St Vincent’s Healthcare Group have affirmed that the New National Maternity Hospital which it will own and help operate will offer every medical procedure that is legal in the State. This could include abortion if the pro-life amendment is repealed. “In line with current policy and procedures at SVHG, any medical procedure which is in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Ireland will be carried out at the new hospital,” its chairman, James Menton, said in a statement.
National Maternity Hospital’s deputy chairman, Nicholas Kearns, writing in the Irish Times, says a religious order will not control the hospital, “[a]nd whatever the law permits at any given time about carrying out particular procedures, these procedures will be available in this hospital.” The hospital’s clinical director, Prof Declan Keane, speaking on RTÉ, said he had “no doubt” that the nuns would not interfere with the clinical working of the hospital and that it would be able to offer IVF, sterilisation, gender reassignment and, where legal, abortion.
Harvard University’s office of BGLTQ Student Life has published a guide that states one’s gender can “change from day to day” and to deny this is true “is a form of … violence.”
“Transphobic misinformation is a form of systemic violence,” the document states. “Fixed binaries and biological essentialism, manifest in gendered language, misgendering someone, and the policing of trans bodies, threaten the lives of trans people.” In other words, the traditional understanding of the distinctions between male and female is itself “a form of systemic violence.” Campus Reform reports that several Harvard students expressed outrage about the misuse of tuition money for the politically correct student guide, but “all declined to comment on the record due to concerns about potential repercussions from the school.” Chris Pandolfo at the Conservative Review commented: “One wonders if Harvard’s administration has paused to consider whether they are providing a ‘Safe Space’ for students who think that men are men and women are women. This is the sad state of affairs at colleges and universities,” Pandolfo concludes. “Traditional values are called violent. Mob violence to silence free speech is called justice.”
An undercover Mail on Sunday investigation has revealed troubling questions about the methods and loopholes exploited by a leading UK surrogacy agency. The investigation of the British Surrogacy Centre (BSC) owned and run by the UK’s first same-sex fathers via surrogacy, Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow, also highlighted the ‘abusive’ attitude to a vulnerable would-be mother and exposed a lack of rigour in the company’s medical and legal vetting of a potential surrogate.
The evidence has persuaded an industry expert, Baroness Warnock, architect of Britain’s fertility legislation, that the way BSC operates is illegal and should be investigated. Although the company gives the impression of being British, and operating according to UK law where commercial surrogacy is illegal, they are in fact based in California where profiting from surrogacy contracts is legal. Baroness Warnock told The Mail on Sunday: ‘It seems pretty clear that they are breaking the law. I think their motive is to get around the law and they should be investigated by the authorities on that basis alone. I would like to know the details of their financial profits and I think certainly the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority should investigate their activities. This is a plain case of exploitation.’
Kim Cotton, a pioneering surrogate mother and head of the not-for-profit British surrogacy agency COTS, branded BSC’s fees ‘extortionate’ and also accused the high-profile couple of ‘exploitation’.
The UK Government appears to be pressing ahead with plans for an equality oath which teachers, doctors and other public office holders would be forced to swear. Cabinet minister Sajid Javid has expressed support for an oath and The Sun newspaper has reported that the minister’s officials have held meetings with concerned parties in recent weeks.
Colin Hart, Director of The Christian Institute, said: “The Government needs to come clean. From what we are hearing the Government’s idea seems to get everyone to swear an allegiance to the Equalities Act.” An Equality Oath was first suggested by Dame Louise Casey in a report on integration. Previously, The Christian Institute has said: “Equality sounds nice but it is in the name of equality that Ashers Baking Company has been taken to court, B&B owners sued and a faithful Christian registrar forced out of her job.”
An editorial in The Independent also strongly criticised the Equality Oath, saying it would deny the right to dissent. It said: “Why should anyone have to sign up to some officially approved list of moral rules if they don’t believe in them? This is effectively the case if their livelihood depends on it. If a soldier or a teacher doesn’t believe in equality, should they be forced to say they do just to hang onto their job? Would it make them better or worse citizens?”
The US State Department has announced that it will stop contributing to the United Nations Population Fund on the grounds that it supports China’s unethical family planning polices, which include the practices of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization. The State Department noted that the fund “partners on family planning activities with the Chinese government agency responsible for these coercive policies.”
Those policies have accounted for a tide of human suffering that has lasted for decades. A 2014 human rights report from the State Department stated that 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations had occurred in China since the beginning of the stringent family policies introduced in 1971, which led to the one-child policy in 1979. According to the World Health Organization, the rural areas of China have the highest female suicide rate in the world, and it is the only country listed where the number of suicides among women surpasses that of men. The one-child policy also led to a surge in female infanticide that has now resulted in a disastrous sex ratio of 115 boys to every 100 girls.
There was a sharp rise in countries complicit in religious persecution in 2015 according to the latest annual Pew Research Center report on “Global Restrictions on Religion”. In 2015, there were “very high” or “high” levels of animosity shown towards religious groups in 40 percent of countries, the report noted, either through restrictive government laws targeting religious groups or violence or harassment toward adherents of specific religions by other members of society. The 2015 percentage was up six points from 2014, when 34 percent of countries reported such levels of hostility to religious groups. Certain countries and regions of the world showed especially high hostility towards religious groups. Russia, Egypt, India, Pakistan, and Nigeria all showed both government harassment of and social animus toward certain religious groups.
While married Americans now account for about half the adult population, they pay 74% of income tax. A recent report shows that, even as the share of married people in the US has declined, the share of tax they pay has declined at a far slower rate indicating that, proportionally, they are earning more income and paying more in tax than ever before.
The report was compiled by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan “Fact-Tank” whose aim is to inform public debate without taking any policy positions themselves.
The author of the report, Anthony Ciluffo, said this is an indication of the increasingly visible “marriage-gap” which has developed in the US and elsewhere whereby marriage is becoming both a sign of and a driver of education and wealth.
“The fact that married Americans continue to pay roughly three-quarters of the nation’s income taxes, in spite of their dwindling share of the adult population, is in part a result of the changing demographics and economics of marriage. Marriage is increasingly linked with higher levels of education, which are in turn linked to higher incomes” he said.
Cultural traditions that give the impression of State-endorsement of religion, such as the prayer before the start of each Dáil session, should be ditched according to Ronan McCrea, a law lecturer at University College London. Writing in The Irish Times he says that while such traditions might be mere cultural symbols, migrants from abroad might not understand that and mistake them for actual State endorsement of a particular religion.
“The problem with the European arrangements [favouring certain religious symbols] is that they rely to a large degree on insider knowledge that allows people to distinguish between the situation on paper and the actual situation. . . If one comes from a society where politics and religion are deeply intertwined, prayers in parliament may appear to be much more than a cultural symbol.”
He added: “This divide between symbolic religiosity and substantive secular politics leaves European societies open to allegations of hypocrisy when they ask migrants from areas of the world with more muscular religion to accept that religion and politics are separate and that religiously controversial ideas such as free speech on religion and gay rights must be accepted.”
Specifically, he believes the prayer at the start of each Dáil session to be particularly problematic: “It is hard to see a prayer that involves a wish that “Christ Our Lord” will guide parliamentarians’ work as a mere cultural symbol.” He concludes: “If we wish migrants to this country to feel at home and to accept a division between religion and politics that may be challenging for them, it is important that the majority appear to honour those commitments too.”
