Mexico City is set to make assisted suicide a constitutional right. On January 31, the representatives of the Mexican capital’s Constituent Assembly will present the city’s new Constitution. Article 11 of that document states: “The right of determination and free will, should enable all people to freely and fully exercise their capabilities to live with dignity. The right to a dignified life implicitly contains the right to a dignified death.” The right will be confined to Mexico City as the capital independently elects its own legislative assembly, as all other states in the country do. Reacting to the move on assisted suicide, the Archdiocese of Mexico said: “If science determines that a person is alive but fails to provide the necessary help to keep said person alive, the crime of murder is in essence committed under the guise of ‘letting a person die’.” The archdiocese added that “Mexico City is converting a crime into a law.” The new law will come into effect on January 1, 2018.
A Christian group in Australia has warned that gender would become “increasingly confused” if marriage is redefined in the country. Speaking at a sitting of a Senate committee inquiry, the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) said marriage redefinition would have such an impact because “the complementarity of male and female is uniquely defined in the marriage law”. “Where gender is erased from the fundamental group unit of society, it logically follows that gender becomes increasingly confused at all levels in the community,” the ACL asserted. “If marriage is a child-centred institution it reasonably follows that it is not a category of relationship that can reasonably apply to same-sex relationships, which do not bear even the possibility of producing children.”
A British government plan to allow single people to raise surrogate children has been criticised as an attack on family values. The government move to amend the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 comes on foot of a ruling by a High Court judge in 2016 that confining the rearing of surrogate children to couples breached the human rights of single people. Reacting to the announcement, Ciarán Kelly of The Christian Institute said it was yet another attack on family values. “All the evidence shows that children do better when raised by their mother and father – and best of all when those parents are married. It is beneficial to the children. It is beneficial to society. Why does the Government want to undermine this?” Meanwhile, Robert Flello MP, vice-chairman of the All Parliamentary Pro-Life Group, stressed that the focus overall should be on the child. “The right for the child to have two parents is deliberately overlooked,” he said. “A child has the right to be brought up in a loving family by its mother and father and that should be the starting point for government and society.”
The number of abortions taking place in the United States is at its lowest level in 40 years, according to latest figures. Compiled by the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice organisation, the new report revealed a figure of 926,200 abortions for the year 2014, the lowest figure since 1974, the first full year after the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision broadened access to abortion across America. The 2014 figure represents a continued decrease in terminations over recent years, down by 32,500 on 2013. In percentage terms, the reports also reveals a 12.5% decrease in 2014 over 2011, when abortions stood well over the million mark, at 1.06 million terminations that year. “The number of abortions and the abortion rate declined steadily between 2011 and 2014, by 3–6% per year,” the report finds.
Independent TD Mattie McGrath has described the Minister for Education’s stated commitment to tackle the so-called ‘baptism barrier’ as a “transparent diversionary tactic”. In a statement following Minister Richard Bruton’s announcement of a consultation process on four options which will undermine the ability of faith schools to prioritise children of their respective faiths for admission, Deputy McGrath said, “What Minister Bruton is attempting to do is to divert attention away from the complete failure of his Government and his Department with respect to addressing the issue of over-subscribed schools.” He continued: “It is far easier to characterise the rights of denominational schools as obstructive rather than face the real issue of funding for the construction of so called ‘stand-alone’ state schools, funding which we all support and see as increasingly necessary.” He added that the options proposed by Minister Bruton “continue the assault on denominational schools that has already seen everything from their rights regarding employment policy, curriculum content and protection of ethos being severely undermined.”
The representative body for over 2,900 Catholic primary schools has reiterated the fact that oversubscription of school places only occurs in a minority of locations in Ireland. The comment came in the wake of an announcement from Minister for Education Richard Bruton of a consultation process on four options to tackle the prioritising of children of faith backgrounds in denominational schools. In a statement, The Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (CPSMA) pointed out, “The vast majority of Catholic schools are not oversubscribed and enrol all applicants. The issue mainly arises in areas of Dublin and in small pockets of the commuter belt surrounding the capital.” Despite this reality, there has been a major drive in some quarters for the so-called ‘baptism barrier’ to be dealt with once and for all, leading to Minister Bruton proposing his four options towards reducing the ability of faith schools to prioritise pupils from their respective faith communities during the admissions process. The CPSMA has called the term ‘baptism barrier’ “misleading and warned that “reforms to admissions policies will do nothing to alleviate the shortage of school places: only extra school places can achieve that.”
A Bill aimed at banning abortions once a foetal heartbeat is detected has been placed before the US Congress. Introduced by Republican Representative Steve King, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017 requires that doctors check for a foetal heartbeat before any move to provide a termination and refuse to proceed should a heartbeat be detected. The only exemption permissible under the act would be where a mother’s life is in danger. Medics breaching the law would face a fine and/up to five years in prison. “America was founded on the concept that our rights come from God,” said King. “All human persons have a right to life. How then could we confer that those rights allow the killing of a baby? I believe our most important responsibility that God has bestowed upon us is to protect innocent human life, and I will continue to dedicate my life to that responsibility.”
Women in Europe are having fewer children, with the trend particularly notable in the southern part of the continent, a new study has shown. Conducted by France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies, the research found that more than a fifth of women born in southern Europe in the 1970s may remain childless, compared to an average of 15% in northern Europe and 18% in western Europe. The report tracks a combination of factors to explain a trend not seen since the early years of the 20th Century, when World War I and the Great Depression had devastating impacts on demographics. “Most of the economic and cultural trends of the last half-century appear to have steered women and men away from having children,” the report states, adding that very few women plan never to have children, rather most end up “perpetually postponing parenthood” until it is too late. Reliable contraception, delayed union formation and childbearing, greater family fragility, demanding careers and job instability, as well as general economic uncertainty, are likely to foster childlessness,” the report concludes.
Britain’s civil servant tasked with integration issues has likened Catholic teaching on traditional marriage to Islamic extremism that has been exposed in schools in Birmingham. During a sitting of the Communities and Local Government Committee, at which Dame Louise Casey answered questions on her report into the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ schools affair, she said the issues uncovered about extremism were “not okay, in the same way that it is not okay for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage. That is not okay either — it is not how we bring children up in this country”. Dame Louise went on to allege that opponents of same-sex marriage using religion to cover their anti-equality views. “It is often veiled as religious conservatism, and I have a problem with the expression ‘religious conservatism’, because often it can be anti-equalities,” she said.
