The Irish Girls Guides organisation is considering new guidelines to allow boys who self-identify as girls to become Guides. The revelation came after a move by Britain’s Girl–guiding body to accept biological males who identify as female into its ranks. Linda Peters, chief executive officer of the Irish Girl Guides said, “Our policy is that anyone who lives their life as a female is welcome to join our organisation.” She added that the Irish body is currently taking guidance from the Girl Guides in Canada towards a full set of guidelines. “We asked their permission to adopt their guidelines if it suited us, but ours may be slightly different,” she said. Seeking to reassure parents, Peters said that any future move on transgender Guides would involve input from parents, unlike in Britain where the Guides do not consider it “best practice” to inform parents that their daughters may be sharing facilities with biological males who identify as female.

The Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (CPSMA) has said that the real barrier to school access is often lack of places and not religious difference. Responding to the ongoing debate around the so-called ‘baptism barrier’, the CPSMA conducted a survey of Catholic primary schools in the Dublin area and found that just 17 of 384 schools (4.4%) responding had denied admission based on grounds relating to a baptismal certificate. Overall, the survey found that just 96 of 7,750 failed enrolments were related to issues around baptism certificates. Unveiling the finding, the CPSMA’s general secretary Seamus Mulconry said: “It is striking that the overwhelming focus of public comment in the media on the issue of schools admission policy… has focused on an issue that affects only 1.2% of the applications that do not result in enrolment.” Pointing out that oversubscription of school places was a far bigger issue, Mr Mulconry said, “The real issue is one of resources and the need to create school places through the opening of new schools, or the expansion of existing ones.”

A baby has been born in Ukraine through a controversial genetic modification technique involving three parents. The procedure known as Pronuclear Transfer, mooted as a treatment for maternally carried mitochondrial DNA sees the healthy nuclear material from a fertilised egg of two parents removed and placed into a donor egg from a second woman which has healthy mitochondria.

The procedure to deliver the child was led by Dr Valery Zukin, who said afterwards of this world first that the successful birth “opens up the possibility of augmenting embryos”. However, reacting to the birth announcement, Professor Adam Balen, chairman of the British Fertility Society, described it as “highly experimental” and also said it has not “been properly evaluated or scientifically proven”. The world’s first three-parent baby was born to US parents in Mexico last September, using a similar technique known as Maternal Spindle Transfer.

Two leading divinity schools in the United States have introduced gender-neutral language for staff and students when referring to God. The Divinity School of Duke University has issued new guidelines which call for ‘he’ and ‘him’ to be avoided in reference to God, suggesting instead that ‘God’ and ‘Godself’ be used. The guidelines also offer an example of gender-neutral metaphors such as “God is the father who welcomes his son, but she is also the woman searching for the lost coin”. Meanwhile, at Vanderbilt University, professors in the divinity school have been urged to give “consistent attention to the use of inclusive language, especially in relation to the Divine,” because campus policy “commits continuously and explicitly to include gender as an analysed category and to mitigate sexism”.

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.”