A charge of criminal abortion has been dropped from the indictment against a man who murdered a pregnant woman as New York state no longer recognises it as a crime according to its new, extreme abortion law.
Prosecutors initially included a charge of abortion as well as murder against a man arrested Friday in his pregnant girlfriend’s killing — but rescinded it when they realised it the charge had been repealed by the legislature.
In the brutal murder, captured on CCTV, the man dragged the woman from her apartment and stabbed her in the stomach. “He’s got a knife! He’s going to kill the baby!” shouted five-months-pregnant Jennifer Irigoyen around 1 a.m. as her attacker pulled her from her third-floor Ridgewood walk-up and down the stairs to the building’s entranceway, horrified witness Maurice Roman Zereoue told The New York Post.
A neighbour said she heard a man and a woman arguing loudly and then the victim “yelling … about wanting to protect her baby.’’
Her boyfriend was subsequently arrested and charged with the killing of both mother and unborn child, but that charge has now been reduced simply to the killing of the mother.
A US federal court ruled that the University of Iowa illegally targeted student religious groups in denying them official recognition. The University had objected to the groups having an ethos requirement whereby their leaders had to be selected from those who followed their faith.
While the case concerned one Christian group in particular, during the course of discovery, it was revealed that the University had put 31 groups on probationary status and every one of them was religious in character.
The University funded many other groups which explicitly restrict or control access to leadership or membership based on categories like race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and U.S. military service. Nonetheless, the University had operated a policy that said “religious registered student organizations are not permitted to require their leaders to agree with and live by the organization’s religious beliefs.”
Ironically, the University claimed they were acting on an anti-discriminatory impulse, but the Court found them to be engaged in discrimination.
A county Louth print and design company has been ordered to pay €2,500 to a gay man for refusing to print invitations for a same-sex, civil partnership ceremony. The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) found that Beulah Print and Design discriminated against Jonathon Brennan on the grounds of sexual orientation under Section 3 of the Equal Status Act.
Beulah told the WRC that the refusal of this service was not due to Mr Brennan’s sexual orientation but was rather due to the subject matter which was contrary to their religious beliefs. They were not refusing the person, just the particular order.
They had turned down requests to print material depicting nudity before based on the same convictions. Beulah stated that they would have refused the same request if it had been made by someone with a heterosexual orientation. They had also served Mr Brennan happily for four years and would continue to do so in the future in respect of other material.
The WRC rejected their argument despite the Supreme Court in the USA and in the UK accepting the same argument in high profile cases in the last few months.
In a statement on the WRC’s finding, Beulah said that it rejected the ruling as it “simply acted in accordance with the light of our own consciences as followers of Christ”.
“For us, designing and printing invitations to such events would be the lending of our approval and even the promotion of the content and is therefore something we could never do.”
The number of women divorcing their husbands has dropped to its lowest level in a generation, new figures reveal. There were a total of 62,712 women who filed for divorce in the UK in 2017, compared with 118,401 in 1993. The number of divorces initiated by husbands fell by 15% to 38,957 over the same period, according to Office for National Statistics figures.
Overall divorce rates in Britain are at their lowest since 1973, some four years after the present law was introduced. The UK has a fault-based divorce system so that, unless a spouse can prove their marriage has broken down due to adultery, unreasonable behaviour or desertion, the only way to obtain a divorce without a spouse’s consent is to live apart for five years.
Joanne Edwards, head of family at Forsters, a London law firm, has analysed the grounds cited for divorce. She has found a “sea change in the sharing of childcare responsibilities within the home and fathers who are ever more hands-on” and this has reduced what had been a common complaint of wives, who in the past sought a divorce on the grounds of bad behaviour.
Sir Paul Coleridge, a former High Court judge and founder of the Marriage Foundation, said it was time to challenge the stereotype of men behaving badly. “When I was engaged in the justice system, wives were almost always the initiators of divorce,” he said. “That is becoming less and less true year by year. Why? The only sensible explanation is that men are behaving better and more responsibly when it comes to marriage.”
Public interest directors could be appointed to religious-owned hospitals if the Government accepts the recommendations of a review group. According to a report in the Times, Ireland edition, the review group shied away from recommending the State take over the health services of voluntary hospitals, but they did advise that changes be made to how they are funded and governed.
The group has proposed state representation on the boards of all voluntary organisations that get more than €20m a year from the exchequer, when this amounts to more than half their income.
If the proposal is adopted, it will mean public interest directors being appointed by the Health Minister to large non-HSE hospitals such as St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, the Mater hospital group, and the Mercy University Hospital in Cork.
Simon Harris, the Health Minister, is expected to seek approval for the appointments when he brings the report to cabinet in a fortnight.
The group says the state should allocate money for specific services rather than providing block grants, and recommends all faith-based voluntary organisations publicly state their services are available to everyone.
A member of ‘Be Here For Me’, a group that offers counselling to women entering abortion facilities, told members of the Oireachtas yesterday that she owes the life of her daughter to a pro-life person she met outside a Marie Stopes abortion clinic in Ealing, London.
Alina Dulgheriu was addressing a Human Dignity Group event on the Government’s plan to introduce ‘exclusion zones’ outside abortion facilities in Ireland. Deputy Carol Nolan, who chaired Wednesday’s meeting, said introducing exclusion zones in Ireland “would create a very dangerous precedent”. She said that buffer zones like the ones being proposed in Ireland do not exist throughout Europe and that “placing a bolt on every door to deny women the opportunity to access to information on alternatives to abortion is neither pro-woman nor pro-choice.”
Tom Curran, a campaigner seeking the legalisation of assisted suicide, has said that the reported numbers of Irish people going abroad for euthanasia are artificially low as people conceal their origin for fear of prosecution once the surviving members of the party return home.
Statistics from one clinic, Dignitas in Switzerland, show that nine Irish people have ended their lives there in the last 20 years whereas the figure for the UK was 415 and for France 330. Mr Curran has claimed the numbers of Irish who have gone to Dignitas for euthanasia could be “at least double” what the figures showed. He said: “I know several people who have travelled from Ireland in the last few years and who have used the UK as an address. They’re not registering that they’re from Ireland after the Gail O’Rorke case and that’s why the numbers appear so low.”
Gail O’Rorke was prosecuted in this country after she had brought a friend to Switzerland to be euthanised. She was subsequently acquitted.
Mr Curran is a member of Exit International which supports euthanasia on broad-ranging grounds and not just when a person is terminally ill.
During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, US President Donald Trump called on legislators to pass a bill prohibiting the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother’s womb.
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on scientific research showing that unborn children can begin to feel pain at that stage of development.
According to recent polling, nearly two-thirds of Americans support limiting abortion to the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, a statistic that includes majorities of both Democrats and of Republicans.
President Trump also gave a powerful witness to the humanity of unborn children and criticised individual states for bringing in extreme abortion measures. He cited the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child and contrasted it with what he called the chilling displays of lawmakers in New York who cheered with delight the passage of a late-term abortion law.
‘These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and dreams with the world’, he said.
‘Porn literacy’ should be included in a sex curriculum for school children say researchers at NUI Galway.
The findings, published in ‘The Journal of Sex Research’, are based on research by PhD student Kate Dawson. In her study, participants said that pornography is here to stay and, rather than trying to fight against it, youth should be equipped with the tools to use it to help them navigate their sexuality. Central to that would be eliminating the stigma associated with pornography and then helping students to distinguish good from bad pornography. Specifically, the study says, young people “need to be supported to develop the competence to distinguish between positive and negative models of sexual health and relationship from the pornography they watch.”
Ms Dawson said that at the forefront of the debate around the inclusion of pornography in sex education is the negative effects of pornography engagement, but she claimed that research showed few people experienced adverse effects from watching it.
Meanwhile, Dr Louise Crowley, a law lecturer at University College Cork, has developed a ‘bystander intervention programme’ for third and second-level students. The aim is to create a culture of zero tolerance around verbal and physical sexual harassment by empowering witnesses to call out unacceptable behaviour.
She says her research shows that the vast majority of students share an abhorrence of unwanted advances and abusive behaviour, and once they know that, it gives them confidence to speak up knowing they will be surrounded by like-minded people.
The number of young people in the UK who say they do not believe that life is worth living has doubled in the last decade, new research suggests.
In 2009, only 9% of 16-25-year-olds disagreed with the statement that “life is really worth living”, but that has now risen to 18%. More than a quarter also disagree that that their life has a sense of purpose, according to a YouGov survey of 2,162 people for the Prince’s Trust.
Youth happiness levels have fallen most sharply over the last decade in respect of relationships with friends and emotional health, the survey found, while satisfaction with issues like money and accommodation have remained steady.
Just under half of young people who use social media now feel more anxious about their future when they compare themselves to others on sites and apps such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. A similar amount agree that social media makes them feel “inadequate”. More than half (57%) think social media creates “overwhelming pressure” to succeed.
The gloomy view on life being taken by a growing minority of young people comes amid reports of an increased rate of teenage suicide. It was reported on Sunday that official statistics due later this year will show that suicides now occur at more than five in 100,000 teenagers in England. That contrasts with a figure of just over three in 100,000 in 2010.
