Abortion in the United States now the leading cause of death, outstripping cancer and heart disease, researchers have revealed. In a paper, ‘Induced Abortion, Mortality, and the Conduct of Science’, published in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers compiled figures on abortion nationwide for 2009 to reveal that while deaths from heart disease amounted to 599,413 and cancers 567, 628, the 1,152,000 abortions in that year almost match the other causes combined, making it the lead cause of death and, across all mortality figures for that year, 32.1% of the total.

Women with terminally ill unborn babies are to receive HSE counselling post-abortion under newly updated guidelines for health workers. It is understood that the guidelines will offer instructions on how best to deal with parents who suffer a loss, regardless of regardless of whether the mother carried the child to full-term or travelled abroad for an abortion. Given that the new guidelines use the term ‘fatal foetal anomaly’, the move is sure to be viewed by pro-life advocates as a worrying development at a time when there is a call for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment constitutional protection for the unborn.

Decades of religious decline in Britain have levelled off according to soon-to-be released figures. According to The Sunday Telegraph, which has seen the results of the 2016 British Social Attitudes Survey, “the overall proportion of Britons who described themselves as Christian actually rose one percentage point in the last year from 42% to 43%”. The rise, it says, corresponds to a 1% decline in those describing themselves as having no religion, from 49% to 48%. Within the category of those aged under 25, the number of non-believers actually fell three percentage points, from 65% to 62%.

The Immigrant Council of Ireland and the Ruhama anti-prostitution group have renewed calls for the criminalising of sex buyers following comments by Minister John Halligan that prostitution should be legalised. Voicing backing for the Turn Off the Red Light campaign, both groups, which support trafficked women and those forced into prostitution, said most women in prostitution want to escape that life and most had been trafficked into it. “The Government can enact the Sexual Offences Bill within a matter of weeks. This Bill takes huge strides in tackling many forms of sexual exploitation of vulnerable children and adults,” the Council stated.

Medical practitioners in the US state of Illinois have launched a legal bid to have a new law denying conscientious objection to abortion overturned. The move comes in the wake of the recent signing of Senate Bill 1564, which removed the right of doctors to opt out of providing abortions to patients on moral and religious grounds. The Alliance Defending Freedom group has announced it is backing a doctor and two pregnancy centres in the legal challenge. “The governor should have vetoed this bill for many reasons, including its incompatibility with Illinois law and the state constitution, which specifically protects freedom of conscience and free speech,” said ADF Senior Counsel Matt Bowman.

Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone has said she favours widening access to abortion beyond rape and fatal foetal abnormality as such provisions would “do nothing at all for most women in Ireland”. Arguing that she supports the repeal of the Constitutional protection for the unborn, Minister Zappone said women “do not want to be pregnant without their consent [and] I am committed to them having the option not to be”.

The new leader of Nigeria’s Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has instructed his followers to actively target Christians in the country. In a message announcing his leadership, Abu Musab al-Barnawi alleges that there is an active conspiracy in Nigeria to Christianise the region and says this will be resisted. He said members of Boko Haram will react by “booby-trapping and blowing up every church that we are able to reach, and killing all of those (Christians) who we find from the citizens of the cross”.

Germany’s Federal Court of Justice has rejected the creation of a third gender category to accommodate a person who identifies as neither male nor female. In a case taken by the unidentified German citizen, registered as female, it was argued that as she could produce a genetic analysis proving to be neither male nor female, she should be granted the right to identify as ‘intersex’. The court, however, disagreed and ruled that German law would not allow entry of a third option of “inter” or “diverse” in the birth registry, and saw no reason to refer the matter to the German constitutional court. The plaintiff has said she will challenge the ruling.