It is likely to be another week before the wording for the referendum to delete the protection afforded mothers in the home in the Constitution will go to Government for approval. The Government wants to replace it with gender-neutral wording.
Despite some indications over the last week that the wording for the referendum would be considered at today’s Cabinet meeting, it is now expected to go before Minsters next week.
The original intention of holding the referendum this month was abandoned some time ago and March 8th – International Women’s Day – is now likely to be the polling day.
The plans are also set to include inserting recognition of family carers and also an aspiration that the State should “strive to support the provision of care” in the home into the Constitution.
The number of abortions in England and Wales for 2023 could reach an unprecedented high of 325,000, according to an independent public health consultant.
Kevin Duffy says official government data for January to June 2022 reported a staggering 17% increase over the same period in 2021.
On 22 November 2023, Parliament published written evidence submitted by MSI Reproductive Choices to the inquiry ‘Impact of the rising cost of living on women’. Citing the 17% rise in 2022 MSI-RC says: “As a leading abortion provider [we have] seen an even bigger rise. For example, the first period in 2023 saw an increase of 32% compared with the same time period in 2022…”
Duffy says the official 2022 full-year data from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) has not yet been published, but “based on the OHID data for the first six months of 2022 and making an estimate for 2023 based on MSI’s written evidence, we can project a total of 325,000 abortions in 2023”.
This would mean that 1-in-3 pregnancies now end in abortion, up from 1-in-4 in the past.
A UK Government review has revealed that abortion complication rates are likely much higher than has been previously reported.
The review, undertaken by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), analysed Hospital Emissions Statistics (HES) for England from the years 2017 to 2021. They compared the complication rate derived from this analysis to the currently reported complications rate derived from the Abortion Notification System (ANS) based on data provided by abortion providers, which are reported in the annual abortion statistics.
From 2017-2021, the review found the average abortion complication rate was 1.52 per 1,000 abortions using data derived from the ANS as used in the annual abortion statistics. However, the review also found the average abortion complication rate over the same time period using data from HES was 4.06 , over 2.6 times higher. When the HES data analysis also includes incomplete abortions, the complication rate over the same period is 18.16 per 1,000 abortions. This is over 11.9 times higher than the ANS-derived complication rate used in the annual abortion statistics which does not include incomplete abortions.
A theology lecturer is to sue over allegations that a Methodist theological college threatened him with a counterterrorism referral after he criticised the church’s stance on homosexuality.
Aaron Edwards has claimed that he was sacked from his position at Cliff College in Derbyshire after commenting on Twitter/X that senior church officials were obsessed with “apologising for their apparently barbaric homophobia, whether or not it’s true”.
The 37-year-old father of five has also alleged that college officials threatened to refer him to the government’s Prevent scheme, which is designed to crack down on radicalisation.
At the centre of the legal row is a post on Twitter/X from February in which Edwards commented: “Homosexuality is invading the Church. Evangelicals no longer see the severity of this [because] they’re busy apologising for their apparently barbaric homophobia, whether or not it’s true.”
The lecturer went on to say: “This *is* a ‘Gospel issue’, by the way. If sin is no longer sin, we no longer need a Saviour.”
Catholic schools’ bodies have warned that a draft for a new SPHE curriculum for Senior Cycle “ignores” and “underplays” spiritual wellbeing.
The APTCS expressed “great concern” that “religion, spirituality and values seem to be ignored when all of them play a very important role in the development of young people,” the body said in their submission.
Concerns regarding the absence of spirituality from the new course were also raised by the Joint Managerial Body/Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools (JMB/AMCSS).
“Education cannot be deemed to be holistic in any sense if it ignores either our actions or the spiritual or moral basis of the values that inform such actions,” the body said in their submission.
They stressed the importance of proper engagement with parents when schools introduced the revised curriculum, to ensure a “trusting relationship” between schools and parents.
A 14-year-old Nigerian Christian escaped his Islamic kidnappers last week after more than two years in captivity.
Treasure Ayuba was one of 121 students who were kidnapped by a group of radical Islamic Fulani herdsmen from their school in Kaduna, Nigeria, in July 2021.
Parents were forced to negotiate with the terrorists over ransom payments, local pastor Winyadebi Rolis said, but only some students were freed while the kidnappers upped their demands.
Ayuba’s captors reportedly planned to hold him until he converted to Islam. Ayuba did not and managed to escape instead.
“Treasure somehow managed to sneak away and escape from the extremists,” Winyadebi said. “He walked at night and hid during the day. Eventually he found hunters who took him to his hometown and from there he was able to find his way home.”
Nigeria is one the worst countries in the world for Christian persecution, with thousands being killed every year. Christians in the African nation have accused the government of negligence and asked them to take stronger steps to counter the violence.
The vice president-elect of Argentina has heralded a “new era” for the pro-life movement and called for a repeal of the nation’s 2020 law that legalised abortion up to 14 weeks.
The presidential election was won by Javier Milei, an avowed anti-abortion politician, securing 55.6% of the national vote.
During his campaign, Milei vowed to launch a referendum on Argentina’s abortion law
His running mate, Victoria Villarruel, 48, and now the vice president-elect, is also an outspoken pro-lifer who has used her position as a writer and politician to condemn abortion and affirm the “right to life, because life begins at conception”, stating that her stance is not “a matter of religion” but of “pure biology”.
The congresswoman has also stated that she’d support a repeal of the “disastrous” 2020 law that legalised abortion up to 14 weeks, explaining that “there was a lobby here that was also promoted from abroad, abortion is big business and there is a lobby that promoted this issue”.
A call for greater provision of palliative care was made at the Oireachtas committee on ‘assisted dying’ on Tuesday.
The meeting heard from the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF), the Irish Association for Palliative Care (IAPC) and from Hope Ireland.
In its submission, the IHF said some 74 per cent of Irish adults would prefer to die at home, but only 23 per cent will do so.
The IHF told the committee that access to timely palliative care was associated with improved quality of life, and the percentage of people dying in Ireland who will require palliative care was projected to increase by up to 84 per cent by the year 2046 as the population ages.
“While availability and access to palliative care services has been increasing, access is uneven and there are still some regions without an inpatient Specialist Palliative Care unit”.
There was a need to focus on strengthening access to primary palliative care and generalist palliative care, the IHF said, adding, “access to care can be improved through expanding the knowledge on end-of-life care across different professionals and care settings.”
Medical ethics must be informed by a robust understanding of medicine’s role within the Nazi regime, according to a new report from a commission of prestigious journal, The Lancet.
The history of medicine is the focus of the ‘Lancet Commission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today, teaching for tomorrow’.
Through examples of discriminatory and inhumane medical policies and practices under the Nazi regime, the authors inform approaches to contemporary issues in medicine and underscore the importance of centring human rights and dignity in medical professionals’ conduct, including a willingness to stand up to wrongdoing whenever and wherever necessary.
“Nazi medical atrocities represent some of the most extreme and best-documented examples of medical involvement in human rights violations in history,” explains Commission Co-Chair Dr Sabine Hildebrandt of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “While it is tempting to view the perpetrators as incomprehensible monsters, the evidence put forward by the Commission demonstrates how many health professionals were capable of committing ethical transgressions and even crimes against their patients under certain conditions and pressures.”
The Government is likely to propose a change to the definition of marriage and family in the constitution in a second referendum planned for early March.
The change will clarify that families not based on marriage are legally recognised. It is not clear what will happen the “special status” of marriage.
The vote will be held on the same day — likely March 8th — as the referendum on deleting the protection afforded mothers in the home.
Though there are significant misgivings about the proposal within Government, with several senior figures unconvinced on the issue, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar confirmed to the Dáil on Tuesday that he will propose two separate referendums.
Government spokespeople declined to release the proposed wording until the plan is approved by the Cabinet, expected to happen next week.
Article 41 recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental group unit of Society, possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law, though it does not define what it means by the family.
A subsequent section pledges to guard “with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack”.
