During one online news program in late 2021, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, said “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear, . . . In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?”

Last year, when asked to elaborate, Dr. Narita graphically described a scene from “Midsommar,” a 2019 horror film in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff.

Now however, Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context,” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics — to make room for younger generations.

But critics worry that his comments could summon the kinds of sentiments that led Japan to pass a eugenics law in 1948, under which doctors forcibly sterilized thousands of people with intellectual disabilities, mental illness or genetic disorders. In 2016, a man who believed those with disabilities should be euthanized murdered 19 people at a care home outside Tokyo.

Government could solve falling birth-rates by encouraging single women to have children, according to a UK political correspondent.

Writing in the Guardian, Martha Gill said falling birthrates are frequently blamed on a shortage of childcare and housing plus income problems, but the evidence for this is lacking.

Rather, she says it is ‘female empowerment’ that tracks with declining births as many financially independent women have not found the right person to have a child with.

“Surveys of childless women tell us that a top reason is not career, lifestyle or financially related: it’s that they just haven’t found the right partner. This was the second most common reason given in a representative UK study of 42-year-old childless women – right behind not wanting children. (Focusing on career was way down the list.)”.

She then offers a “radical solution”. She notes that single women may not want to pair up, but they can still have children alone. Yet single motherhood is still offputtingly tough and to some extent socially penalised.

“Policymakers would do well to think about how they could better support single mothers. Target them and watch birthrates rise,”, she concludes.

However, countries like Sweden have very high numbers of unmarried mothers but its fertility rate is still well below replacement level.

Bishop Rolando José Álvarez Lagos of Matagalpa was sentenced to more than 26 years in prison during a court hearing in Managua on Friday in the far-left ruled country where the regime has been cracking down on the Church and other critics. Pope Francis has expressed his ‘grief’ at the development.

The Catholic bishop, was convicted of ‘treason, undermining national integrity and spreading false news’, among other charges. The judge of the Appeals Court of Managua also announced that he would be fined and stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship.

The sentence came the day after Bishop Álvarez refused exile to the United States along with another 222 detained opponents to President Manuel Ortega The group also included five priests, a deacon and two seminarians condemned to 10 years imprisonment on charges of conspiring against the government.

A vocal critic of President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime is the first bishop to be imprisoned since Ortega returned to power in 2007.

The sentence comes as the crackdown on the Church in Nicaragua intensifies, with ongoing arrests of priests and closures of Church charities and agencies. In televised remarks following the verdict, President Ortega reiterated his accusations of “terrorism” against Bishop Álvarez.

A new abortion clinic of the Massachusetts-based “The Satanic Temple” ‘reproductive rights’ organisation is set to open in New Mexico.

Recognised as a tax-exempt religious organisation, it seeks to expand access to medical abortions and conducts its own abortion ritual with each procedure.

Anyone in New Mexico seeking free abortions from the organisation must go through the religious rite though what that entails is not clear.

The response from local church leaders has been unequivocal.

“The last thing we need in our state is a satanic temple from Massachusetts to offer free ‘reproductive health’ services,” New Mexico’s bishops said in a joint statement. “We shudder to think what the ‘Religious Abortion Ritual’ that they require is all about.”

Barrister Marie O’Shea was last year appointed as chairwoman of the review. Coalition sources said on Friday that the review is now expected to be submitted in “a short number of weeks”.

In January, the Department of Health said Ms O’Shea believed it was “vitally important” that key research on conscientious objection was considered before the work was submitted to Government.

The chairwoman was awaiting key research from a study, Conscientious Objection after Repeal: Abortion, Law and Ethics, carried out at Trinity College Dublin.

Having a baby through a surrogate has been illegal in Italy for nearly 20 years but Giorgia Meloni’s proposals would extend that prohibition to couples seeking to have a child in countries like the US, Canada and India where it is legal. The main destination for Irish people before the war was Ukraine.

“The penalties should apply for offences committed abroad,” the proposed law says.

Babies were being treated as “merchandise”, the backers of the new legislation said, in what was an “execrable example of the commercialisation of the female body”.

Advocates of the new law said that there had been a dramatic increase in recent years in “procreative tourism”, in which straight couples unable to have children, as well as gay couples, and single people had resorted to looking for surrogate mothers abroad.

“The recourse to this practice has dramatically increased and surrogacy is becoming a veritable business which, just to give an example, is €2 billion a year in India,” they said in presenting the draft law.

A Catholic priest in England is facing a legal battle after he was charged for breaching an exclusion zone by silently praying near an abortion clinic after it had closed for the day, in addition to holding a sign with the words “praying for free speech,”

A further charge related to parking his car, which for some time has had on it a small “unborn lives matter” bumper sticker, within the same area. The area surrounding the facility has been covered by a local Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO), in force since November, which prohibits prayer, distributing information about pregnancy help services, and other activities deemed as “protest”.

For peacefully supporting free speech within the censorship zone, Father Sean Gough was charged with “intimidating service-users” of the abortion facility. This was despite the fact that all this happened while the abortion facility was closed.

“I pray wherever I go, inside my head, for the people around me. How can it be a crime for a priest to pray? I often pray in my head near the abortion facility, but at the time in question, I was praying for free speech, which is under severe pressure in our country today. At all times, I believed my actions to be lawful – freedom of expression, especially when peaceful, is protected in domestic and international law. It is deeply undemocratic to censor public streets, particularly those spaces where we know that many women have benefitted from peaceful offers of help about services available,” said Father Sean Gough.

A Canadian widower is sounding the alarm over what he calls a shocking and dangerous bias in the medical system toward the promotion of euthanasia for sick and elderly patients.

Richard Leskun, 75, made the charge after he said medical staff at the Abbotsford hospital “pressured” and “badgered” him to allow his wife of 50 years, Marilynn, to be euthanised.

Leskun remained at his wife Marilynn’s side nearly 24 hours a day after she was admitted to Abbotsford Regional Hospital, the result of a fall from her wheelchair.

Staff asked him five times over eight days whether they could place a Do-Not-Resuscitate (DNR) designation on his wife.

As his wife’s condition continued to deteriorate, a ‘hospitalist’ — a specialist physician assigned to the case — asked Leskun if he would agree to medical staff euthanising Marilynn.

Eventually, as his wife’s condition worsened further, a nurse informed him that a doctor had already given a DNR order without his consent.

A leading voice in sex education wants children at junior cycle level taught gender ideology, the controversial theory which says your ‘gender’ and biological sex are unrelated.

Dr Siobhan Higgins is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Psychology, NUI Galway and describes herself as a “sexual health promoter” from a “sex positive” perspective.

Asked on Newstalk’s Breakfast show yesterday whether it was prudent to bring a matter of “heated public debate” into schools, she said, “Isn’t that a safe place to actually discuss these things, where we give our children a space, with information, non-biased information, to make informed decisions for themselves”.

She continued: “Our SPHE curriculum as it stands is outdated and our children are finding information about how to explore their sexuality which includes their gender identity from other sources. And unless we provide from the school and from parents, non-judgemental information so that they can make informed decisions, they are going to follow people like Andrew Tate.”