The amount of time spent teaching religion may be left up to the discretion of individual primary schools under a proposal being considered by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment.
The body is holding a consultative conference in Dublin Castle to explore how time should be allocated to various subjects throughout the school week. This is in response to complaints from teachers that the school syllabus is increasingly over-loaded with time-intensive obligations.
Schools are required to teach 30 minutes of the religion of the school’s patron. For the vast majority of schools, where the patron is the Catholic Church, that means catechetical instruction in the Catholic faith.
The proposal under consideration though would leave it up to the discretion of each school to decide for themselves how they should organise up to 40% of school time, including time spent on religious education. This would allow schools to drastically reduce the amount of time they currently spend teaching religion.
A 17-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome issued a pointed challenge to policymakers over the use of tests to screen out people with the condition. Speaking at a conference event at the United Nations in Geneva ahead of World Down’s Syndrome Day last Tuesday, Kathleen made clear the immeasurable value of her life and the disturbing nature of screening for Down’s. “I love to sing, I love to dance, and I started playing tennis. I hope everybody loves me. I have Down syndrome. Yes. Is that so wrong? So, why all this testing? Why?” She added: “My name is Kathleen Humberstone and I love my life!”
Her mother Denise said that the testing regime was seriously misguided. “I dare anyone currently promoting this screening to meet with adults with Down Syndrome like my daughter Kathleen. I dare them to look her in the eye and tell her straight to her face that her life is less valuable than their own”.
A candidate for the leadership of one of Canada’s largest political parties has pledged a set of policies that would make Canada the most pro-adoption country in the world. Conservative leadership candidate Brad Trost says he’ll double the federal tax credit for adoptive parents to “at least $30,000”. This is a tax credit that parents can claim for expenses incurred during the course of an adoption. Currently, the credit can be claimed for expenses only up to a limit of $15,000. Trost says this reform would be part of a wider commitment to uphold the sanctity of life and promote pro-life policies.
An MP since 2004 and the father of a two-year-old daughter, Trost acknowledged that “we would like legislation” to protect the child in the womb, “but we also understand in Canada that may take awhile to get to that goal.” But he can advance policies supporting adoption, Trost pointed out in a campaign video. “We need to review our laws, federally and provincially, to see what we can do to make our laws more friendly for quicker, easier adoption, both domestic and internationally,” he added.
A proposal to oblige religious schools to prioritise locally-based children has emerged as a front-runner in plans to reform the admissions policies of faith based schools reports the Irish Times. At present, publicly funded schools which are oversubscribed may prioritise children of their own faith-community ahead of other children who live closer to the school. A consultation process to consider reforms of this policy was launched by Minister for Education Richard Bruton last January. The options that were examined included allowing schools to favour children of their own religion only when those children live within the school’s catchment area, or when that school is their nearest one; a quota-based system; and an outright ban on using religion as a factor in admissions. The Catholic Primary School Management Association, which represents the boards of management of the more than 2,900 Catholic primary schools, said the catchment-area proposal was the “least problematic” of the options. However, it says reforms to admissions policies will do nothing to alleviate the shortage of school places and only extra school places will remedy this.
Women should be able to have abortions simply because their unborn child is the ‘wrong’ sex, a leading ethics expert at the British Medical Association has said. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Professor Wendy Savage called for the law banning such terminations to be scrapped. Her comments will cause shockwaves as she is an influential member of the BMA’s 18-strong medical ethics committee. They also come amid concerns that British parents are seeking abortions based on the gender of babies – which has led to some NHS hospitals refusing to tell parents-to-be that information. Fears that British women are undergoing abortions based on the gender of their babies have grown since a 2014 study found that Britain had up to 4,700 fewer girls than would be statistically expected. And undercover journalists have secretly filmed doctors appearing to agree to carry out abortions for reasons of gender alone. This led the Department of Health to issue new guidance clarifying the law, which stated: ‘Abortion on the grounds of gender alone is illegal.’ Pro-life campaigners reacted with dismay and described her demands as ‘utterly abhorrent’. Conservative MP Mark Field said: ‘Suggesting that women should be able to abort babies solely because they happen to be either male or, much more usually, female, is utterly abhorrent. ‘To have someone like Wendy Savage with her extreme views at the heart of the BMA is a very worrying sign. The majority of people in this country, even those who support abortion, think sex-selective abortion is a step too far.’
A pro-choice US Senator has urged her colleagues to reject a nominee to the US Supreme Court because he believes “the intentional taking of a human life by private persons is always wrong.” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, made the remarks during the first day of Judge Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Although the writings in question regarded euthansia, Senator Feinstein fears the Judge would apply the same principle to life before birth and thereby vote to overturn the Roe v Wade case that made abortion legal throughout the USA. “President Trump repeatedly promised that his judicial nominees would be pro-life, and ‘automatically’ overturn Roe v. Wade,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, said to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Judge Gorsuch has not had occasion to rule directly on a case involving Roe. However, his writings do raise questions. Specifically, he wrote that he believes there are no exceptions to the principle that ‘the intentional taking of a human life by private persons is always wrong.’ This language has been interpreted by both pro-life and pro-choice organizations to mean he would overturn Roe.”
A University in the UK has received permission from the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority to begin creating embryos with three parents. The purpose of creating embryos this way is to attempt to modify them to not have certain genetic diseases. The embryos will have DNA from two mothers and one father, Dr. David A. Prentice, vice president and director of research at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, told LifeSiteNews. “The type of technique they’re using actually involves destroying two embryos to then re-combine [their] parts for a third constructed embryo with genetics from two women and one man,” said Prentice. “This technique starts with death of young human embryos.” He added: “They are literally using human beings – creating human beings – as experiments, . . . It’s not experimenting on human beings where you might be doing something to them. They are the experiment. They’re the creation.”
A US Supreme Court Judge has warned that America’s commitment to religious freedom is under attack. Justice Samuel Alito said that the Supreme Court’s decision in 2015 to impose same-sex marriage on all 50 States in the US was already being used to “vilify those who disagree, and treat them as bigots”. While religious freedom has been recognized in Congress and in the courts, there have been numerous, recent cases testing its limits especially as it applies to Government mandates concerning abortion and contraception. “We are likely to see pitched battles in courts and Congress, state legislatures and town halls,” he said. “But the most important fight is for the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans. It is up to all of us to evangelize our fellow Americans about the issue of religious freedom.”
