The EU Competition Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has taken a strong position in favour of abortion ahead of the planned Irish referendum on the issue.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, Ms Vestager said: “It is never a thing that comes easy, but it gives you a right to your own body as a woman, to which you are otherwise deprived”. She added that it was “very important people can make their own decision within the family, when [they] want to have children”. In her native Denmark, abortion is available for any reason up to 12 weeks and thereafter for certain reasons and is paid for by the Government. “We think about it as a way to make sure that you are having children when you want to have children, and not when they come in a way when you haven’t chosen it yourself,” she said. Denying that the law harms the social fabric of the country, she said: “We find that the social fabric is made by taking responsibility for the choices you make; not denying people the right to free abortion, but affording them it with caution and the seriousness that people put into that decision”.
A new Penal Code in Bolivia bans religious evangelisation aimed at recruiting new members of faith communities. Religious organisations are classed with terrorist groups in the new law with both threatened with jail time of five to 12 years for attempting to recruit new members.
Specifically, Article 88.11 reads: “Whoever recruits, transports, deprives of freedom or hosts people with the aim of recruiting them to take part in armed conflicts or religious or worship organisations will be penalised 5 to 12 years of imprisonment”. Christian groups in Bolivia fear that a rigorous application of the Penal Code could ban preaching in the streets or even the act of inviting someone to a Christian event.
Several pastors gathered outside the Bolivian national parliament in La Paz to pray for religious freedom. “Will they denounce us if we bring a group of people to a Christian camp? Will I no longer be able to preach the Gospel on the streets?”, pastor Miguel Machaca Monroy, President of the coalition of evangelical churches in the capital city asked.
The National Association of Evangelicals in Bolivia also criticised the new Penal Code. “It is deplorable that Bolivia becomes the first Latin American country to persecute the rights of freedom of conscience and of religion, which are protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the declaration of San José de Costa Rica, and our Constitution”.
The Supreme Court has agreed to urgently hear the State’s appeal against a High Court finding that the unborn is a “child” with a significant set of rights beyond the right to life recognised by the pro-life amendment. Lawyers for the State told the Chief Justice on Thursday morning they wanted an “extremely early” hearing date because the prospect of an abortion referendum in late May had been raised. Mary O’Toole SC said her side is very anxious the appeal is heard and decided as soon as possible.
The Chief Justice, Mr Justice Frank Clarke, said the courts would likewise be anxious to not have the appeal heard in the middle of the referendum campaign on the Eighth amendment. Because of this, the court would hear the case at the earliest possible date, probably around February 22nd or 23rd.
The Chief Justice was appointed to his position only last summer and this would be the first major case involving the unborn that he would preside over as the Chief Justice. At the time of his elevation, the Irish Times correspondent, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, described him as a “socially liberal” judge with a radical edge who may be willing to take the Court into a new era of judicial activism.
A recent study has shown that 18 months after a new law was enacted in Quebec, conscientious objections by doctors against providing euthanasia were far more frequent than anticipated. Prior to the law, only 28% said they would never participate, but afterwards, 77% of the physicians refused to actively participate, all of them using the conscientious objection clause, even though the study claimed the majority (72%) were in favor of the law with only 13% of the doctors neutral or ambivalent.
The most common reason given for refusal was “too much of an emotional burden to bear, followed by a perception of lack of clinical expertise, and a fear of being stigmatised by peers or by people in general for participating.” Other reasons included not adding to an “already heavy clinical burden”, being “a very time-consuming process” and “medical legal concerns”. According to Nancy Valko, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Pro Life Nurses, “the seemingly obvious takeaway from these surprising refusals is that participating in the killing of patients is much harder in reality than approving gauzy claims of just relieving suffering”.
A further study of the reasons doctors were objecting concluded that legal “conscientious objection” is mostly being used for “reasons other than moral or religious grounds” and therefore do not meet the classic definition of conscientious objection. The also expressed concern of a “looming crisis” of delays in access to euthanasia “services”. The authors suggested that conscientious rights of physicians might have to be circumscribed or curtailed. Ms Valko commented: “It is ironic how deliberate death decisions defended on the basis of ‘choice’ can easily become ‘no choice’ for those health care professionals dedicated to really caring for patients instead of killing them”.
The Colorado Supreme Court is hearing a custody dispute over which spouse of a divorcing couple may gain custody of their frozen embryos. One parent is claiming the embryos so he can destroy them, the other, so she can bring one or more of them to birth. Unusually, they are both using arguments grounded in the US Constitution so the case may yet go to the US Supreme Court, creating a precedent that involves both the personhood of embryos and a test of Roe v Wade.
Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen said the central issue focuses on how to balance one person’s constitutional right to procreate with another’s countervailing constitutional right to not procreate. The question parallels similar arguments used in the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 abortion decision in Roe v. Wade. If women have the right to not be forced to be a gestational parent, do men have the right not to be forced to be a genetic parent?
Absolutely says the husband, Drake Rooks, whereas his wife, Mandy Rooks, flips the argument and comes to the opposite conclusion. “No one,” she said in an emailed statement, “has the right to tell me that I have to kill my offspring.”
According to attorney Katayoun Donnelly, Drake Rooks “is saying he has a constitutional right not to be a parent, but he forgets it is past the point of conception”. A woman who wanted a man to donate his sperm would have no legal right to force that, she noted. By contrast, “he has already agreed to use his sperm with the eggs. So we are in this unknown territory.”
The husband’s attorney, James Giese, argues that the current case rests on a person’s constitutional right to privacy and to not have the state unduly influence whether someone should have children.
The Thomas More Society, writing in support of Mandy, has asserted the “personhood” of the embryos and their rights, saying that what is actually at stake is the termination of a human life or the continuation of that life.
The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has expressed scepticism as to whether a proposal to allow abortion for any reason up to 12 weeks would meet public support. This was one of the recommendations of Oireachtas abortion committee. “I think it’s fair to say that… the proposal to allow for the termination of pregnancies up to 12 weeks went further than many people may have anticipated” Mr Varadkar told journalists after yesterday’s cabinet meeting. “There is a concern understandably among many politicians that perhaps for the majority of the public that proposal might go one step too far.” He refused to state his own preference.
Some Ministers, such as Paschal Donohoe and Michael Ring, said they agreed with the proposed 12 week unrestricted abortion licence but expressed doubt that such a regime would be accepted by the people. Chief Whip Joe McHugh said he would be opposed to the proposal. Nonetheless, the Dept of Health will continue to prepare legislation along the lines of the committee recommendations and no other legislative proposals on abortion are being prepared. Minister for Health Simon Harris told the Cabinet he expected to be in a position within three or four weeks to seek their formal agreement to hold a pre-summer referendum.
The Dáil will debate the Committee’s report for three days next week, which will be preceded by a special meeting of the Fine Gael parliamentary party next Monday.
Professor Simon Fishel, a pioneer of IVF and founder of CARE Fertility in Britain, said: “It’s very important to have regulation. It takes away the ambiguity about what doctors and scientists can do. It creates a social acceptance. Even though there might always be a group who are against it they will have less of a voice because regulation has decreed, through intellectual deliberations, what is right and what is wrong.”
Regarding costs—each attempt at IVF costs up to €5,000—unlike Britain, the treatment is not available to public patients in Ireland. “It does mean poor people can’t have it,” says Prof Fishel. “It’s heartbreaking. That’s why public funding is so critical. Not only is it helping the individual but it’s helping society. Those children will contribute. Society needs them.”
Asked about future trends, he said “fertility preservation” would grow. With increasing pressure on women to work into their late 30s before having children, the professor recommended women freeze their eggs sometime between age 26 and 30. It costs about €4,500 to freeze eggs in this country and he said it should be funded from the public purse. This was “justified”, because of the value children bring to society: “I think if a society looks at how valuable children are, people should be assisted and helped to have them. Society needs them. Let’s welcome them into the world.”
In 2004, the Times of London named Prof Fishel as one of a few doctors who “have made fortunes from the fertility ‘industry’”. It reported at the time that his Centres for Assisted Reproduction, which he founded with two other doctors, was worth at least £20m. In 2012, the group was sold for £60m (€75m).
Speaking on Premier radio, he said: “The bottom line is, of course, I did [feel pressured] and there are things – including that – that I said that I regret”. He expressed frustration that the media wanted to talk only about his Christian beliefs and whether he thought homosexual sex is sinful. “Foolishly and wrongly, [I] attempted to push it away by giving an answer that, frankly, was not right.”
Intense scrutiny over Tim Farron’s stance on homosexuality first ignited in July 2015 when he was repeatedly quizzed during an interview with Channel 4’s Cathy Newman. After his views on the issue drew renewed attention from journalists in the weeks prior to the 2017 General Election, Tim Farron told the BBC he did not believe gay sex was a sin. Less than two months later, Tim Farron resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats, saying he felt “torn” between his faith and job; he also admitted failings in his handling of the interest in him. At the time, he said: “A better, wiser person than me may have been able to deal with this more successfully, to have remained faithful to Christ while leading a political party in the current environment.”
Tim Farron also told the radio interviewers of feeling “isolated” during the controversy. “I know that others were praying for me but there is a sense in which I was isolated. I had a wonderful team around me at HQ but with one exception, there were no Christians; it was not their fault they didn’t understand the issue,” he said.
The European Union has warned the Polish government of serious repercussions if it enacts pro-life legislation that would ban abortion on disability grounds. The EU claims the proposals represent a “serious breach of European values” and the European Parliament said that if plans proceed it may suspend Poland’s EU Council voting rights. Polish ministers have said they will press ahead anyway with their plans which received the support of 830,000 Poles in a petition delivered to the Polish government. The proposed legislation also has the backing of the Catholic Church with one bishop, Pawel Rytel-Andrianik, saying the current law “doesn’t protect human life sufficiently” because it allows the abortion of unborn children with a disability, adding “in 90 per cent of cases this refers to children with Down’s syndrome”. He added: “The Polish bishops’ conference underlines that the right to life is fundamental to every human being, so we should all protect this right for defenceless children”.
A poll of over 2,000 adults in the UK found that money worries top the list of reasons why marriages break down, with one in five saying it was the biggest cause of marital strife.
Over a third of those questioned said that financial pressures were the biggest challenge to their marriage, while a fifth said that most of their arguments were about money. One in five of those polled blamed their partner for their money worries, accusing them of overspending or failing to budget properly.
The latest figures available from the Office for National Statistics show that 107,000 couples divorced in 2016 – up 5.8 per cent from the previous year.
“Money is always a common issue and if one person feels that their partner is not pulling their weight financially or at least trying to then it can very quickly cause resentment to grow,” said Lorraine Harvey, family lawyer at law firm Slater and Gordon, who commissioned the survey.
