Aborting unborn babies earlier in pregnancy is ‘more respectful’ of prenatal life, a legal expert is due to tell the Oireachtas committee on the Eighth Amendment in expert testimony today. Senior law lecturer in medical law from the University of London, Ruth Fletcher, will tell the committee that the vast majority of abortions by women in the UK occur at less than 13 weeks into gestation. Irish women, however, are accessing abortion later because they must travel. Such abortions are less respectful of unborn life and so, she advises, introducing a UK-style abortion law here would allow women abort their babies at an earlier stage of pregnancy. “For many people, a law which has the effect of helping to make earlier abortion more likely than later abortion, is, in effect, more respectful of prenatal life if it reduces the rate of later abortion.”
An expert witness due to give testimony to the Oireachtas abortion committee has pulled out calling the process “deeply biased” and a “kangaroo court”. Marty McCaffrey, Professor of Paediatrics at University of Carolina, was asked to appear before the committee following a request from Fine Gael Senator Michelle Mulherin. However, in a letter to members, Mr McCaffrey said he was surprised a decision had already been taken to change the Eighth Amendment and felt that an appearance by him now would be exploited to provide a semblance of balance to the process. “It became clear that the invitation for my testimony, offered only after the vote on repeal had already taken place, was a retrospective effort to attempt to offer some illusion of balance to the Oireachtas hearings. It is with great regret that I must respectfully decline the invitation to offer testimony to the Committee,” he said. “In reviewing the proceedings, testimony and transcripts from records on the Committee website one can only conclude that the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth is a ‘kangaroo court’. It is simply stunning that most Committee members did not see the need for a fair hearing for such a momentous issue as the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, but were satisfied with such a prejudiced process.” He concluded: “I hope that the Irish people will not be deceived by such theater.”
A new YouGov poll in Britain, shows that people still support the biblical commandments that relate to how we treat our neighbours but not the ones that relate to God.
The research found 93 per cent of Britons surveyed believed “thou shalt not kill”, and “thou shalt not steal”, remained important. Not bearing false witness – lying – came third in importance, valued by 84 per cent of respondents while almost three quarters, 73 per cent, believed not committing adultery was still important. However, only 31pc believed the command not to worship idols was still important, 23pc said it was important not to take the Lord’s name in vain and just 20pc believed that worshipping only God was an important principle to live by.
A case has been filed with the European Court of Human Rights protesting Belgium’s euthanasia laws as a breach of the rights to life and to family life which are both protected under the European Convention on Human Rights. The case was filed on behalf of a Belgian national whose mother was euthanised without his knowledge or any of his siblings while she was suffering severe mental health problems. A spokesperson for ADF International, who filed the case, said international law has never established a so-called ‘right to die.’ On the contrary, it solidly affirms a right to life – particularly for the most vulnerable among us. “We will be judged as a society by how we care for our most vulnerable”, he said. Commenting specifically on Belgium’s law, Robert Clarke, Director of European Advocacy for ADF said “The slippery slope is on full public display in Belgium and we now see the tragic consequences. More than five people per day are euthanized. And that may yet be the tip of the iceberg. Belgium has set itself on a trajectory that – at best – implicitly tells its most vulnerable that their lives are not worth living”.
The granting of rights and privileges of the opposite sex to transgender individuals would infringe on the rights and protections of women, a meeting at the House of Commons has been told. The argument was offered in response to a Government proposal released this summer to allow people to change their official sex to whatever gender they identify with. A previous parliamentary committee had heard only one side of the argument, drawing the bulk of their evidence from transgender activist groups, because, it was said, people with contrary views were bigoted and their opinions had no validity. At this meeting however, it was pointed out that the advance of transgender rights often comes at the expense of women’s rights. Caroline Flint MP, a Labour minister from 2005 to 2009, spoke of the emerging environment of competing rights in which women were on the losing end. Miranda Yardley, herself a transsexual, pointed out: ‘The endowment of rights to males as females compromises the privacy of females . . . and particularly will affect those women who are economically disadvantaged or victims of male violence.’ Women’s group representatives described the chilling effect of trans-activism on women’s organisations who cannot publicise meetings for fear of attack.
A major new survey shows that in 2016, 36pc of Irish adults still attended a religious service at least once a week. The finding is contained in the European Social Survey (ESS), one of the biggest surveys of social attitudes across Europe. The 2016 figure of 36% is one point down from the last survey, in 2014, but remains one of the highest in Europe and shows the continued resilience of religious practice even in the face of secularising trends and hostile attitudes to Christianity. The 2016 survey also showed that there has been only a tiny increase in the number of Irish adults who say they don’t belong to any particular religion or denomination compared with 2014 when the figure was 25.2pc and last year was 26.3pc. A somewhat bigger drop was recorded in the number of Irish people who say they pray at least once a week from 60pc in 2014 to 55.3pc in 2016.
The Iona Institute said in a statement: “The survey shows Ireland remains one of the most religious countries in Europe, with only Poland registering higher levels of regular church attendance and prayer. The results should also come as a surprise to pundits who peddle the narrative of religion being a dying feature of Irish life.
Contrary to all other polls and predictions, an academic study of Twitter opinions is pointing to the ‘No’ side eking out a slim victory in the national same-sex marriage survey in Australia. Academics David Tuffley and Bela Stantic used advanced data analytics which they say have proven uncannily accurate at predicting the outcomes of hard-to-call polls, including the 2016 US presidential election, when Donald Trump shocked virtually all political pundits by beating Hillary Clinton. In their trawl through almost a half million tweets on the issue, they found that while 72 per cent of tweets favoured same-sex marriage, less than 15 per cent were sent by people over the age of 55. Moreover, taking the sentiment of the unique users into account, the adjusted figure in support came down from 72 per to 57 per cent. Then, adjusting the low proportion of tweets from over-55s and matching it against the 36 per cent of the voter pool they represent, support for ‘yes’ comes down to 49 per cent. “So it is likely to be a close-run result, much closer than the earlier polls suggested, and leaning in the direction of ‘no,’ Professor Stantic and Mr Tuffley concluded.
The Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, Alphonsus Cullinan, has offered a robust defence of the right to life of the unborn and its place in the Constitution as enacted in the 1983 pro-life amendment. In his opening address to the ‘Crisis of Democracy in Ireland’ conference in Waterford, Bishop Cullinan said the amendment recognises a fundamental, personal right that is neither given nor can be taken away by the State, but can only be acknowledged as already inherently belonging to each unborn child. The deletion or amendment of Article 40.3.3, would serve no purpose other than to withdraw the right to life from some categories of unborn children. To do so, he said, “would radically change the principle, for all unborn children and indeed for all of us, that the right to life is a fundamental human right”. Denying the pro-choice clam that a mother’s right to bodily autonomy includes the right to abort her own child, he quoted Pope Francis saying, “no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the ‘property’ of another human being.”
Bishop Cullinan also said that language describing the unborn is often used to dehumanise the child in the womb. “We question why, in public discourse, healthy unborn children are always referred to as ‘the baby’ while those who, in the opinion of some, do not measure up to expectations are routinely defined as the ‘foetus’ or the ‘embryo’. We are concerned that language is being used with the intention of depersonalising certain categories of unborn children in a way which seeks to normalise abortion.”
