Parents of pre-school children in 16 areas across the country are to be polled over the coming weeks on whether they want multi-denominational patrons to take over the running of their local Catholic primary schools.
The Minister for Education, Richard Bruton, announced the plan on Monday. In areas where parents express a preference for non-Catholic schools, Mr Bruton has proposed that the State lease buildings from the church and provide for “live transfers” of schools.
Minister Bruton said he hoped the Church would support his proposals. “I’m confident there’s support within the Catholic Church for this. There’s support in the community. I’m confident this process will evolve well,” he said.
The Medical Alliance for Life has asked the Minister for Health, Simon Harris, to guarantee that medical staff and doctors will not be prosecuted for refusing to facilitate abortions. The published heads of the proposed abortion bill allows GPs to not administer abortions personally to their patients, but obliges them to refer those patients to another doctor who will. A spokesperson for the Alliance, GP, Dr Andrew O’Regan, said they want the Minister “to fully respect and protect the right to conscientious objection for all healthcare professionals and to ensure that nobody can be prosecuted for refusing to facilitate abortion.”
If medical practitioners, nurses and midwives were opposed abortion, then they would be unwilling to be involved in the process and refer women on. “If someone is saying that it goes against my entire conscience and everything I am about, and goes against everything that I understand as good healthcare, then I am not going to refer it either,” he said. “The big buzz word during the campaign was ‘choice’. What about the choice of the doctors who say this isn’t what we signed up for?”
Doctors for Life, another group representing medics which campaigned for a No vote in the referendum, said it would be “a clear voice for those healthcare professionals who do not wish to use their skills against the weakest members of society, of any age.”
“We will not perform any action to deliberately end the life of any of our patients,” said the group in a message posted online after the referendum result.
Sinn Féin TD, Carol Nolan, has vowed to oppose a bill legalising abortion up to 12 weeks without restriction and up to six months on broad health grounds. Speaking to the Irish Times, Ms Nolan confirmed she would not vote in favour of Minister Simon Harris’ proposed legislation. She said: “I won’t be supporting the legislation as my position remains the same, as a pro-life TD who is strongly opposed to abortion.”
Ms Nolan is already suspended from the parliamentary party for having opposed the holding of the referendum on whether or not to repeal the Eighth Amendment. She now faces the prospect of additional disciplinary action which will be decided by the part’s Ard Comhairle.
Former Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, John Bruton, has urged people to vote ‘No’ in the upcoming referendum on the Eighth amendment.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke, Mr Bruton said he trusts the Irish people to uphold human rights and to be recognise that there are two lives involved. He said the Government was going too far to allow abortion without restriction up to 12 weeks and on the grounds of mental health up to six months. “That is the ending of a little Irish life, a little Irish boy or girl.” While Mr Bruton favours retaining the Eighth amendment in its entirety, he said the Government had other options and could have gone for a more restrictive regime. “I cannot understand why they came up with something so liberal.”
He said lives were being saved because abortion was not available in Ireland. People who might have contemplated abortion but did not have one were then happy to keep their baby when they saw it.
On the issue of pregnancy as a result of rape, Mr Bruton spoke of recovery from a trauma, and said “traumatising somebody is awful, but it’s not as final as killing somebody”.
In relation to babies with life-limiting conditions, Mr Bruton said that mistakes can be made, adding: “We should be cautious … when in doubt opt for life”.
Having a law that gives protection to the unborn in the Constitution is entirely consistent with the general philosophy of the Irish people, he said. “I want to ensure that a baby has the freedom to live, and has the freedom to make choices in its own life having been born, because a baby whose life is cut off before it’s born isn’t free to choose anything”.
A leading group of psychiatrists has said the use of the language of “healthcare” by those pressing for repeal of the 8th amendment is “fundamentally misleading.” In an open letter published on Wednesday, 26 consultant psychiatrists say the vast majority of abortions under the Government’s plan would involve healthy babies and healthy women: “This is not ‘healthcare’ but something else entirely”.
They point out that 90% of abortions will likely occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, when the law does not require any kind of health ground. After 12 weeks, the proposed law “will conform closely to the law in the UK”, where a physical or mental health ground must be offered as a justification for abortion.
“As consultant psychiatrists, it is the so-called ‘mental health’ ground that particularly concerns us because we know from official UK statistics that 97pc of the almost 200,000 abortions which occur annually in the UK, take place under the ‘mental health’ ground”. In fact, they write, these abortions are almost always for socio-economic reasons, something which the Oireachtas Committee on abortion admitted in its report published last December.
“To use ‘health’ as a justification for abortion, when the vast majority of abortions do not take place on any kind of health ground, inverts the true purpose of medicine and doctors who value their calling should have nothing to do with this. Our Minister for Health, for his part, must defend the true purpose of medicine.”
Tens of thousands of people attended the ‘Love Both’ rally in Dublin Saturday, the last of six regional rallies which took place around the country in recent weeks. According to a spokesperson, the focus of Saturday’s event was the extreme nature of the Government’s abortion proposal and the fact that a Yes vote would inevitably open the door to abortion on demand.
Speaking to the crowd in Merrion Square, Caroline Simons, legal adviser to the Love Both campaign said If the 8th Amendment is repealed, Ireland will go from being a country that protects unborn human life to one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world. “Let us be very clear, the Government’s proposal is not about abortion in ‘hard cases’, it is about introducing abortion on demand. That’s the stark, sad reality of the proposal brought forward by Health Minister Simon Harris. It is even more frightening than England’s abortion law, where 1 in every 5 babies loses his or her life to abortion”.
She continued: “Simon Harris’s proposal defines abortion as a ‘procedure intended to end the life of the foetus.’ The intent couldn’t be clearer. There is no mention in the proposal of making every reasonable effort to save the life of the baby when carrying out the procedure. The goal is to end a life, not save one. It has nothing whatsoever to do with healthcare.”
Many others addressed the crowd including doctors, parents of babies with life-limiting conditions, women who endured unexpected pregnancies and kept their babies and young people who owe their lives to the existence of the Eighth Amendment. One of those, a young Dublin student, Gavin Boyne, who was almost aborted, told the gathering: “I speak on behalf of all of those Irish men and women who are alive today because of your efforts – to make Ireland a better and more inclusive society where respect for one another starts in the womb.
“On the 6th of May, Dr Peter Boylan launched the Together for Yes national campaign – in Athlone. He described the 8th Amendment as a ‘failed experiment’, and in doing so, has personally attacked – every single person – who is alive today as a result of the 8th Amendment. I – am one of those people.
“I think people like Peter Boylan need to be very careful when they make comments like that and they need to realise the impact their words can have on people who are alive today because of the 8th amendment”.
The mother of the late Cranberries singer, Dolores O’ Riordan, has spoken out at the ‘Love Both Vote No’ rally in Dublin on Saturday where tens of thousands gathered in Merrion Square to speak up for unborn children and call for a ‘no’ vote in the upcoming abortion referendum.
Among the people talking at the rally was Eileen O’Riordan who travelled up from Limerick to attend the event. Addressing the crowd, she said: “My daughter Dolores . . . She was completely opposed to abortion. All our family will be voting no on the 25th of May.”
Dolores’ pro-life convictions were well known. Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine in 1995, she said: “I’m in no position to judge other women, you know? But, I mean, . . . It’s not good for women to go through the procedure and have something living sucked out of your bodies. It belittles women — even though some women say, ‘Oh, I don’t mind to have one.’ Every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self-esteem, smaller and smaller and smaller.”
A group of early 200 lawyers has confirmed that, if the Eighth Amendment is repealed, the Government’s planned legislation would allow abortion on request up to six months. The lawyers, including former Judge of the European Court Aindreas O’Caoimh and former Chairman of the Referendum Commission, Iarfhlaith O’Neill, dismissed any contrary interpretation as having “no rational basis.”
In a prepared statement, the group compared the legislation which the Government proposed and that which was put in place in Great Britain in 1967, and concluded that both permitted abortion on request, even where the unborn was healthy and close to the point of being able to live outside the womb. Comments made by prominent ‘Yes’ campaigners like Dr. Peter Boylan supported this analysis, the group said.
The lawyers also rejected comments by Fianna Fail leader Michael Martin which suggested the Government’s proposals were necessary to deal with the hard cases of rape, incest, and fatal foetal abnormality. “It was open to the Government to amend the article in the Constitution instead of repealing it and introduce legislation which solely addressed exceptional cases. Instead, they yielded to pressure from extremists who wanted to sweep away the rights of the unborn completely and introduce a wide-ranging right to abortion.”
One of the signatories, Venetia Taylor, BL, said that she would have voted ‘Yes’ had the proposals been limited to exceptional cases. Instead, she said, the only way to stop a “profound injustice” was to join her colleagues in urging a ‘No’ vote.
“Women deserve better than this”, she said. “Irish society deserves better than this. That is why I am voting ‘No’.”
A group of parents of children with disabilities has accused the Government of “actively colluding in the destruction of the most vulnerable” as proposed legislation to follow repeal of the Eighth Amendment would allow the abortion of children screened for disabilities. The claim was made after details emerged that screening for Downs syndrome is being carried out in Irish hospitals as early as 9 weeks gestation.
Speaking on behalf of Disability Voices for Life, spokesperson Michael O’Dowd commented, “Dr. Rhona Mahony and Dr. Peter Boylan have both openly agreed and stated that Irish babies diagnosed with Down syndrome prenatally are being aborted. This is a horrifying and deeply upsetting fact. The proposal that Simon Harris has put forward is discriminatory and regressive. Children like ours need support, and care, not the ending of their life”.
Mr.O’Dowd added, “The abortion campaigners are now being honest about how this abortion proposal discriminates against the most vulnerable. Now that the facts are out, Minister Harris should debate his abortion proposal.”
He continued: “The whole debate regarding the impact of the Abortion proposal has been characterised by misrepresentations, and downright lies. Too many people are either complicit or silent while the majority of those diagnosed with Trisomy-21 have their lives ended before they’re even born. Where are the high minded commitments to the Convention of Persons with Disabilities to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights, including that of the right to life, by all persons with disabilities? Instead we have the obscenity here in Ireland where an organisation, Inclusion Ireland, purporting to represent those people actually campaigns for a measure that will impact on them even further. A Minister for disabilities claims there is no evidence of this genocide and a Government of the people actively colludes in the destruction of the most vulnerable.”
“The only line in the sand is the Irish people who should Vote No on May 25th,” he concluded.
