Women will be urged to seek abortions as early as possible so they fall within the 12 week time frame for unrestricted abortion and to avoid ‘less safe’ later term abortions. The instruction will be part of a communications campaign by the Department of Health and the HSE.
One of the key messages, Ministers have been told, will be “emphasising the importance of attending services early, particularly where a termination of pregnancy is being sought under section 13 of the Bill, where the termination must take place before 12 weeks of pregnancy”.
“Early attendance for services is key from a patient safety perspective,” a document given to the Cabinet on Thursday said. “All the international evidence confirms that the earlier the procedure is undertaken, the safer it is for the woman and her health.”
In order for women to obtain an abortion at their GP’s using abortion pills, they will need to attend their doctor before nine weeks of pregnancy. Between nine and 12 weeks, the women will be referred to a hospital for a surgical abortion.
A Government package aimed at forcing taxpayers to fund free abortions will cost the exchequer about €50 million a year, the Cabinet was told as it formally approved abortion legislation at its meeting yesterday. The package will include sex education and free contraception.
Minister for Health Simon Harris told his colleagues of an ongoing delay in negotiating fees with GPs, but he was hopeful of reaching agreement in the coming weeks.
Mr Harris declined to reveal the cost of providing free abortion, but The Irish Times has established that Ministers were told yesterday that the full-year cost for the GP service will be approximately €5 million.
All abortions after nine weeks of pregnancy will take place in a hospital. The full-year cost of performing abortions in acute hospitals is expected to be €7.35 million. The vast majority of abortions take place in the first three months of pregnancy and most are induced through the abortion pill. The Government is also committed to implementing recommendations from the Oireachtas committee that considered the Eighth Amendment on maternity services, which are expected to cost €26.5 million in a full year, plus €3 million in minor capital costs and €1.4 million to cover perinatal hospice services.
It also recommended a programme of sexual health promotion and crisis pregnancy prevention which costs €9.5 million annually.
A former Supreme Court judge has warned against protecting the rights of carers in the home in the constitution, claiming that it would be difficult to define and would also be contrary to the separation of powers.
Her intervention came as support groups said that the Government risked sending a message that it did not value the unpaid work of stay-at-home parents and carers if it did not create an amendment to replace article 41.2.
Catherine McGuinness said that calls to replace a constitutional reference to a woman’s place in the home with a new gender-neutral amendment could have unintended consequences and appeared to back the Government’s preferred path of simply repealing the clause and not replacing it with anything.
Authorities in India have charged a group of 271 Christians of trying to illegally convert Hindus and have shut down their place of worship. The group are being defended by the international human rights organisation, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Tehmina Arora, Director of ADF India said nobody should be persecuted because of their faith. “In Uttar Pradesh we now sadly witness the results of anti-Christian propaganda that we have had to put up with over the last few years. 271 people have been wrongly accused and put on trial. The only thing they have done wrong is to be faithful Christians,” he said.
“We should no longer stand by and watch as radical groups target Christians and other minorities for their faith. India’s Constitution protects the right to freely live out one’s faith. The right of Pastor Yadav and many others to follow the faith of their choice without fear of reprisal is clearly being violated.”
The Christians face the accusation of illegally converting hindus by spreading false information about Hinduism to persuade people to embrace Christianity. They allegedly drugged visitors with illegal medication and substances in order to induce them to convert. Moreover, the pastor has been charged with “demonic worship.”
In India, Christians, Muslims, and other religious minorities face the highest levels of discrimination. The most recent PEW Research Center report on restrictions on religion, from 2016, ranked India number one on its list of countries with high social hostility against religious groups.
The dominance of the Catholic Church in the primary school education system is “anything but healthy”, but to remove it entirely would lead to an “impoverishment” of pluralism in society, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has warned.
Dr Martin, speaking at the Diocesan Education Mass at Saint Patrick’s Campus, Dublin City University, on Tuesday, he told the assembled guests that a fair and balanced appraisal of the history of the Catholic Church should include “the story of great teachers who wished to share their own experience of Jesus, not as ideology, but as lived commitment to what is good and true and loving.”
He added that “removing the Catholic Church entirely from the realm of education would lead to an impoverishment of what pluralism means. Religion gives believers an integrated vision of life that today’s splintered society needs.”
He continued: “I am not saying that the current situation in which one Church dominates the patronage of such a large portion of Irish education should continue. . . Removing the church entirely from the world of education, however, can be in some cases the fruit of a deliberate misreading of Irish history.”
A group of doctors at a children’s hospital in Canada have written a policy on how they would implement the euthanasia of children, and seem to conclude that it could happen without parental consent.
Since Canada legalised “medical aid in dying (MAID)” as it is known in 2016, the issue of euthanasia for “mature minors” has been debated. The government has asked the Council of Canadian Academies to produce a report on this issue, as well as euthanasia for mental health issues and advance directives, by December this year.
However, a working group at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto have published an essay detailing the forming of their policy on assisted suicide in a paediatric setting – at present, just for those patients who are 18 or over, but arguing that it could apply to younger children.
The doctors consider MAID as “practically and ethically equivalent to other medical practices that result in the end of life”; in other words, that deliberately killing someone by euthanasia is morally the same as palliative care practices such as use of pain-relieving drugs or withdrawal of inappropriate interventions that sometimes result in the end of life, but are not carried out with that intention.
Furthermore, they explain that in Ontario, “young people can be and are found capable of making their own medical decisions, even when those decisions may result in their death”. If MAID is a normal medical procedure, then, they reason, children should also be considered capable to decide on euthanasia.
Pro-abortion activism will need to continue for up to five more years to ensure all women have access to completely unfettered abortion throughout the island of Ireland, the Abortion Rights Campaign has said.
Speaking at the launch of their seventh annual March for Choice, Dr Mary Favier, who is also incoming head of the Irish College of General Practitioners, said activists are worried about the “chilling” of abortion rights despite the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment. The organisers of the march say they will fight until abortion is completely available in Northern Ireland, and available in the Republic in those few circumstances not already covered by the country’s proposed permissive legislation.
Regarding the ARC’s work to repeal the eight amendment and legislate for abortion, Dr Favier said the effort to change the law accounted for only 10 per cent of the work but the fight for its proper implementation will account for 90 per cent. Asking a country like Ireland to discuss, educate and plan such a drastic change will be “a long journey.”
“We have to push the message out in the general public. We need to start again developing our stories, our narratives and we need to push, push, push,” she said. “We can’t probably stop pushing for at least two years but probably nearer five.”
The Government’s proposal to totally remove the offence of blasphemy from both the Constitution and statute law would render as protected speech even the most vile denigrations of religion, former Attorney General, Michael McDowell, has said.
Speaking in the Seanad, Senator McDowell said that repealing the blasphemy provisions of the Defamation Act will mean nobody, in any circumstances, can ever be prosecuted for publishing something offensive to religious sensibility no matter how gross or grotesque. This would, he said, declare it absolutely “open season to say or do anything in public which outrages religious sentiment.”
Mr McDowell said he thinks most people do not know this is the intention of the Government, nor would they support it even if they knew. “I do not believe that the people would be happy to see every single vestige of protection of religion from premeditated and vicious blasphemy swept away in the name of liberalism – and I speak as a liberal on that. People are entitled to have some basic standards of decency or public morality enshrined in the law with regard to the protection of religion. It is not a great expansion of freedom to tear down every barrier surrounding the sacredness to individuals of their religious beliefs”.
More than 11 million U.S. parents – or 18% – were not working outside the home in 2016, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
The stay-at-home share of U.S. parents was almost identical to what it was in 1989, but there has been a modest increase among fathers. The share of dads at home rose from 4% to 7%, while the share of moms staying at home remained largely unchanged – 27% in 2016 versus 28% about a quarter-century earlier. As a result, 17% of all stay-at-home parents in 2016 were fathers, up from 10% in 1989.
A growing share of stay-at-home fathers say they are home specifically to care for their home or family, suggesting that changing gender roles may be at play. About a quarter (24%) of stay-at-home fathers say they are home for this reason. Stay-at-home mothers remain far more likely than dads to say they are home to care for family – 78% say so.
It will be 2019 before all pregnant women are automatically offered an anomaly scan to find out if their unborn baby suffers from a serious, terminal condition. The anomaly scans were meant to be made far more widely available on time for the new abortion legislation, which is due to come into force in January so as to allow women, whose baby has been diagnosed with such a condition, to abort the baby in a clinic or hospital in this country.
Only seven of the 19 maternity hospitals provide the 20-week scan as a routine. A partial service is provided in five others, where it is clinically indicated by a doctor but there is no anomaly scanning, according to the most recent survey.
There had been a plan to hire an additional 28 ultrasonographers, who deliver the scans, this year but it will be 2019 before full access is provided, according to the HSE’s Kilian McGrane in a response to Sinn Féin spokeswoman on health Louise O’Reilly.
