Society must promote hope, but assisted suicide is a “statement of no hope”, the mother of Donal Walsh, whose teenage son’s battle against cancer received huge publicity 10 years ago, told an Oireachtas committee.

Speaking before the Joint Committee on Assisted Dying on Tuesday, Elma Walsh, raised the palliative care her received before he died.

She warned that introducing assisted suicide would “undermine the trust placed in doctors when it comes to end-of-life care”.

Ms Walsh said that while “society must promote hope, assisted suicide is a message of no hope”.

“Telling young people that their life itself is valuable, no matter how uphill it seems at the time, and legalising assisted dying at the same time is to bring about a clash of cultures.”

Ms Walsh pleaded with legislators and politicians to avert the “bizarre situation” where on “one hand we are putting out messages of suicide prevention and on the other we would be offering it”.

“For some we will be saying your life is not living, suicide will be the expectation not an ‘option’.”

Ms Walsh said she “feared” what could be set in motion by the committee should they support TD Gino Kenny’s bill to legalise assisted suicide.

Proposed abortion exclusion zone legislation aimed at silencing pro-life witness is a “draconian” restriction on free expression and freedom of belief, Bishop Kevin Doran has said.

The ‘Safe Access Zones Bill’, currently before the Dáil, proposes 100-metre exclusion zones outside GP clinics and hospitals in which pro-life prayer and witness would be banned.

While the legislation exempts statements made within church buildings, it includes church grounds that fall within the 100-metre exclusion zone.

As the bill includes all GP’s clinics, not just those performing abortions, churches and cathedrals around the country could face penalties if they display pro-life related material on church grounds.

Bishop Doran, chair of the bishops’ council for life, called the bill “draconian” and “fundamentally unjust”, saying the constitution provides people the right to profess their faith publicly “not just in church buildings”.

Exclusion zones legislation a ‘draconian’ restriction on free expression – Bishop Doran

An MP who previously faced death threats and risked deselection for holding pro-life views, has left the Scottish National Party due to “toxic and bullying” treatment from her colleagues.

Dr Lisa Cameron made the announcement yesterday after revealing her deteriorating mental health has led her to start taking antidepressants.

Aside from disagreements about Scottish independence, Cameron also differed with her former party on abortion. In 2020, she was the only member of her party to vote against an abortion buffer zone bill.

In 2018, she was one of only two SNP MPs to vote against forcing an abortion law on Northern Ireland. She revealed her office received more than 900 messages, including “abuse” and “cyberbullying” after she voted against that measure.

Her pro-life views have made her the subject of at least one death threat. Speaking to Christian Today after the abortion buffer zone vote in 2020, she said “I am concerned by the actions of those who have whipped up hatred and toxic aggression online in recent weeks following from my conscience votes on abortion and particularly distressed to have once again received a death threat towards my family”.

Irish Catholic Bishops have called on lawmakers to not invert the purpose of healthcare by legislating for the killing of patients in a regime of ‘assisted dying’.

The Bishops made an appeal instead, “to respect the integrity of healthcare as a service to life from conception until natural death.”

Reflecting on serious illness, they say young and old can find hidden reserves of faith, hope and love, and use the time, “to express gratitude and to heal wounded relationships”.

By contrast, they note, some TDs and Senators want assisted suicide, presenting it as a way of respecting the autonomy of a person for whom life has become unbearable.

“In reality it is an abdication of the responsibility of society to support people who are terminally ill and their families, in living the final days and weeks of life as fully and richly as possible”.

They add: “From our knowledge of what has happened in other jurisdictions, it is also clear to us that the availability of assisted suicide is very quickly extended to include people with all kinds of life limiting conditions, including intellectual disability, whose continued existence is perceived to be a burden on society.”

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”.