s Prime Time programme examined the “exponential growth” in the number of young people seeking to change gender, and the implications of the proposed new law allowing them to do so without their parents’ consent from age 16 on.
Psychotherapist Stella O’Malley expressed concern about the huge increase in the number of young people who say they are transgender. While she affirmed that transgender children exist, she questioned whether authorities are being too quick to accept a young person’s claim to be transgender, and thereby putting them on a medical path with lifelong consequences.
Producer Sallyanne Godson described how plans in the UK to introduce self-identification legislation for the first time sparked a bitter row between some feminists and transgender activists.
Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan has been vociferous in his support for abortion and same-sex marriage. Yet, he told the programme, “the day after the [abortion] referendum Amnesty put out a statement saying it was a great victory for pregnant people, and that got me going as it was a huge betrayal of Irish women. You don’t identify your way into having a uterus.”
Linehan said he is not happy with men who identify as women playing women’s sports, and is especially concerned that dangerous men who claim trans-women status but who haven’t had surgery can access private women’s spaces such as prisons and refuges.
Around twenty-five percent of Dutch deaths are induced by doctors, according to an analysis by the Guardian newspaper. In figures from 2017, some 1,900 Dutch people ended their lives through assisted suicide. However, the number of people who died under palliative sedation was 32,000. In theory, that should mean succumbing to their illness while cocooned from physical discomfort, but in practice it often means dying of dehydration while unconscious. Altogether, well over a quarter of all deaths in 2017 in the Netherlands were induced.
Writing in National Review, Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute explained that the palliative sedation (which eases a dying patient’s symptoms while not intentionally causing death) being practiced in the Netherlands is in effect ‘terminal sedation’.
He added that induced deaths have expanded from the terminally ill who ask for it, to the chronically ill who ask for it, to people with disabilities and the elderly who ask for it, to people with dementia, psychiatric patients with mental illness, and the infanticides of babies born with serious or terminal illnesses or disabilities, who don’t have the capacity to ask for it.
There have been joint geriatric killings of couples fearing widowhood. In 2015, Dutch statistics revealed that 431 patients were killed by doctors who never asked for euthanasia–known in the lexicon as “termination without request or consent”–with next to nothing done about it even though such unasked-for lethal acts are technically murder under the law.
