The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution creating an “International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief” has been established by the United Nations. The day will be observed each year on 22 August.
The move has been welcomed by groups promoting religious freedom amid recent reports by both US and UK government entities that religious persecution is globally on the rise.
Kelsey Zorzi, President of the NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief at the United Nations and Director of Advocacy for Global Religious Freedom for ADF International said nobody should be persecuted because of their faith.
“We welcome this clear statement from the United Nations that persecution on the basis of religion or belief cannot be permitted and the victims must never be forgotten”. She added that resolutions alone are not enough and urged all states to ensure that “their laws and policies are in line with their commitments to protect religious freedom under international law”.
There were just 72 domestic adoptions recorded by the Adoption Authority of Ireland last year, according to the Irish Daily Mail. By contrast, there were 190 such adoptions in 2009 which represents a drop of 60% in just nine years. The decline in adoption across the West has coincided with an increase in the number of abortions.
The Domestic Adoption Unit said the number of infants placed for adoption is now in the minority.
A frequent route to adoption these days is for children to spend time in foster care and then, after two years, to be adopted by their foster parents.
Mark Kirwan of AAI said that a ‘cultural shift’ has resulted in a significant reduction in the number of infants placed for adoption in Ireland. In 2009, there were 74,728 births, with 33% of those registered to unmarried couples. Previously, in 1980, only 5% of the 74,064 babies were born to unmarried couples while 1115 babies were adopted.
A French feminist group, the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (ICASM), asked candidates in this month’s European election candidates to support the abolition of surrogacy.
In its open letter, it says: “Surrogacy violates the rights of children and the rights of women by contributing to a society based on the use and abuse of persons, organizing a first and second class of human beings, promoting an unequal global order discriminatory between human beings.”
It demands not just more regulation for surrogacy, but its abolition.
ICASM contends that surrogacy commercialises women’s bodies, promotes the sale of children, increases inequality between women, and does not satisfy rights claims (it claims that there is no right to motherhood or to children), among other objections to legalising surrogacy.
Pope Francis said at the weekend that abortion can never be condoned, even when the unborn child is gravely sick or likely to die, and he urged doctors and priests to support families to carry such pregnancies to term.
Speaking to a Vatican-sponsored anti-abortion conference, Francis said the opposition to abortion isn’t a religious issue but a human one.
“Is it licit to throw away a life to resolve a problem?” he asked. “Is it okay to hire a hitman to resolve a problem?”
Francis denounced decisions to abort based on prenatal testing, saying a human being is “never incompatible with life.”
Even those babies destined to die at birth or soon thereafter deserve to receive medical care in the womb, Francis said, adding that their parents need to be supported so they don’t feel isolated and afraid.
While one can argue about using medical resources this way, there is value to it for the parents, he said. “Taking care of these children helps parents to grieve and not only think of it as a loss, but as a step on a path taken together,” Francis said.
The constitutional referendum on removing the time restriction on divorce from the Constitution has passed. It had 82.07 per cent support, one of the largest margins in a referendum since the vote on the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
There were 1,384,192 ballots cast in favour of the proposal, with 302,319 cast against. The total valid poll was 1,686,511, with 40,545 invalid ballots. Final turnout across the 31 constituencies was 50.89 per cent. The strongest No vote came in Monaghan, where just under one quarter of voters rejected the proposal. The referendum enjoyed strongest support in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, where 86.7 per cent of voters supported it.
The Government will now legislate to reduce the waiting time to file for a divorce from four years out of the last five, to two years out of the last three. A future Oireachtas will be free to further reduce the waiting time.
The Government’s radical abortion regime was slammed by prolife groups on the anniversary of the referendum that deleted the right to life of the unborn.
Spokesperson for the Pro Life Campaign Maeve O’Hanlon said the true nature of what the Government introduced has become starkly and unavoidably clear in the past 12 months.
“Instead of ‘Safe, Legal and Rare’ we now know that the estimated numbers of abortions will almost treble. What we have been hearing from people over the course of the last year is a deep sense of anger and regret. They feel that they have had their compassion used against them. It is time for the government to realise that the claims upon which they built their campaign for abortion have been exposed as the litany of deception that they were,” she said.
Far from being discouraged, she said the pro-life movement had witnessed an incredible resurgence among those who are committed to the advancement of genuine care for both mothers and babies.
“Today we have launched a nationwide billboard campaign to rally practical and meaningful support for mothers and babies and to encourage Government to provide positive alternatives to women in unplanned pregnancy and their families.”
She added: “We remain committed to providing a better alternative than abortion for Ireland’s women and unborn children”.
A Canadian Court has ruled that physicians can be forced by the State to facilitate procedures they find morally objectionable, including euthanasia and assisted suicide, by connecting patients with willing providers.
Three judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously upheld a lower court ruling in favour of a compulsory “effective referral” policy imposed by Ontario’s state medical regulator, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.
The Court decided the case solely on the basis of freedom of religion claims which it found “insufficient”. It did not consider an intervention of the Protection of Conscience Project about the nature of the procedures that were being objected to.
According to the Project Administrator, Sean Murphy, the judges uncritically adopted the view of the College that euthanasia and numerous other questionable procedures, such as assisted suicide, abortion, contraception, sterilization and sex change surgery, are acceptable forms of medical treatment or health care.
The appellants might yet appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The second London council to institute a controversial Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) around an abortion facility has been taken to court. The censorship zone imposed by Richmond Council around an abortion clinic in Twickenham has banned prayer, offers of support and peaceful protest outside the facility.
Laurence Wilkinson, Legal Counsel for ADF International said the order criminalises free speech and peaceful protest. It also explicitly outlaws prayer – even silent prayer – concerning abortion. While PSPOs are intended to address anti-social behaviour, he said those in both Ealing and Richmond go far beyond that and could not be considered “reasonable or proportionate – banning even a simple offer of assistance”. He added: “Richmond has ignored the evidence that hundreds of women have been provided with practical help and support by pro-life volunteers outside abortion facilities. Local councils and the police have a broad range of existing powers to deal with any unlawful behavior. If we set a precedent that councils can start censoring speech with which they disagree, there is no logical stopping point.”
Richmond’s Public Space Protection Order came in the wake of the Home Secretary’s announcement that it would be disproportionate to introduce censorship zones on a national level last September.
A local election candidate has spoken about her experience acting as a surrogate mother for friends and her relief that she didn’t feel a bond with the child following his birth.
Westmeath-based Fine Gael candidate Becky Loftus Dore, who is a mother of four, gave birth late last month to a baby boy who was conceived through donor IVF. She says, during the pregnancy, she tried to distance herself emotionally from the child she was carrying.
“To be honest, I didn’t feel any connection or bond during the pregnancy. Right from the beginning, I knew I had a job to grow it. It has no biological connection to myself or my husband. It was something that I put into the deal: I wasn’t going to donate my egg or anything like that. It was a complete donor embryo.
“Even though my head had worked out what was going on, and my family had worked out what was going on, I was waiting to see the role my natural hormones would play when I saw the baby. Would there be a connection, would there be any kind of bond? But there wasn’t, which was fantastic”.
Babies are to be called foetuses up until the moment they are born. That’s according to the style guide of the publicly funded National Public Radio (NPR) a network of over 1,000 public radio stations in the United States whose programs are sometimes re-broadcast on Newstalk.
Standards & Practices Editor Mark Memmott published a blog last week on the correct language to use in describing abortion-related news. He wrote:
‘The term “unborn” implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a “baby” or “the unborn” is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion. Use “unborn” only when referring to the title of the bill (and after President Bush signs it, the Unborn Victims of Violence Law). Or qualify the use of “unborn” by saying “what anti-abortion groups call the ‘unborn’ victims of violence.” The most neutral language to refer to the death of a fetus during a crime is “fetal homicide.”’
