Blood tests that screen for abnormalities such as Downs syndrome are being offered at maternity hospitals as early as nine weeks into a pregnancy and are being urged on pregnant women as a better alternative than amniocentesis. Prof Fergal Malone, master of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, says the blood test can be taken from the woman’s arm and it is 99.9pc accurate. A result is returned within a week. Only women who get a positive reading go on to have the diagnostic amniocentesis test for confirmation later in their pregnancy.
Prof Malone said: “Floating around in the pregnant woman’s blood are tiny amounts of the baby’s DNA. A blood sample is taken from the mother’s arm and sent to the lab and it is back in about a week.”
The test can tell the woman if her baby will have Down’s syndrome as well as other abnormalities such as Edwards Syndrome which might result in the child dying naturally before or some time after birth. The screening test costs about €350 in the Rotunda and is not yet available free on the public health system, but amniocentesis is provided without cost.
Prof Malone told the Irish Independent that the Rotunda is now doing around 2,500 screening tests annually. He said: “They are expanding the range of conditions they can test for all the time.
“I find that pregnant women who are older are now very aware of the risk of Down syndrome and they bring it up early on.”
The most senior Family Court judge in England and Wales is set to rule on a case involving a transgender ‘man’ who conceived and gave birth to a baby but is suing to not be designated as the child’s mother.
If granted, lawyers say the child would become the first person born in England or Wales to not legally have a mother.
The baby is the child of a single parent who was born a woman but now lives as a man after undergoing surgery.
Judges have heard that the man had been biologically able to get pregnant and give birth but had legally become male when the child was born.
He wants to be identified as the child’s “father” or “parent” on a birth certificate but a registrar has told him that the law requires people who give birth to be registered as mothers.
Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division of the High Court, is due to decide whether only either “father” or “parent” can be listed on the child’s birth certificate following a trial scheduled to take place at the High Court in London in February.
The man has taken legal action after complaining of discrimination.
Health Minister Simon Harris participated in a march on Saturday calling for ‘free, safe, and legal’ abortion and he told TDs to ‘get on’ with the task of legislating for abortion. About 2,000 people participated in the march but they included prominent members of the Government such as Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone, Kate O’Connell, TD, and Senator Catherine Noone.
Minister Harris told reporters that women have waited far too long already for abortion and the people of Ireland had, with the referendum result, given a very clear instruction to the Dáil and Seanad “to get on with it.” The march was about ensuring a “focus” was kept on the issue.
During the campaign itself, Referendum Commissioner, Isobel Kennedy, said people were voting simply to retain or repeal the 8th and that there were not voting on subsequent legislation.
The Health Minister also said he wanted the medical community to “step up” and engage with legislators in dealing with the matter.
However the Pro-Life Campaign, in a later press release, said Mr Harris was intending to “railroad” his abortion legislation through the Dáil.
“Minister Harris promised during the referendum campaign that there would be ‘ample time’ to debate the provisions of the abortion legislation. Like so many of the other promises Mr Harris has made, he is now reneging on that commitment,” the group said.
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.”
