Even as political deadlock prevents the operation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Mary Lou McDonald, the recently elected President of Sinn Féin, has reissued a call for same-sex marriage to be introduced in the North.
Speaking at an event at Queens University Belfast, Ms McDonald said “the rights of Irish speakers as agreed in St Andrews, the legacy mechanisms agreed in Stormont House and the right to marriage equality – available in the South and across Britain – remain” and “cannot be further delayed”.
She added: “A right delayed is a right denied. It is time to move on, to implement the agreements and to secure these rights”.
Ms McDonald issued her call as identical private members’ bills are being tabled in the House of Lords and the House of Commons this week, one by a Conservative peer Lord Hayward and the other by a Labour MP, Conor McGinn, a native of south Armagh to redefine marriage in the North of Ireland over and above the objections of political leaders in the North.
The proposal to have a GP-led system providing abortion on request up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy is “the exact opposite” of what healthcare professionals are trained to do, a new group called ‘Medical Alliance for the Eighth’ has said.
“Abortion is life-ending. It is never life-saving. This proposal is about opening the door to wide-ranging abortion and nothing more,” Dr Siobhán Crowley, a GP, told a press conference in Dublin yesterday on behalf of the organisation.
“As doctors and as healthcare professionals we believe it is wholly unacceptable and unsafe to hastily push through plans without consideration of the implications”.
She added that there is “widespread opposition and concern” within the medical profession over what the Government is proposing.
Dr Crowley said the repeal of the Eighth Amendment would “lead to abortion on demand in Ireland and to an abortion regime that is more extreme than in Britain, where one in five pregnancies end in abortion.”
Sinn Féin TD Carol Nolan has been expelled from the party for three months for opposing the party’s position on the Eighth Amendment.
Ms Nolan, a TD for Offaly-North Tipperary, voted against the bill to hold a referendum to repeal the right to life of unborn children in the Dáil on Wednesday.
She told the assembled members the recent ruling of the Supreme Court was a “wake-up call” to all in the State. “We are faced with a clear decision in the forthcoming referendum. We can chose to retain the eighth amendment, which is the only legal protection for unborn babies under which doctors in Irish hospitals protect the lives of both patients – the mother and the baby – or we can repeal the eighth amendment and face the prospect of abortion being normalised in this State,” she said.
“I believe that the deletion of 40.3.3° from the Constitution, which would remove the right to life of the unborn, would be a very regressive step, and one which we as a society will live to regret. Every child has the basic, fundamental right to life, and that right to life is non-negotiable. We should cherish and uphold this fundamental right, and we should not repeat or replicate the mistakes of England or other countries where abortion has been normalised and liberalised.”
A Court in Italy has ruled for the first time that two women should be named as the parents of a child on its birth certificate, with both specifically recognised as mothers, even though only one is naturally the mother of the child. No father is to be mentioned on the birth cert. The Court’s reasoning also raised eyebrows for claiming that not recognising both women as mothers on the certificate would “violate the fundamental rights of the child”. The lower court in Pisa that issued the ruling will now await confirmation from the Italian Constitutional Court before implementing its decree, as the judgement is contrary to legislation in this matter that expressly prohibited what the judge ruled is required by justice.
