Britain’s National Secular Society (NSS) has said that young pupils should be forced to attend lessons on homosexual relationships. Writing on the issue, the NSS campaign director, Stephen Evans added that allowing religious parents to remove their children from such classes should be deemed “unacceptable”. Evans was reacting to British government plans to include an opt-out in the proposed Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) programme for secondary schools – unlike the Relationships Education in primary schools, which will have no such element. “The government’s ‘21^st-century relationships and sex education’ will not be worthy of that billing if it allows young people’s rights to be retarded by religion,” Evans wrote, adding that schools are an “ideal place” to encourage a “sexually autonomous younger generation”, and decried a lack of “explicit reference to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the proposals”. Simon Calvert, Deputy Director for Public Affairs at The Christian Institute, criticised the NSS stance. “It cannot be right to trample all over the rights of millions of Christian, Muslim and Jewish families – to do so would be to sideline freedom itself,” he said.

The Catholic Bishops of Canada have denounced plans by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plan for a $650million fund for increased international access to abortion. In an open letter to the Canadian leader, the prelates describe the plan as “a reprehensible example of Western cultural imperialism” that “exploits women”. Mr Trudeau used International Women’s Day to announce that his government will commit the funds over the next three years to “address gaps in sexual and reproductive health and rights in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities”. The Bishops wrote that the move not only “negates our country’s laudable efforts to welcome refugees and offer protection to the world’s homeless…[but] your policy and vision, contrary to the fundamental ethic of protecting the most vulnerable and assisting the weakest, are in conflict with the principles instinctively shared by the majority of the world’s population and consistently upheld by the Catholic Church: to defend and protect human life from conception to natural death.”

A Bill which sought to reduce the penalty for procuring an abortion in Ireland from 14 years in prison to €1 has been defeated in the Dáil. The vote to strike down the legislation, tabled by Bríd Smith of the Alliance Against Austerity-People Before Profit, was carried by 81 votes to 26. Opposed by the Fine Gael Party, members of Fianna Fáil were allowed a vote of conscience, but in the end just three members voted in favour of the Bill: Stephen Donnelly, Lisa Chambers and Billy Kelleher. On the issue of a referendum on the Eighth Amendment, soon to be the subject of recommendations from the Citizens’ Assembly to the Dáil,Tánaiste and Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald has suggested that should a referendum be recommended,  it would be next year before any such poll would take place.

Pro-life groups in Britain have called on the government to shut down Marie Stopes International (MSI) clinics after a Daily Mail exposé of questionable practices. Both the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) and Life issued a joint petition urging immediate action after an undercover reporter found that clinics were willing to alter patient application  forms so as to be seen to conform with the Abortion At of 1967, with doctors ‘assessing’ women by phone before recommending terminations. “In view of their appalling treatment of women, and recognising that every abortion takes the life of an unborn baby, Life and SPUC call on the Secretary of State for Health to withdraw from MSI their licence to carry out abortions.” SPUC executive director John Smeaton added: “It is a matter of fact that 98 percent of abortions are certified on mental health grounds when the government’s own evidence shows that there’s no real risk to the woman’s mental or physical health if she has the baby. In these circumstances, these abortions are illegal.”

The Pro Life Campaign (PLC) has said the latest call from a United Nations committee on Ireland to legislate for abortion is damaging the international body’s reputation. In a new report from the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), it expresses concern that “access to abortion in the State [Ireland] is restricted to cases where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the pregnant woman under the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 …” The PLC has responded that CEDAW “in effect calls for the overturning of all meaningful protections for the unborn child under the Eighth Amendment…The purpose of the CEDAW committee is to highlight and seek to eliminate discrimination. Abortion, however, is the ultimate discrimination as it targets the most vulnerable in society, namely unborn babies.” The pro-life group went on to accuse UN committees like CEDAW of losing “all credibility as defenders of authentic human rights” and in recent years becoming “cheerleaders” for the abortion movement.

Two more US states have officially recognised pornography as a “public health crisis”. Virginia and South Dakota have become the latest jurisdictions to acknowledge that the use and proliferation of porn as reaching “crisis” levels. This comes after the state of Utah made similar declarations in 2016. The Virginia State House voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution expressing concerns over the damaging effects it has on its users. In South Dakota, there were unanimous votes in both the House and Senate. Groups working against pornography have welcomed the state moves, with the National Centre for Sexual Exploitation noting that they will “pave the way for greater awareness and national dialogue on the issue”.

Doctors at Marie Stopes clinics in Britain are approving thousands of women they have never met for abortions every year. According to an investigation undertaken by The Daily Mail newspaper, “less than a year after an inspection by the healthcare watchdog found that many abortion approvals are based on only a one-line summary of what a woman tells a call centre worker who has no medical training, [the] investigation revealed that the telephone discussions can be as short as 22 seconds”. An undercover reporter who attended a clinic stated that staff there altered the reason she gave for her abortion – “I just don’t want the baby” – to fit requirements for termination demanded by the Abortion Act. “Although doctors are not legally required to meet a woman before signing off their abortion, Department of Health guidance says it is ‘good practice’,” the Mail explained. “And doctors must be able to show they have signed off the abortion after forming an opinion ‘in good faith’ that the legal grounds for termination have been met.”

The US Supreme Court has refused to hear a major transgender rights case and referred the matter back to a lower court. Centred on the demand of school student Gavin Grimm, who self-identifies as male, to access male toilet and changing facilities at school, the case was brought to the Supreme Court for it to rule on the Obama administration’s  2016 guidelines that insisted transgender students had the right of access. However, since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, the guidelines have been withdrawn. Thus the court ruled that the original Appeals court should again examine the case locally. Kerri Kupec, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian advocacy group, welcomed the ruling. “The first duty of school districts is to protect the bodily privacy rights of all of the students who attend their schools and to respect the rights of parents who understandably don’t want their children exposed in intimate changing areas like locker rooms and showers,” she said.