Doctors walked out of a recent Irish College of General Practioners EGM due to ‘disgust’ at the refusal to allow votes turning what should have been a genuine consultation into a mere ‘talking shop’. Regular Irish Medical Times columnist Dr Ruairi Hanley has written of his own experiences at the meeting and said the reason for the mass exodus was that members were not allowed to propose motions and vote on them, despite speaker after speaker requesting it. In effect, he said ‘democracy was suspended’.
‘The ICGP declared they were there to listen and debate. Yet in truth, an EGM without motions and without voting is a talking shop, nothing more. I also found it somewhat chilling when I listened to someone (who I don’t remember winning an election) tell us that, as paying members, we were simply not allowed to exercise basic democratic rights’, he wrote.
A small but growing minority of GPs have signed contracts with the HSE so far to provide “abortion services” from January. According to the Irish Independent, the number might run into hundreds out of the roughly 4,000 GPs in Ireland.
The compliant GPs are returning signed contracts despite the fact that clinical guidelines are still only being drafted. At the same time, GPs who returned an expression of interest in delivering the “service” are being urged to send back a signed contract by tomorrow. This would allow the HSE to send them an information pack with important details of where they would secure the drugs needed for medical abortions.
The HSE wrote to those stating: “if you could return your contractor details and acceptance form on or before Friday, December 14, it would be greatly appreciated”.
The correspondence states that this will allow “the HSE to provide you with the stock order forms for this service so that you can order the medicines from your community pharmacy of choice in advance of the commencement of the service”.
A man stole nearly €10,000 in donations after robbing two volunteers at knife-point and injuring one outside a Catholic church in Dublin yesterday.
A lone man drove into the grounds of St Aengus Parish in Tallaght yesterday morning and committed the violent robbery. It’s understood approximately €6,000 was to be donated to St Vincent de Paul and €4,000 to the church. Fr Ben Moran told the Irish Independent that the two volunteers were getting ready to transfer the money to the bank, but as they reached their car a hooded man drove up to the grounds blocking their exit. “He just casually walked up to the men while carrying a knife and said: ‘I’ll be taking that, gentlemen.'”
The volunteers resisted, but during the struggle the assailant slashed one of them in the arm. He then made off with the cash and drove away, leaving the two men in total disbelief. “It could have been a lot worse – who knows what this guy was capable of,” said Fr Moran. “The injured man ended up in hospital and needed stitches, but otherwise he’s doing fine.”
Tallaght councillor Mick Duff told the Irish Independent that he believes the man responsible must have done a significant amount of research before he carried out the robbery. “This guy definitely did his homework and must have known the routine of these two men,” he said. “This is a new low for our area. This money would have gone directly to poor and needy families – the thug that did this has literally robbed the bread from their mouths.”
The Minister for Health Simon Harris has said he is “disappointed” at comments from the Master of the Coombe Women & Infants University Hospital who warned that the hospital will not be ready to provide abortions by the planned deadline date of January 1st.
Mr Harris said in the Seanad that it is a “reality today in Ireland that some women can travel and that other women, particularly marginalised women, can’t travel. That is why I am disappointed when I hear comments like the comments from the Coombe hospital today who say they won’t be in a position to provide the services”.
The Minister then said there was a need for “clinical leadership” to “make sure that the services are in place in January.”
Independent Senator Rónán Mullen accused Mr Harris of “hustling” hospitals. “I don’t think it is good enough for the Minister to be hustling them in the language that he just did. We hear a lot these days about the need to defer to medics and medics knowing best, how we are not going to write the script for medics. But people seem to be very willing to do that when they want.”
He added: “It is entirely unfortunate to be sending out any ministerial, political message to the Coombe hospital or others. The Minister should be deferring to the medical facilitates on this one instead of hustling them on for the sake of some politically motivated time limit. That is entirely the wrong approach.”
TDs have been taken to task for refusing to mandate pain-relief for babies suffering late-term abortions. Writing in the Irish Times, Rev Dr Chris Hayden, a priest of the diocese of Ferns and editor of Intercom magazine, said a vet putting down a horse will do all in his or her power to ensure that the animal is comfortable, unstressed and pain-free. What then, he asked, “might be the problem with extending the same ‘humaneness’ to an unborn human?”
Dr Hayden said that nobody is arguing that the unborn is not sentient, or that dismemberment or poisoning do not cause it agony, so it begs the question: why not make pain-relief mandatory, in law?
The answer, he writes, “is as simple as it is sinister.”
“Give any recognition, anywhere in the legal apparatus, of the sentient nature of the unborn, and you open a door towards a recognition of humanity. Open that door, and you might open another – and another. We can’t deny the reality of an unborn creature writhing in agony inside its human mother while the abortionist’s tools take hold. This has been recorded on ultrasound. We can’t deny it, but we must not recognise it either. It is an inconvenient truth.”
The Archbishop of Dublin has voiced his support for Catholics wishing to resist the abortion law currently going through the Oireachtas.
In remarks to the Irish Times, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said, “There’s a clear Catholic teaching that if legislation is against the basic principles of faith of people that they can’t be forced to carry it out.” On the right of medical personnel to not be forced to participate in abortions, he said: “The Minister himself has recognised the place of conscientious objection. We’ll wait and see exactly what comes out as to whether the solutions the Minister presents are going to be adequate.”
Asked whether this right of Catholics not to obey laws in certain circumstances also included legislation on divorce, same-sex marriage and family planning, Archbishop said: “There’s a hierarchy of truths in Catholic teaching and the centrality of some aspects. If people have conscientious objection it’s a very important thing to remember it. For me, very often social change comes from people who stand up for their commitments.”
Minister Simon Harris has described as ‘offensive’, allegations that he made untruthful claims regarding the lack of prohibition on late-term abortions.
Speaking in the Seanad yesterday, Independent Senator Ronan Mullen said voters were repeatedly told there would be no late term abortions, and quoted Mr Harris stating in the Dáil that ‘it is important to be clear and truthful that in cases where there is foetal viability early deliver and the full range of neonatal care is the reality’.
However, Mr Mullen said, there was no provision in the legislation “requiring even a consideration of saving unborn life in an emergency situation”.
He added: “it is impossible to conclude Minister that you have been truthful now in the light of what the Bill now says”.
He also asked “what protects against abortion right up to birth on mental health grounds” and said it was “bizarre” that in situations where there is abortion on grounds of mental health that the medical practitioners does not have to be a psychiatrist.
The Minister told the Senator “we don’t need you to protect pregnancy because women do that, women are the greatest protectors of their pregnancies”. And he said it was “particularly offensive” of Mr Mullen to pick a section of the Bill linked to emergency situations when a woman was at risk of dying or of serious harm.
The Minister said the only place in the bill that allows abortion post-viability is the emergency provision. “Your efforts to say ’including mental health’ as though that’s some sort of made up thing over there is setting this country back 50 years.”
The right to life is a primary human right according to former Taoiseach, John Bruton. In a speech delivered at the Irish Catholic Doctors’ Learning Network Annual Conference in Swords, Co Dublin, last weekend, Mr Bruton said that the pro life case is that the right to life is the primary right, “because, without life, one simply cannot exercise any of the other rights. It flows from that that the primary responsibility, of the state, and of each of us as citizens, is to protect life.”
He also said the State by facilitating, and paying for, the taking of life, is abandoning one of its core functions which is to protect life.
Regarding conscientious objection, the former Taoiseach said “no person, medically qualified or otherwise, should be forced by the threat to his/her employment, or of criminal sanctions, to be involved in the ending of a human life, against his or her religious convictions.” He cited Article 44.2.1 of the Irish Constitution which, he said, “guarantees, subject to public order and morality, the ‘free…..practice of religion’”.
The Catholic Bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran, has said the Abortion Bill has no moral force and if it becomes law must be resisted. “Catholics have no obligation whatsoever to obey this law,” he told the Irish Independent.
Bishop Doran said the fundamental presupposition is that citizens should always obey a just law. “But this is an unjust law and therefore it has no moral force,” he said.
Bishop Doran said resistance should not simply be theoretical: he cited the example of the Dunnes Stores workers’ boycott of South African goods and said the tradition of “constructive resistance” was well established. He said doctors, nurses and midwives who oppose abortion should unite. “They will have to stick together because if they don’t they’ll be picked off individually. But what we would be saying is that they as a substantial body [should] simply refuse to participate or to refer.”
He called on teachers, not just Catholic teachers in Catholic schools, “but people of integrity who believe absolutely that this is a human being” to reflect their beliefs in their teaching. “They can’t just roll over and say ‘we’ll teach that it’s just a cluster of cells’ or ‘this is OK because the law says it is OK’. You would be calling on teachers to be consistent with the truth in their teaching.” He also said people working in the pharmaceutical industry may not want to be involved in making drugs used in abortions. He said if such workers were to say they didn’t want to be involved in making drugs that are designed to kill, “now that takes courage”.
Women seeking abortion in January will be left in the lurch unless doctors ‘step up’ and start executing the procedure, Minister for Health Simon Harris has warned.
He said he acknowledged some medical professionals were raising issues of genuine concern. However, he said he wanted to hear “solutions” and then for “clinical leadership to prevail”.
His comments come after warnings from obstetricians that abortion would not be ready to roll out in hospitals at the start of January. The Minister is to meet doctors’ representative organisations today, where an outline of new clinical guidelines is expected to be considered. “I will be using this opportunity to ask the stakeholders to put their shoulder to the wheel and assist the HSE in providing this much needed service. I am eager to hear their concerns, not through the airwaves or the papers, but directly and I will not shirk from my responsibility in responding appropriately. But I also want to hear solutions.”
The Sunday Business Post reported yesterday that Dublin’s three maternity hospitals were unable to guarantee they would be in a position to carry out abortions from the beginning of January.
Mr Harris said on Sunday “without a start date, women will still travel and will still take illegal pills. Any delay will affect the 12 women a day who find themselves in crisis pregnancies and only have the internet or the plane as solutions.”
