The number of same-sex marriages has dropped following an initial spike after the marriage referendum in 2015, figures from the Civil Registration Service show.
In the first year same-sex marriage was legal some 1,056 couples officially wed. This fell to 759 in 2017 and was down to 664 last year. Same-sex marriages accounted for just over 3 per cent of the 21,052 marriages registered last year. Sixty-six of the same-sex couples who got married last year had been together in civil partnerships beforehand.
Figures also show that 75 individuals applied to have their gender legally changed last year, up from 60 the previous year, but slightly less than the 77 who did so in 2017. Fifty-six people availed of the legal change in 2015, the first year of the operation of the new gender change Act which allows individuals to change their legal gender based on their own self-assessment.
A new US study has found a decreased incidence of marital infidelity among those with fewer sexual partners over their lifetime.
Among the participants, 16% of married adults had committed sexual infidelity at least once in their current marriage. However, for people who reported four or fewer lifetime sexual partners, the rate of infidelity in the current marriage dropped to 11%, while for those who had five or more sexual partners the number was nearly double (21%).
In addition, starting with their first sexual experience, 49% of those with fewer partners said their first time was with someone that they loved, compared with 37% of those with more sex partners. Similarly, 42% of those with fewer partners reported that their first time was in the context of an extended relationship. The number is just 30% for those who have had more partners.
An unborn child narrowly escaped being aborted after being incorrectly diagnosed with major foetal abnormalities because its mother sought a second opinion which disproved the original diagnosis.
Viktorija Avisane, 31, considered an abortion after getting “devastating news” late last year at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital, admitting to the Sun newspaper: “I could have killed a healthy baby.”
Both a twenty week anomaly scan, and a subsequent amniocentesis test at the Rotunda indicated major abnormalities, but on a visit to her native Latvia, another set of tests showed no such problems.
The child was born and is now seven months old and in good health.
Ms Avisane put the survival of her child down to in part Ireland’s one-time pro-life laws: “And then I started to think about abortion. Thank God abortion was not widely available in Ireland, because if there was I was going to go there. I would have killed a healthy baby.”
The Pro Life Campaign described the case as deeply disturbing, and yet unsurprising. Spokesperson Eilís Mulroy, said it “highlights the life or death prenatal genetic diagnosis lottery that unborn babies and their mothers are being subjected to under the current abortion regime.
“We need to urgently develop a national conversation around the risks associated with abortion and the limits of pre-natal diagnosis. In fact, it is a conversation that should have happened two years ago,” concluded Ms Mulroy.
A new Eurostat study on childcare in the EU finds that there is little demand for daycare services.
It reports that 62.3pc of people minding children aged under 15 do not use ‘professional childcare services at all’. Only 7pc of people minding children under 15 cite cost as a reason for not using ‘professional childcare’ and just 3pc cite none being available.
Almost no-one says a lack of daycare is why they find it hard to reconcile home and work. The main reasons are long commutes, long working hours and so on.
But 64pc of respondents have no difficulty at all in reconciling home and work.
Free contraception for women will be available from 2021, Minister for Health Simon Harris has told the Dáil. The move comes despite there being no conclusive evidence that ever more freely available contraception reduces unplanned pregnancies in the general population.
The Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution on abortion recommended the provision of free contraception and Mr Harris established the working group to examine policy, legislative and regulatory issues on access to contraception.
Mr Harris said significant progress had also been made on providing ‘free’ male contraception. “We have very significantly increased the amount of condoms being distributed. We are putting vending machines into a number of locations throughout the country and our sexual health strategy very much aligns with this, not only in terms of reducing crisis pregnancy but in terms of reducing STIs (sexually transmitted infections) which are at a worrying level in our country.”
He said legislation would be necessary and there were regulatory and policy issues that had to be dealt with “when it comes to the female side of contraception”.
The Minister for Health, Simon Harris, has issued an information sheet to GP clinics and hospitals on preparing for ‘unlawful infringements’ by pro-life people on women accessing abortion.
Mr Harris listed laws that already protect people from “behaviour that impedes access to services or causes distress.”
However, he also insisted that Gardaí put in place “local area safety plans” in case of unlawful disruptions.
Eilis Mulroy of the Pro-Life Campaign said the Minister’s correspondence makes clear he views peaceful pro-life witnessing as a significant threat to public order.
She also called the provision of ‘safety plans’ an ‘alarming development’:
“This kind of language is more appropriate to dealing with impending riots or looting or other forms of large-scale public disturbances.
“It is clear then that the Minister is perpetuating, however indirectly, a hostile perception of pro life citizens based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever.
“He is generating worrying and deeply unfair levels of personal mischaracterisation that needs to be immediately addressed.
“We are calling on Minister Harris to reconsider his inflammatory language and to become aware that this can only lead to the stoking of public resentment against pro life people that is absolutely unwarranted,” concluded Ms Mulroy.
A majority of people in the North do not support forthcoming Westminster abortion changes, according to a survey.
The poll conducted by Belfast research group LucidTalk examined 1,424 responses, weighted to represent Northern Ireland society, to a survey conducted over three days at the end of September.
The survey asked those participating: `Do you support the changes voted for at Westminster that will impose a new abortion regime in Northern Ireland?’
It found that 57 per cent of respondents said they oppose a change to the law, due to come into effect on October 21, which will introduce an even more liberal abortion regime than exists in Britain where there is one abortion for every four live births.
Dawn McAvoy, a spokeswoman for the Both Lives Matter campaign, said the message in Northern Ireland “could not be clearer”.
“The majority of people of Northern Ireland do not want these changes, no Northern Ireland MP voted in favour of the abortion amendment proposing these changes and the majority of councils in Northern Ireland have now voted against these changes,” she said.
“As the 21st October approaches, the public is realising just how bad the law imposed by Westminster is. Northern Ireland will be left without proper regulation for months putting mothers and unborn babies at risk – it is bad for both”.
More than 9,300 calls were made to the HSE’s unplanned pregnancy helpline in the first eight months of this year.
They include 244 calls from women who had passed the 12-week limit for an abortion on request with no questions asked.
When abortion services became legal on January 1, the HSE set up a support service called My Options. It provides information on continued pregnancy supports and how to access abortion.
In the first eight months of this year, there were 9,319 calls in all made to the helpline.
While nearly 6,300 people discussed pregnancies of less than 12 weeks, 244 people had passed the legal limit for an abortion.
A hundred children contacted the service in the first eight months of this year, along with 88 women over the age of 45.
A new set of abortion guidelines for medical professionals in Northern Ireland have been published.
The report lays out what will happen in the “interim” period between 21 October, when abortion will be decriminalised if Stormont is not reconvened, and 31 March 2020, when regulations to introduce a very liberal legal framework for abortion have to be brought forward.
Liam Gibson, SPUC’s Northern Ireland political officer, said: “This guidance is truly appalling. It demonstrates just how ruthless the new abortion regime being imposed on Northern Ireland is likely to be.”
Bernadette Smyth, Director of Precious Life, also strongly condemned the guidelines: “This document is not about protecting life at all – it is about ending life. It is a document of death. This guidance is truly appalling. It is evidence of just how cruel and inhumane the new abortion regime being imposed on Northern Ireland will be if Stormont is not reconvened by October 22nd.”
Huge crowds protested in Paris at the weekend against a bill that deliberately removes a father from the life of a child. The bill is aimed at reforming the law around IVF which is currently legally accessible only by infertile opposite-sex couples. The law would extend IVF to single women and female same-sex couples. Many French bishops have spoken against the bill.
Organizers of the protests said the move would weaken the family and thus society, and that it is unjust “to authorise the manufacture of children voluntarily deprived of a father.”
Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris has said that the bill “touches on the most essential foundations on which our human societies are built: filiation, the non-commercialisation of the human body, respect of all life from its conception until its natural death, the best interest of the child, a philanthropic and non-commercial medicine, a human ecology where the body is not an instrument but the place of the edification of the personality.”
