The Catholic Archdiocese of San Antonio in Texas has condemned the publication of a full-page ad in a daily newspaper claiming that “public funding for abortion is a Catholic social justice value”. In a statement reacting to the Catholics for Choice ad in the San Antonio Express-News, the archdiocese said it “misrepresents the truth and what the Catholic Church believes and teaches”. “This misrepresentation is demonstrated by their statement that ‘Public funding for abortion is a Catholic social justice value,’” the statement continued. “Nothing could be further from the truth…It is our hope that one day Catholics for Choice will take the time to acquaint themselves with basic Catholic teachings, and acknowledge the truth of the Catholic faith, and not choose to misrepresent her teachings with false and inaccurate information and ads that only work to confuse and mislead the public.”
Women in Britain are freezing their eggs as they take longer to find a suitable partner, new research has shown. In a study conducted among 31 women who have frozen their eggs, by Kylie Baldwin, a PhD student at De Montfort University, it was found that none of the women had undertaken the process due to career reasons but instead had pursued their careers as they had not yet found a man deemed suitable for starting a family. “It was the absence of this particular type of potential father, not just the absence of any partner, that led them to freeze the eggs,” Baldwin said. “It’s about having the right dad for their child.” Freezing ova for later fertilisation was first offered to cancer patients whose treatment caused permanent sterility to allow them to have children after treatment. Now it is most common among women simply choosing to delay motherhood.
The British government is to relax rules that restricted the way in which faith schools select new pupils. Prime Minister Theresa May has stated that an admissions cap, limiting oversubscribed new faith schools to only selecting half of their intake from children of their own faith will be brought to an end and additional Catholic schools will be built in order to meet demand because Catholic schools “are more successful, more popular and more ethnically diverse than other types of state school.”
A US appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital that refused a woman an abortion. The Mercy Health Partners facility in Muskegon, Michigan, had faced legal action for “denial of medical care” after Tamesha Means suffered pregnancy complications at 18 weeks but was not advised during her treatment to consider abortion as one option. The case was pursued after an earlier dismissal – which ruled that a negligence claim would “impermissibly intrude upon ecclesiastical matters” – and now the Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has upheld that decision on the basis that negligence had not been proved.
Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in 122 cities have taken part in marches in defence of traditional marriage. The marches were organised in response to moves by President Enrique Peña Nieto to have same-sex marriage recognised in the nation’s Constitution. The group behind the marches, Frente Nacional Por La Familia (National Front for the Family) warned that the president’s plans will be far-reaching and damaging for families. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Catholic Church said the move on same-sex marriage was a betrayal on the part of a president who had courted Church support in the past.
Christians in Egypt have said they are “at breaking point” amid ongoing violent attacks on them by Muslim extremists. A report in the New York Times reveals that the Christian community faces regular house burnings, attacks on Christians in the streets and hate graffiti on church walls. “We are at a breaking point,” Bishop Makarios of the city of Minya said. “People can’t put up with any more of this.” Meanwhile, the government-appointed imam charged with maintaining peace between communities insists there is no problem. “No one has been killed,” Imam Mahmoud Gomaa said. “No one has even been wounded. There’s no conflict. The problem is really with the journalists writing about it.”
The US Commission on Civil Rights has stated that anti-discrimination laws outweigh religious freedom in its latest report. According to the body’s report on Peaceful Coexistence: “Civil rights protections ensuring non-discrimination, as embodied in the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of preeminent importance in American jurisprudence…Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights.” In one strong entry in the report, Chairman Martin Castro stated: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance.”
Tens of thousands of lives have been saved by Ireland’s Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the Pro-Life Campaign (PLC) claims. A report commissioned by the group aimed to challenge assertions made by pro-abortion advocates that the amendment merely results in women travelling abroad for abortions. It found that in 2014, some 5.2% of pregnancies in Ireland were ended by abortion (performed outside the jurisdiction), while the rate in Sweden was 24%, 21% in England and Wales and 18% in Spain. “At a very conservative estimate there are tens of thousands of Irish people alive today precisely because of the protection that the Eighth Amendment gives to the unborn,” the report states. Even at the lowest of these rates, the report adds, there would have been 229,000 abortions between 1994 and 2014, meaning “121,000 Irish citizens would not have been born”.
Churches in the US state of Massachusetts may be forced to accommodate transgender access to toilet facilities under a new anti-discrimination law. Coming into effect on October 1, the new legislation has been supplemented with a ‘Gender Identity Guidance’ booklet to better explain the responsibilities of businesses and “agents of places of public accommodation”. The guidance goes on to make clear that even places of worship may at times fall into the latter category. “Even a church could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public,” the guidance notes. The religious freedom law group Alliance Defending Freedom has reacted by arguing that the law and its interpretation clearly violates the First Amendment on freedom of religion.
A US academic has challenged a New York Times article which downplayed the value of adult stem cell therapies to point out that “over 1.5 million patients have had their lives saved and health improved by adult stem cell transplants”. David Prentice PhD, Research Director of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, was prompted to speak out after an article penned by Times journalist Gina Kolata that trials with adult stem cells are “still in the earliest phase”. Dr Prentice referenced published research in which stem cell transplants are hailed as both life-saving and cost-effective, and he said articles downplaying stem adult stem cells only serve to “confuse, not illuminate, the facts about stem cell therapies”.
