The Danish Council on Ethics has advised Denmark’s parliament against legalising euthanasia.

A report endorsed by 16 of the council’s 17 members concluded that it was “in principle impossible to establish proper regulation of euthanasia”. Other countries such as Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands that have gone down this road have seen numbers availing of it increasing rapidly and the grounds for granting it expand.

In June Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that she might be in favour of legalisation. She said that she had received a letter from a woman who had lost a family member to a painful illness and her dog through euthanasia. The relative’s death was “troubled and chaotic,” she said, whereas the dog’s death was “peaceful and controlled”.

Pro-life critics of this argument respond that putting an animal down does not send a social signal to other animals that assisted suicide is acceptable thereby creating a new social norm with accompanying pressures.

The council’s opinion now makes it less likely that Denmark will follow The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and some states in the US in legalising assisted suicide or euthanasia.

The penalties were issued last month for the incident that occurred in 2019 when the woman, Timika Thomas, a mother of four at the time, was undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) in an attempt to have another child.

She had just had two human embryos placed in her womb when the Las Vegas CVS dispensed the wrong prescription.

Thomas, 38, told CNA on Monday that when she realized what had happened, her first thought was, “They killed my babies.”

Two pharmacists, along with two technicians at the CVS, committed a series of mistakes that led to the abortion drug mistakenly being given to the patient, according to documents filed with the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy.

More than 30 Christians in southern Kaduna state, Nigeria, were kidnapped by terrorists on Saturday.

The assailants ambushed and took the Christians away at gunpoint at about 11 a.m. as they worked on a communal farm in Chikuri, Chikun County, said area resident Victor Dabo.

“Over 30 Christian farmers who were cultivating a farm have been abducted in one fell swoop,” Dabo told Morning Star News.

Another resident said his family members were among those kidnapped.

“The terrorists kidnapped 30 of our Christian villagers as they were working on a farm,” Dogara Peter, told Morning Star News. “My mother and sister are among those kidnapped by the terrorists. This incident has thrown our community into confusion. The terrorists are yet to contact us more than 24 hours after the abduction of our family members.”

The abductions marked the third time the militants have invaded their traumatized community, he said. Saying the community’s last hope lay with police, other security agencies and the Nigerian government, he issued an appeal for them to rescue those held captive.

The rights of children highlights the need for public policies that support parents, a Vatican delegate has told the United Nations.

“The promotion and the protection of the rights of the child cannot be separated from measures to support and strengthen the family”, said the Deputy Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations.

Addressing the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly, Monsignor Robert Murphy remarked that the family is “the natural and fundamental group unit of society”.

He therefore pointed to the need for policy makers to “provide programmes that support and complement mothers and fathers, rather than replace them”, to enable “children to flourish as human beings.”

Monsignor Murphy also reaffirmed the Holy See’s stance that children need safeguards also before birth, advocating in particular against abortion, including sex-selective abortion and eugenic abortion, that victimize girls and children with disabilities. In this regard, he further decried assisted reproduction, particularly in the form of surrogacy, that, he said “is incompatible with respect for the dignity and rights of the child.”

A Catholic teacher could be barred from her profession because of her views on gender and sexuality.

Glawdys Leger, 43, was dismissed from her post at an Anglican School in May 2022 and referred to the Teaching Regulation Authority (TRA), which this week will hold a fitness to practice hearing to consider whether she should banned from the profession for life.

The school authorities complained that Ms Leger “upset one pupil by sharing her views on LBGTQ+ and she went on to share many more in our investigation and subsequent hearings”.

Ms Leger said she was “treated like a criminal” for saying in Religious Education (RE) lessons that Christians believed people are born male and female and that sex outside the marriage of a man and a woman is sinful.

She had been instructed to use materials for RE entitled ‘Who Am I?’ which included introducing 11 and 12-year-old children to gender identities such as pansexual, asexual, intersex and transgender.

A bill designed to stop pro-life gatherings outside Scotland’s abortion clinics has been published at Holyrood, similar to one in Ireland.

Green MSP Gillian Mackay’s bill is likely to have cross-party support and is being backed by the Scottish government.

It would create 200m (656ft) “safe access” zones around facilities which carry out abortions and other health services.

It also includes powers to allow health boards extend the size of a zone allows for unlimited fines for people who breach it.

The bill is opposed by pro-life groups.

Lois McLatchie Miller of ADF UK in Scotland said everyone stands firmly against harassment, but this Bill goes much further, “making it a crime to engage in ‘influencing’ on public streets anywhere ‘visible or audible’ from an area 200m around the abortion facility”.

“The use of such broad and sweeping terminology leaves Scottish people open to prosecution merely for engaging in a consensual conversation, offering charitable help services to women who’d like to consider other options, or even privately praying about abortion and those impacted by it”.

A new draft curriculum for Social Personal and Health Education, which includes sex education, for Senior Cycle students in secondary schools “provides vital space” for Catholic schools to teach the curriculum according to their ethos, a Catholic body has said.

The Catholic Education Partnership (CEP) welcomed the draft overall saying it will allow Catholic schools to present Church teaching “with confidence” and “in line with the moral duty owed to parents/guardians”, in a submission to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment’s (NCCA) consultation process seen by The Irish Catholic.

While some criticise the curriculum for presenting no “overarching ethical perspective”, the CEP believes “this is a strength as it provides a vital space for the ethos of a school, of whatever religion or ethical worldview, to inform the curriculum”.

But the curriculum specification needs to be “strengthened” by an “explicit acknowledgement” of the role of ethos, and must provide “in a practical way” for the role of parents as the primary educators of their children.

Alan Hynes, CEP CEO, also called for the NCCA to include ‘spiritual’ in its ‘wellbeing section’, to encourage discussion of students spirituality.

A pro-family Catholic group has applauded a move in Brussels to designate surrogacy as a form of human trafficking.

“We welcome this decision of the European Parliament, finally recognising surrogacy as a crime of human trafficking. Moreover, surrogacy is now considered together with crimes as slavery, forced marriage, illegal adoption or exploitation of children,” said Vincenzo Bassi of the President of the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE).

“Surrogacy violates human dignity – that of the child as well as the mother – as a form of exploitation that targets the most vulnerable”.

The decision was jointly taken by the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) and the one on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) on an updated implementation of the 2011 Directive on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings and protecting its victims.

The government of New South Wales in Australia has slashed palliative care funding, while directing some of that money into assisted suicide.

The Daily Telegraph revealed that the government covertly cut Aus$150 million that was supposed to pay for items like palliative care nurses, pain management drugs and better end-of-life services.

Palliative care advocates say the cuts will force more people to die at home without specialist help, leading to increased suffering.

The money has been reallocated within NSW Health budget, which includes $97.4 million over four years to implement Voluntary Assisted Dying laws.

The Telegraph understands that NSW Health put forward the cuts as part of the cabinet expenditure review process; and health bureaucrats are understood to have consistently opposed spending money on palliative care.

Palliative care advocate Natasha Walsh, whose husband Derek died of brain cancer in 2019, said the cuts would only increase suffering for families in the midst of trauma.

“Its already immensely painful when someone dies and you know, particularly when they’re young”, she said.

“If the money is being pulled back, then that means less time at either rehab boards or time with service providers to get assistance”.

The European Parliament has taken the first step to designate surrogacy as a form of human trafficking.

On Thursday, the committees on Women’s Rights and Civil Liberties adopted revised rules to combat human trafficking by adding new categories of crimes, including forced marriage and illegal adoption, into the existing EU framework.

Additionally, MEPs voted to include surrogacy for the purposes of reproductive exploitation and the exploitation of children in residential institutions in the scope of the law.

The section prohibiting surrogates received 58 votes in favour, 28 against and 5 abstentions.

“It has been very complicated to get to this point,” admitted Spanish MEP Margarita de la Pisa .

“Without a doubt it is a first triumph,” she continued, “but we cannot claim victory because there is room for interpretation.” The inclusion of surrogacy has support of MEPs on the right and the left, but it has been resisted by the Greens and Renew (liberals).

Once the draft position has been endorsed by the full parliament, negotiations with the European Council and Commission on the final form of the law can begin.