Minister for Health Simon Harris is to ask the Cabinet to approve State funding for abortion. The Minister brought the heads of the Health (Regulation of the Termination of Pregnancy) Bill to today’s Cabinet meeting, which will legalise abortion in wide-ranging circumstances. That includes abortion on demand for the first 12 weeks, where there is a risk to mental health up to 24 weeks, and where there is an emergency risk to mental health up to nine months. It will also allow the abortion, up to birth, of babies with serious disabilities if it is thought they would likely live no more then 28 days after birth.

Government sources said the Minister had been clear that cost should not be a barrier to women wanting abortions. It is understood Mr Harris is examining whether services can be provided under the Maternity and Infant Scheme. Currently, that programme allows for maternity services free of charge when provided by a family doctor and a hospital obstetrician but this could be expanded to women who want an abortion of their unborn child.

A call has been made to publish a mandated review of Ireland’s gender-changing law which is one of the most radical in the world. The law, introduced in 2015, allows individuals change their legal gender on request, and minors aged 16 and over, after a routine court process.  The law mandated that a review of its operation be conducted after two years and be delivered to the Government. That review was brought to the cabinet by the Minister for Social protection Regina Doherty yesterday. It is thought to include a recommendation that those 16 and over should no longer have to undergo a court process to change their legal gender. Even more radically, it recommends that children under 16 should also be facilitated in changing their gender and that courts should become involved in adjudicating gender-recognition applications for children only when a parent does not give consent or there is a concern about mental health.

Sinn Féin Senator Fintan Warfield has called for the report’s immediate publication. Mr Warfield said the 2015 Act was “one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in the world” with the exception of the provisions for children under 16 and those in the 16/17 age category. He hopes that legislative changes to facilitate minors changing their legal gender would happen without delay. This, he said, “will end forced outing of oneself if certain legal documents (including birth certificates) align with a person’s true gender”.

Unborn babies suffering serious disabilities who are not likely to live beyond 28 days after birth will be eligible for abortion at any stage up to birth under the abortion bill being prepared by Minister Simon Harris. The provision for abortion in the case of so-called “fatal foetal abnormality” or babies with life limiting conditions was never clearly defined prior to this. In the draft scheme of the bill, the case was described by the phrase “likely to die shortly before or after birth” where, in legal terms, “likely” represents nothing more than a greater than 50% chance. The “shortly after birth” will now be defined as any time up to 28 days.

Minister Harris will bring the Heads of the Health (Regulation of the Termination of Pregnancy) Bill to Cabinet on Tuesday, for the approval of the Government.

Legislation to enable the use of donor sperm, eggs and embryos, that was rushed into law prior to the Marriage referendum in 2015, will be corrected by another piece of legislation that is set to come before the Dail soon.

Provisions for the creation of a register to allow donor-conceived children obtain personal family information once they turn 18 and to ban anonymous gamete donation was contained in 2015 Children and Family Relationships Act. But the minister at the time did not commence enactment of parts two and three of the legislation which would have brought the measures into force immediately. “During the preparation of regulations to facilitate the commencement of parts two and three of the Act, a number of technical drafting issues came to light that required amendments to the Act of 2015 through primary legislation,” a Department of Health spokesman said. Mr Harris received Government approval last week to draft an amendment to the Bill to remedy the defect. The Minister “hopes to be in a position to introduce this legislation into the Dáil as soon as possible and commence parts two and three of the Children and Family Relationships Act in the autumn”. The department was responding to the announcement last week by international clinic Institut Marquès that it was offering women undergoing IVF in Ireland the use of anonymously donated eggs without having to travel abroad. This new bill would aim to prohibit such a practice.

A group of lesbian activists blocked the start of the Pride in London march Saturday in protest against men who identify as transgender, lesbian women.

Using a banner that read: “Transactivism erases lesbians” and another that said “Lesbian = female homosexual”, one of the activists shouted: “A man who says he’s a lesbian is a rapist”. They also distributed a flyer that said: “The trans movement is… coercing lesbians to have sex with men. We firmly condemn this vicious form of anti-lesbianism disguised as progress.”

Speaking to Gay Star News, Jan Williams from a group called Object said: “Transgenderism is conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is wrong.” She continued: “Only women can be lesbians. A man who has surgery can never be a lesbian.”

Sarah Mason, founder of Get The L Out, told GSN the group is an alliance of lesbian and feminist organisations. She said her sexuality is seen as transphobic and exclusive “just because we are women attracted to women.”

“We don’t want any kind of penis in our bedroom,” she said. “I’m really sad I have to reassert this again. It’s everywhere online – it’s everywhere in LGBTQ centres.”

There is a danger that suicide prevention may change into suicide assistance according to speakers at a symposium in Oxford this week. The Anscombe Bioethics Centre, a Catholic academic institute, held a three-day symposium on the ethics of psychiatry and mental health care this week. One of the speakers was Professor Patricia Casey, a patron of The Iona Institute.

Michael Wee, the education officer at the Centre said psychiatrists and mental health professionals are precisely the kind of persons those who are suicidal might go to for help.

“The shift to suicide assistance, by the very people whose role we customarily think of as being suicide prevention, is one that will therefore interest and, indeed, alarm many,” he said.

Earlier this year, medical professionals in the Netherlands performed euthanasia on a 29-year-old woman suffering from depression and other mental ailments, after the country widened its euthanasia laws to allow it for those with mental illnesses. Euthanasia for people who are not terminally ill, but suffering psychiatric disorders, is also legal in Belgium.

“We wanted to highlight the way that physician-assisted suicide is also a mental health issue and that the norms of suicide prevention should also apply to people to are seeking to end their lives by assisted suicide,” said David Albert Jones, the director of the centre.

A Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief has been appointed in the UK to promote international religious liberty and fight persecution. Lord Tariq Mahmood Ahmad, Minister of State for the Commonwealth and the United Nations, is the very first person to be selected for the role. Lord Ahmad “will promote the UK’s firm stance on religious tolerance abroad, helping to tackle religious discrimination in countries where minority faith groups face persecution,” the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said in a statement Wednesday.

Ahmad said he was delighted by the appointment and plans to “use the UK Government’s global network to reach across religious divides, seek the elimination of discrimination on the basis of religion or belief and bring different communities together.”

“In too many parts of the world, religious minorities are persecuted, discriminated against and treated as second class citizens. As a man of faith, I feel this very keenly,” he said in a statement.

“Freedom of Religion or Belief is a human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It must be respected. People from all faiths or none should be free to practise as they wish. This respect is key to global stability, and is in all our interests.”

Lone parents forced to take up work by changes to the One Parent Family Payment actually suffered a fall in income, a new study shows. The report, from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), finds the changes, which were introduced by former Tánaiste Joan Burton in 2011, resulted in employed lone parents who had been in receipt of the payment losing 1.9 per cent of income while their non-employed counterparts saw no change. The drop in income by those who went into paid employment was due to the cost of childcare and the low wage, part-time jobs they were working.

About 99 per cent of recipients of the payment are mothers. In Ireland, in 2016, 17.6 per cent of children lived with a single parent – just above the OECD average of 17.1 per cent. The report also said that Ireland does stand out in terms of poverty and deprivation experienced by these lone parents. “Persistent poverty . . . was 26 percentage points higher among lone parents than for other adults compared to an average gap of between five and 20 points evident in other countries. This indicates that poverty among lone parents in Ireland appears more endemic and not solely due to transient shocks such as short-term loss of employment.”

Church leaders in Nigeria have said that Christians are experiencing “pure genocide” as 6,000 people, mostly women and children, have been murdered by Fulani extremists since January.

“What is happening in Plateau state and other select states in Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately,” said the Christian Association of Nigeria in a press release last week.

The church leaders said that they are particularly worried at the widespread insecurity in the country where “wanton attacks and killings by armed Fulani herdsmen, bandits and terrorists have been taking place on a daily basis in our communities unchallenged”. Despite huge investments in the security agencies, they say the perpetrators are being deliberately allowed to go scot free.

“It is even more worrisome that these huge numbers of over 6000 deaths in 2018 alone have been recorded in various attacks, especially in the northern and middle belt states”, adding, “There is no doubt that the sole purpose of these attacks is aimed at ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and forceful ejection of the Christian natives from their ancestral land and heritage.”

The press release also pleaded with the international community, as well as the United Nations, to intervene in the Fulani attacks, fearing they might spread to other countries as well.

The latest HSE figures for births in the country’s 19 maternity units estimate 61,902 babies were born last year. This figure represents a decline of 1,844 since 2016 and a precipitous drop from a high of 75,554 in 2009. The annual birth rate stands at 12.9 per 1,000 of population, compared to 16.1 per 1,000 population in 2007.

The only two maternity units to show an increase in births were in Portlaoise Hospital and Mullingar Hospital. The largest fall in births was in Mayo, where the number of babies born last year dropped to 1,547, down from 1,650 in 2016. Even in Dublin a sharp decline was recorded with births in the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street down by 5.3pc.