A challenge to the ban on abortion in Poland when a child has a disability was struck down by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last week.

Without ruling on the merits, the Court said that the applicants could not personally claim to be “victims” of the ban as they were not pregnant or expecting a child with a disability.

At issue was a decision of the Polish Constitutional Court of October 22, 2020 which ruled that a long-standing law allowing “eugenic abortion”, or abortion when a foetus is “malformed”, was contrary to the constitutional principles of respect for human life and dignity, which is endowed to every human being from before birth.

The decision was welcomed by the pro-life European Centre for Law and Justice who called it a significant defeat of pro-abortion lobby groups from all over the world.

Canada’s legalisation of euthanasia should be a warning sign for other countries as people are offered help to die if they do not have adequate access to social supports, MPs in the House of Commons have been told.

The country has a “very aggressive medical delivery system of euthanasia”, a parliamentary committee heard as it listened to experts on the issue.

In what was described as a “very disturbing societal norm”, Dr Scott Kim, told MPs: “The law itself says this doesn’t have to be last resort, which means that a person could genuinely lack access to disability services, to outpatient psychiatric treatment, which is common in Canada. Those people would still qualify.”

Canadian Professor Trudo Lemmens said he had been a supporter of initial legislation but it has become a “form of harm reduction”.

“I would say Canada is a warning sign for countries that contemplate legalising medical assistance in dying or assisted suicide and euthanasia.”

A growing ideological polarization between men and women spells bad news for marriage as young men are moving slightly right while young women move strongly left and fewer Americans are willing to date or marry across the political aisle.

That’s according to Brad Wilcox of the Institute of Family Studies.

In an article in the Atlantic magazine, he says “Liberal women & conservative men who want to marry face a particular challenge:… there are only 0.6 single liberal young men for each single liberal young woman; likewise, only 0.5 single conservative young women exist for every conservative young man.”

“About 1 in 5 young single adults will have to put a ring on someone outside their ideological tribe—a consequence of the fact that far more single conservative men than conservative single women now exist, as well as far more single liberal women than single liberal men.”

“The sobering future for marriage and family life in America is that greater political polarisation spells trouble for already anemic rates of dating, mating, and marrying,”

Staff and patients are upset at the removal of all Catholic imagery from St Vincent’s University Hospital, after the hospital’s controversial transfer from the Religious Sisters of Charity (RSC).

All crucifixes and holy images – including of the hospital’s founder Mother Mary Aikenhead – were removed from public display this year in the hospital, while the Blessed Sacrament will no longer be housed in one of the two chapels in the South Dublin hospital.

In a statement to the Irish Catholic, St Vincent’s Holding Group (SVHG) said all religious artefacts had been removed and an inventory taken following the transfer from the Sisters to the SVHG. A new National Maternity Hospital will be built on the same campus as St Vincent’s public and private hospital. The land on which the maternity hospital will be built has been leased long-term to the State.

It is unclear why the religious artefacts have been removed. Other publicly-funded hospitals such as the Mater in Dublin still have such artefacts.

The hospital had already removed a large statue of Our Lady from the Merrion Road end of the campus following upgrades to the car park.

The main chapel will continue to facilitate daily Mass and a chaplaincy service is available to patients.

A Catholic bishop has criticised a plan for school sex education class to include lessons on how to obtain an abortion. The order to do so was ordered by the Northern Secretary. The Secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, said he was doing so following a recommendation by the UN.

Bishop of Derry Donal McKeown said he was concerned that schools not offering the lessons could be “criminalised”.

He added: “Schools want to offer pupils education, not just information.

“If anyone wants to find out about abortion you get something called Google and you type in abortion,” he said.

He enforced the move in Parliament, based on recommendations made in a United Nations report. UN recommendations are not legally binding.

Separately, the Presbyterian Moderator, Dr John Kirkpatrick, said that parents may withdraw their children from the new curriculum, while teachers may boycott the teaching of it.

Childbirth in England and Wales fell to its lowest recorded level over the past decade in all educational groups, a study reveals.

The research, from the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, found women had fewer children, and did so later in life, between 2010 and 2020.

Better educated women were delaying childbirth at a greater rate than those who were less well educated, researchers discovered.

The birth rate for well-educated women whose parents were also highly educated dropped from 1.8 to 1.4 children per woman during the period.

Less-educated women had their children younger in life, but the birth rate for this category also saw a drop — showing all women were having children later. The study said it had found a “substantial decline in each education group”, defined either by women’s parents’ education alone or by a woman’s own education relative to her parents’ education.

The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Dr John Kirkpatrick, said the Northern Ireland Secretary was trying to “impose a particular worldview on the education of children in Northern Ireland”.

Among other things, the course would instruct pupils on how to access abortion.

“In an increasingly pluralistic context, RSE of course should be taught in a sensitive and inclusive manner, where teaching is reinforced and supported by policies and processes that schools have in place around safeguarding, bullying and pastoral care,” he said.

“Young people should have the opportunity to explore their own personal morals, values and beliefs including the moral and ethical considerations around sensitive issues like abortion and contraception.

“The secretary of state’s actions run contrary to these aspirations,” he continued.

Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe according to a new survey.

Data on more than 20,000 Europeans was collected at the end of 2022 from an online consumer panel.

Findings show that on average, 13pc of respondents reported feeling lonely most or all of the time in 2022, while 35pc reported being lonely at least some of the time.

According to the survey, loneliness is most prevalent in Ireland as over 20pc of respondents reported feeling lonely.

Luxemburg, Bulgaria and Greece followed behind while the lowest levels, all below 10pc, are observed in the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Croatia and Austria.

Irish, UK and US doctors are carefully monitoring gonorrhea detections amid concern at a new antibiotic resistant strain and its potential public health impact given the rate of increase of the illness in Ireland.

Medical chiefs urged people to take sexual health precautions amid warnings about the dangers of presuming such sexually transmitted infections are easily treated.

One strain of gonorrhea, caused by the bacteria Niesseria Gonorrhoeae, is exceptionally resistant to normal antibiotics and treatment regimes.

“It is a reminder that gonorrhea is becoming increasingly resistant, increasingly hard to treat,” warned Dr Jeffrey Klausner who is a consultant with the US Center for Disease Control (CDC).

“We don’t have any new antibiotics. We haven’t had new antibiotics to treat gonorrhea for years and we really need a different treatment strategy.”

The latest Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) report starkly revealed that case numbers of all five major STDs increased over the past 12 months in Ireland – with all five now being notified at higher levels last year than at 2018, two years before the pandemic struck.

Detections of gonorrhea soared from 2,098 in 2021 to 4,075 last year.

An abortion bill which passed its second stage in the Dáil on Wednesday evening, “goes miles beyond what people voted for”, according to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, who is himself strongly pro-choice.

The Bill removes virtually all restrictions on the procedure.

Government TDs were given a free vote. Although an opposition Bill, it passed by 67-64. There were eight abstentions.

Mr Donnelly told Newstalk Breakfast that he abstained because the Bill did not respect the will of the people expressed in the referendum of May 2018.

“I actually looked at the Bill in great detail. The Bill goes miles beyond what people voted for in repealing the Eighth. I made this point to Deputy Smith and to others who were supporting the Bill during the second stage debate.

“I campaigned very hard for Repeal, but the Bill does not respect that vote at all because it goes way beyond that vote.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar also sounded a note of caution. He campaigned for repealing the right to life, “but I also believe that when we called for a Yes vote at the time we gave people certain assurances. Those assurances were set out at the time.”

Mr Varadkar said: “This is a sensitive issue, it’s an issue of conscience. It’s about the rights of woman and also about the rights of children.”