Minister for Health Simon Harris has offered his political support and assistance to two pro-choice campaign groups seeking a repeal of the Eighth Amendment. Mr Harris met the Women’s Council of Ireland and the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment on Friday afternoon to discuss the upcoming abortion referendum and legislation that would follow its passage. After the meeting, he told The Irish Times, “I was delighted to meet with representatives of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment and the National Women’s Council of Ireland to brief them. A strong civil society campaign will be key in the weeks ahead and I look forward to helping in any way I can.”
The Pro Life Campaign, however, accused the Minister of crossing a line. Spokesperson, Dr Ruth Cullen said: “Minister Harris has crossed a line by giving a private briefing to groups campaigning for abortion on demand. I think this latest initiative on his part will be widely perceived as unfair and even undemocratic. He is privy to the information he is imparting to them because he is a minister so any attempt to excuse it as something any TD could do simply doesn’t add up”
Dr Cullen continued: “As Minister for Health, Simon Harris has pointedly failed to meet or engage with people from the pro-life side, including families who say they owe the life of their child to the Eighth Amendment. He is also the Minister who is overseeing the referendum. With this role comes an obligation to maintain a high standard of objectivity. The way the minister is behaving at present does not inspire confidence that the forthcoming debate will be in any way fair.”
A new Catholic school divestment process has been launched by the Minister for Education, Richard Bruton. Parents of pre-school children around the country will be asked to vote on whether they want a greater choice of primary schools in their area. A similar survey, which included parents of schoo-age children, was conducted in 2012. It found that less than 10 percent of parents wanted divestment.
The survey will be finished before the end of March and there is a commitment to agree detailed arrangements on school transfers by the end of June.
The survey will be conducted by local education and training boards (ETBs), which will compile a report on the process to be published on the Department of Education website. Where demand for the transfer of at least one Church-run school is identified, the local bishop will be expected to consult with the school and parents about options offered by other patron bodies.
The reconfiguration of a school from its Catholic patronage would also differ with school buildings being leased from the bishops for a small fee, rather than being sold through the legally complicated process of property transfers.
Dr Brendan O’Shea, of the Irish College of General Practitioners, has said: “A doctor has an ethical obligation not to allow his or her personal moral standards to influence treatment of patients”. He was speaking to the Irish Independent in response to a concern that women in some parts of the country could face difficulties accessing abortion locally, if groups of GPs decide to opt out of providing the abortion pill on conscience grounds. Dr O’Shea said that “Where the doctor has a conscientious objection to a course of action, they must explain this to the patient and provide the names of other doctors available to the patient”, adding that, “The GP must enable women to reach an informed decision, to minimise emotional disturbance, whatever decision is made, and to lessen the risk of further unwanted pregnancy.”
“In Britain, where abortion was introduced with the conviction that it would only be in exceptional cases, today one in five pregnancies end in abortion,” he said. In a pastoral message to the Limerick diocese, Bishop Leahy said “any conversation around the upcoming referendum is not easy for people. While I too find it difficult to talk about it, nevertheless the Gospel and my conscience convince me that I am obliged to speak”.
Addressing those who had an abortion or who knew someone who had one and who may find the current public discussion upsetting, he said “I do not wish to upset. Remember Jesus’ words: ‘do not let your heart be troubled; trust in God’, the God who loves you immensely and whose mercy embraces you like a mother.”
Regarding the unborn child, he said in the midst of the discussion about the Amendment and legislation and how politicians are going to vote, “we can become so distracted that we end up desensitised to the preciousness of the unborn baby”.
“We do indeed need to love both mother and baby in pregnancy, but I believe that in our public commentary at the moment we are often forgetting the unborn baby. And we are talking about a baby. Make no mistake about it. It is a baby,” he said.
The Pro Life Campaign have been refused leave to join the defense of unborn rights against an Appeal by the State to overturn all rights of the unborn, apart from the right to life explicitly recognised by the 8th amendment. The Appeal was made after it was ruled in the High Court that the rights of the unborn extend beyond the right to life.
On Monday, Benedict Ó Floinn BL, for the organisation, told Chief Justice Frank Clarke that the group, arising from “concerns over recent developments”, wished to be joined to the action as an amicus curiae – an assistant to the court on legal issues. Mr Justice Clarke granted counsel permission to serve short notice of its application and said he would consider it Tuesday during a case management hearing concerning the appeal. Lawyers for the State told the Chief Justice that they were opposed to the PLC’s application. The following day, counsel for the PLC told the Chief Justice his side were ready to address the matter and appreciated the appeal was for hearing on February 21st and, if it was joined, was not seeking to have that date changed. He said that the PLC could bring 25 years of experience and expertise, including that of constitutional law professor William Binchy, in protecting the rights of women and their unborn children to help the court to decide the legal issues before it. Counsel for the State argued, however, that as the case concerns constitutional law, the PLC could not bring any expertise the lawyers already involved do not have.
The position is significant as the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment recommended that abortion should be available on mental health grounds after 12 weeks, but without specifying a legal time limit. Instead, the Committee’s report said that “provision for gestational limits for termination of pregnancy should be guided by the best available medical evidence,” which should then be provided for in legislation.
Dr O’Grady said best medical principles around timescale for abortion involved having the procedure “as early as possible and as late as necessary”, rather than getting bound up in “absolute decisions” about numbers of weeks, he said. This would potentially allow for abortion up to birth, if necessary.
Dr O’Grady, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, was addressing a campaign launch hosted by the Galway Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment.
Pro-choice campaigners have been asked to condemn the “orgy of abuse” directed at a young American visitor curating the @Ireland twitter account this week. The call came from the SaveThe8th group who said that the Repeal Campaign “must change the tone” of the debate before someone gets physically hurt.
The @Ireland account is a twitter account that is curated each week by a different guest. Maria Oswalt, 23, has recently come to Ireland to visit her boyfriend, and has expressed pro-life views in the past but has tweeted nothing about the upcoming referendum.
Repeal campaigners trawled her social media accounts in an attempt to find out her views on abortion, and then subjected her to a sustained campaign of vicious bullying and abuse. She has been repeatedly told that she is “not welcome” in Ireland and that she should go home.
Commenting, Savethe8th spokeswoman Niamh Ui Bhriain said: “These vicious attacks on a young woman for holding a private opinion are an example of the very worst of what this campaign could become. Repeal supporters, who have no problem with Amnesty Ireland taking illegal donations from an American billionaire, spent most of yesterday abusing a 23 year old for holding private views, bizarrely finding and posting information about her family, and telling her to go home to her own country. This is not just creepy, it’s nasty and vicious”.
She added: “There is a lot of talk about a reasoned and respectful campaign, but one only needs to read the comments towards this girl to know that there is no reason or respect for those of us who have concerns about the introduction of abortion in Ireland. It is incumbent on the leaders of the repeal campaign to call off the dogs. And it is incumbent on the media to hold them to account if they do not”.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has formed a new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within its Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The purpose of the new division is to restore federal enforcement of laws that protect the fundamental and inalienable rights of conscience and religious freedom for medical personnel. In a press release heralding the news, a spokesperson said the new division will provide the Health Department “with the focus it needs to more vigorously and effectively enforce existing laws protecting the rights of conscience and religious freedom, the first freedom protected in the Bill of Rights”.
OCR Director Roger Severino said, “Laws protecting religious freedom and conscience rights are just empty words on paper if they aren’t enforced. No one should be forced to choose between helping sick people and living by one’s deepest moral or religious convictions, and the new division will help guarantee that victims of unlawful discrimination find justice. For too long, governments big and small have treated conscience claims with hostility instead of protection, but change is coming and it begins here and now.”
The move was criticized by groups claiming, among other things, that freedom of conscience could harm ‘abortion rights’.
The National Association of GPs has strongly objected to the Government unilaterally co-opting them to provide unrestricted abortion services for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. In a statement released yesterday, the association, which represents around 2,000 family doctors, said it strongly objects to the assumption that this will be a GP-led service and said that their members are outraged that there has been no consultation.
Dr Emmet Kerin, President of the NAGP remarked: “I was alarmed to hear the Minister’s comments and presumption that the State would direct GPs to lead an abortion service without any engagement with our members to discuss the implications of this notion. The growing disconnect of the Minister and his Department of Health from the frontline service of General Practice is of genuine concern to me.”
Dr Kerin further commented “General Practitioners are dedicated to the health of their patients but feel that their work supporting the increasingly chaotic healthcare system receives no acknowledgment. For the Minister to suggest that our profession should lead out an abortion service without consultation with our member GPs is an affront to our profession and could pose yet another strain on the provision of general practice healthcare services.”
A court in Ontario has ruled that doctors must refer patients for all procedures and drugs, including abortion and assisted suicide, even if they conscientiously object. The Court held that “equitable access” to health care services is of “sufficient importance to warrant overriding” the right of religious freedom.
The background of the case are policies of the body regulating the practice of medicine in Ontario which require that pro-life doctors who object to abortion and euthanasia must refer patients seeking those services to a “non-objecting, available, and accessible” physician, “in a timely manner” ensuring that the patient is “not exposed to adverse clinical outcomes” because of delay. This was appealed to the Supreme Court which found that the forced referrals are a violation of religious freedom, but also ruled that “equitable access” to such procedures was more important and thus justified the religious freedom violation. The Court drew a number of further conclusions including that doctors unwilling to provide “effective referrals” will have to change their area of practice; practicing medicine from a Christian ethical framework is characterised as one likely to shame patients; Professional disciplinary proceedings is a likely consequence for Christians who practice according to conscience and decline to refer; and, in the public square, in the event of a conflict between doctors’ rights and the patients’ interests, religious freedom loses.
