A pro-life conference has been told that any liberalisation of the country’s abortion laws would inevitably lead to a radically liberal regime equivalent to that of the UK. Lord David Alton, a long-time anti-abortion campaigner and a member of the British House of Lords, said the “law of unintended consequences” which had seen Britain move from a restrictive abortion regime when legislation was introduced 50 years ago to one which sees “an abortion carried out every three minutes” would be replicated in the Republic. “It was a law that was only supposed to be is used in very extreme circumstances but of course it is now an open-ended law and is it has led to massive destruction and loss of life,” he said. His comments were echoed by Cora Sherlock of the Pro-Life Campaign. “If we were to look at changing any other law we would look and see how it has affected other countries. But when we look at abortion, when you look around the world, what you find is that when you introduce abortion in any way it settles down to generally one in five pregnancies ending in abortion.” She said she had frequently been asked about her preferred wording for a referendum but said “the reality is the wording doesn’t matter to people who want to see the baby protected and mothers protected. Because we have no doubt that when the wording is announced by the Government it will be presented as something very restrictive, very attractive to voters but that’s what happened in England.”
An Irish pro-choice group has initiated an “Advent for Choice” social media campaign as part of its push to repeal the Eighth amendment. David Quinn of The Iona Institute called it ‘tasteless in the extreme’. The campaign involves a daily post on social media under the hashtag #adventforchoice showcasing a parent who supports pro-abortion laws. It is organised by the group Parents for Choice who are campaigning for the availability of “free, safe and legal abortion in the Irish maternity care system”, and for “the recognition of a pregnant and birthing person’s immutable right to bodily autonomy and exercise of choice in all situations”. The groups does not used the term ‘pregnant woman’. The group is prominent in the Repeal the Eighth coalition and addressed the Citizens’ Assembly’s fourth session on March 5th last. Ailbhe Smyth, Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment, expressed her “love” for the initiative and thanked the group “for thinking of it”.
Educate Together, a non-denominational school patron body, has warned the Department of Education it will be difficult to change the culture of schools divested by the Church if long-serving teachers committed to a Catholic ethos remain in place.
In a meeting in April, Educate Together representatives told Department officials, the body was “particularly concerned about the [Department’s] proposals for the live transfer of schools, including existing staff”. Paul Rowe, Educate Together’s chief executive, told the Sunday Times, Ireland edition, they were not looking to replace staff, but they were concerned that “changing school culture is quite difficult and usually involves changes in personnel”. Rowe said there could be teachers in Catholic schools “who have been teaching in a certain way for 20 years and don’t want to change”. Hence, they have asked the Department to provide more resources on the divestment process, including a “voluntary redeployment process” for teachers who do not want to work in Educate Together schools.
The medical profession has an “ethical imperative” to say assisted suicide is not how you alleviate suffering, an Oireachtas committee has been told. Prof Des O’Neill, of the school of medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, told the Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality, that many people expressed the idea that they do not want to suffer at the end, but 30 years practise as a geriatrician had shown him that when care was proactive, compassionate and provided dignity “not one of our patients has chosen to die,” he said. Prof O’Neill said assisted suicide that is passed off as a “noble deed” is very often an “ignoble response to dreadful patient care.”
He agreed with Fianna Fáil TD Jim O’Callaghan that “there is no legal right to die” and that “people in Ireland do die with dignity”. He said the phrase “the right to die with dignity” had been “adopted as a synonym for assisted suicide”. Prof O’Neill said the notion of freedom of conscience among medical practitioners was also being undermined. He said there was pressure on doctors to go along with arguments for assisted suicide and this was “an assault on ethics and it is a very difficult and dark place”.
“We have an ethical imperative to say this is not how we care for people, not how we alleviate suffering,” he said.
However, Dr Louise Campbell of NUI Galway, a philosopher with training in clinical ethics, said she would be “cautiously” in favour of “assisted dying”. In some cases “the motivation was to end the suffering of the individual at his or her request”. She said the capacity for autonomy, a person’s ability to make decisions based on their own beliefs, was widely recognised within the liberal tradition, and that proponents of assisted dying argued that those who were “suffering intolerably” should be allowed “to control the manner and timing “ of their dying.
Adopted children must have the right to contact with their birth families, leading advocates for children’s rights have told a conference hosted by the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI) in Dublin on Thursday.
Tanya Ward, chief executive of the Children’s Rights Alliance, said it was now time to look at “post-adoption supports” including legislating for open- and semi-open adoptions. These were crucial to provide adopted children with opportunities to know all they needed to feel secure in their identities. Semi-open adoption is where birth families have ongoing contact with the adoptive families, and open adoption is where there can be contact between the adopted child and their birth family – if the child wants it.
Norah Gibbons, chairwoman of Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, said the traditional “clean break” adoptions, where all contact with the birth family was severed, could be damaging for children. She said it could be hugely beneficial for children to meet their birth parents and “get an explanation” as to why they were in care.
The Oireachtas abortion committee will vote on December 13th, on whether the amendment should be repealed in full and what law, if any, would replace it. It will then publish a “brief” report on December 20th making its recommendations to the Oireachtas. The committee had previously voted to not retain the Amendment in its current form though they had not specified how it should be changed, whether it should be repealed entirely or what might replace it.
Separately, on Thursday, the committee discussed the possibility of contraception being made entirely free to the general public and the Chairman of the committee said it was “doable”, after hearing evidence on the proposal. Senator Catherine Noone had asked Dr Tony Holohan, chief medical officer at the Department of Health, whether the provision of free contraception was possible. Committing his department to examining the feasibility of providing such a service, he said “in broad terms, it would not be expensive”.
The Appeal Court in Norway has ruled that doctors have the right to practice medicine in accordance with their conscience. The case arose from a doctor who was fired from her job for refusing to insert intrauterine devices (IUDs), which can act as abortifacients. She said to do so would contradict her Christian faith. When she was hired in 2010, Dr. Katarzyna Jachimowicz clearly stated her objection to the use of the intrauterine coil, which did not present a problem to her employer at that time. However, while Norwegian law allows doctors to conscientiously object to abortion, the country introduced a new rule in January 2015 prohibiting doctors from refusing to provide any method of birth control, including those which can cause abortion. Doctors are therefore able to object to abortion, whilst being coerced to perform other procedures which can have the same result. The Appeal Court in Norway has now sided with Dr Jachimowicz.
Robert Clarke, Director of European Advocacy for ADF International, who fought the case on behalf of the doctor said: “The notion that her employer could not accommodate her deeply held convictions seems absurd, especially since there is a lack of medical doctors in Norway. This judgment sends a clear message to the Norwegian authorities that conscience is a fundamental right under the European Convention on Human Rights, which must be protected.”
The Department of Health is reviewing the possibility of GPs distributing pills that induce abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy if the pro-life 8th amendment is repealed. That nurses or GPs might offer such drugs has been mooted by members of the Oireachtas abortion committee and the Department of Health has said the matter would be kept “under review” if the law changed. Tony Holohan, the chief medical officer, wrote to the committee saying: “Although no medicines indicated for the termination of pregnancy are currently authorised in Ireland, no immediate service provision issues are identified relating to the prescription and supply of medicines for this purpose.”
Separately, the HSE has said that the State would need to hire more than 50 sonographers before every pregnant woman could have a 20-week foetal anomaly scan. Currently, they are offered in only six of Ireland’s 19 maternity hospitals. In the UK and elsewhere a large majority of babies found to have a ‘foetal abnormality’ such as Down Syndrome are aborted.
Researchers have unearthed evidence that far fewer married people experience dementia than single people. Experts conducted an analysis of 15 studies which held data on dementia and marital status involving more than 800,000 people from Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Their study, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, concluded that lifelong singletons have a 42% elevated risk of dementia compared with married couples. Those who have been widowed had a 20% increased risk compared with married people, they found, but no elevated risk was found among divorcees compared with those who were still married. Commenting on the study, Dr Laura Phipps of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said there is compelling research showing married people generally live longer and enjoy better health, with many different factors likely to be contributing to that link. “Spouses may help to encourage healthy habits, look out for their partner’s health and provide important social support. Research suggests that social interaction can help to build cognitive reserve – a mental resilience that allows people to function for longer with a disease like Alzheimer’s before showing symptoms,” she said.
A witness appearing before the Oireachtas committee examining the Eighth amendment has asked that any potential legislation enabling abortion where there is a serious disability would not make a list of conditions that would qualify. Dr Peter Thompson, a consultant in foetal medicine at Birmingham Women and Children’s Hospital, will say in his opening statement: “With regard to this I would urge you not to make a list, as with the ever changing progress in medicine, conditions would need to be added and removed from the list on a regular basis”. In the UK, 90pc of babies who are diagnosed in the womb to have Down Syndrome are aborted.
He will also “strongly advise” the committee against “being prescriptive and using the term lethal abnormality”.
“The problem is there is no agreed definition as to what lethal actually means, is it that all foetuses with that condition die before birth, that they die either before birth or in the neonatal period despite supportive therapy, a baby that usually dies in one of these two periods of time or is it that it has been noted that there is an association between the condition and death.”
