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.

More doctors and nurses are needed to service the great numbers of people seeking death by assisted suicide in the Australian state of Queensland.

“I’ve accepted a huge number of [first] requests and we are managing but we just simply don’t have enough practitioners for a sustainable service,” says practitioner Claus Bader.

When voluntary assisted dying (VAD) became legal in Queensland this year, he says they weren’t expecting the “tsunami” of cases which followed.

“[It’s] almost like a continuous wave of choice and determination for people wanting to access the service,” Dr Bader said.

He also wants more money to compensate doctors and to allow for an e-service, in place of face-to-face meetings.

The Commonwealth Criminal Code limits the use of phone, email, fax and video communication to discuss “suicide-related material”. Prescriptions can’t be sent electronically and some assessments can’t be completed remotely.

Dr Bader said for patients in the final stages of the process, those discussions could take two minutes.

“We’re always forced to kind of skirt around the edges of the Criminal Code, while trying to stay just within its boundaries,” Dr Bader said.

The two traditional religious ceremonies marking the occasion — both a Church of Ireland service and a Catholic Mass — are “valuable and often beautiful” events, the Chief Justice said.

However, there has “always been, in my experience, some discomfort with the idea of the opening of the legal year being marked by not one but two religious ceremonies, and also increasingly with the idea that the opening of the year was associated, almost by default, with religion”, he continued.

Senior judges and lawyers from across these islands were in attendance for the historic event, which was devised by a committee chaired by Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne of the Supreme Court.

A devout Catholic woman who was on her knees praying when approached by police, and a man in a wheelchair who was praying the rosary with her, are the first people in Northern Ireland to be arrested in new abortion buffer zones.

The arrests were made by the PSNI at Causeway Hospital in Coleraine on Tuesday, according to a report in the Belfast Newsletter.

A friend of the pair, who often protests with them at the location, said he had spoken to ‘Mary’ [not her real name] after her arrest. He said pro-life protestors had been gathering at the location since abortion restrictions were relaxed in Northern Ireland in 2020.

“We are not part of an organisation, we are just individuals who gather there on Wednesdays because we understand that is the day that abortifacient pills are handed out to pregnant women there,” he said.

“Mary is a Roman Catholic and you can see in the photo she is kneeling as she often does in prayer – holding her rosary beads in one hand and a sign in the other.

“We stand there to reach out to mothers who are on the brink, praying that cars will do a U-turn – and we have seen that happen.”

TDs and Senators have been warned of “grotesque examples of unnecessary deaths” resulting from legalised euthanasia.

Chief Executive of UK Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Professor Kevin Yuill told the ‘Assisted Dying’ committee that in Canada “many” seek euthanasia “for problems of homelessness, poverty, and inadequate medical resources”, leading to “a growing number of grotesque examples of unnecessary deaths”.

Dr Thomas Finegan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Mary Immaculate College said keeping the current law is the only “credible safeguard on offer against the normalisation of consensual killing in healthcare”. Dr Finegan is also on the board of The Iona Institute.

Dr Mark Komrad, a clinical psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University of Maryland, described the practice as “neither good medical ethics, nor good public policy”, and said he hoped Ireland could learn from America’s “bad example”.

“PAS (physician assisted suicide) in the US is anathema to most physicians. The fact is, even among those doctors who endorse these procedures, very few are actually willing to provide them,” he said.

“Lethal prescribing tends to be done by a very few extremely zealous physicians who write scores of lethal scripts, for patients with whom they’ve had a relationship for only one or two days. Last year, one doctor in Oregon wrote 51 scripts.”