France could soon legalise euthanasia for the terminally ill after Emmanuel Macron called for a law on a “French model on the end of life” within months.
The French president on Monday pledged to table a draft law on a so-called ‘right to die’ by the “end of summer,” a day after a citizens assembly called for legislation to be changed.
Mr Macron said the bill would build on the work of a group of 184 randomly-appointed French citizens who have debated the issue since December.
In conclusions handed to the French president this weekend, some 76 per cent of the citizen’s council said they favoured assisted suicide in some form.
There has been a call to circumscribe the use of conscientious objection as Ireland’s system of providing abortions comes under strain.
Academic, Dr Deirdre Duffy was appointed by the Government to examine the working of the current system. She identified issues around guidance on conscientious objection as well shortcomings in the spread of services available around the country and the availability of staff and facilities in hospitals.
Regarding conscientious objection, she said there was regulation and guidance but their research had uncovered evidence of conscientious objection being interpreted in various ways that was not ‘consistent’ with these regulations. It was not clear what she meant by this and pro-life groups are concerned it may lead to conscience rights being curtailed.
“Where someone breaches their obligations in a hospital, it is almost impossible to challenge them. If you take someone off the ward for unprofessional conduct for example, there may be no one there to fill their post,” she said. “There is a lack of consistent management of conscientious objection.”
Dr Duffy said the availability of facilities and staff were major issues and there were instances of people being sent back from operating theatres or “timing out” of abortion access because of this.
In a tweet, Aontu said: “90% of doctors refuse to carry out abortions. Most doctors became doctors to save lives, not to end lives. Now the government are seeking ways of forcing medics to participate in abortions against their conscience.“
The Irish author, John Banville, has described the Catholic Church as an “evil” institution that should be “abolished”.
In his latest novel, “The Lock-Up”, the Booker Prize winner features the Church in a malign role: interfering in an investigation into the murder of a pro-abortion campaigner.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Banville revealed his personal feelings about the ecclesial body: “I think it’s an evil institution. It should be abolished. It’s not just the child abuse, but the suppression of women, the hatred of the flesh”.
He added: “My poor mother used to say to me: ‘Laughing will turn to crying.’ She wouldn’t have been like that otherwise. At the end of her life she realised that she’d been had. This whole religious thing was nonsense. It’s a power structure run by men.”
He concluded, “Obviously I’m now prepared for the Catholic equivalent of a fatwa.”
Veteran journalist, Mary Kenny, said his attitude called to mind the penal laws.
‘The National Maternity Hospital (NMH) now allows parents to register a newborn baby with their sex unspecified after its IT system was updated four years ago.
Mary Brosnan, director of midwifery and nursing at the NMH, said the parental decision to register a baby with their sex unspecified was “a rare occurrence” and that only three couples had chosen to do so in the past two years.
“It’s a cultural change, we try to make sure that people are respectful of everybody’s wishes, and try not to upset anybody by using the terms male or female if that’s what a couple don’t want to do,” she told The Sunday Times yesterday.
“But it’s certainly a challenge because I suppose we’re conditioned to welcoming somebody into the world as a boy or a girl and there’s a lot of discussion around the name.”’
In doing so, the judges dismissed an appeal by the Adoption Authority of Ireland against a High Court order that facilitated recognition of an adoption order made by a US state court in respect of the Northern Irish man and the two children.
The authority wanted clarity on points of law and public policy relating to its ability to register foreign adoptions arising from surrogacy arrangements.
Under the Adoption Act of 2010, the authority may recognise a foreign domestic adoption “unless contrary to public policy”. There is a prohibition under the Act against “receiving, making or giving certain payments and rewards” as part of an adoption agreement.
A woman donated an egg, while another woman in the US carried and gave birth to the children pursuant to a commercial arrangement that agreed the NOrthern Irish man and his partner were the intended parents.
The letter said the bishops are ready “to accompany all” – but also stresses that accompaniment has the goal of conformity with Church teaching.
The Bishops grant their support of some aspirations of the contemporary movement for LGBT rights, and condemns unjust discrimination of any kind.
But, they add that when a “view of human nature that abstracts from the embodied integrity of personhood, as if physical gender were accidental” is put forward, “we must dissent”.
Further to this, “we protest when such a view is imposed on children as if it were not a daring hypothesis but a proven truth”.
The bishops, writing in the name of the Scandinavian Bishops’ Conference, related these points of dissension to Christianity’s conception of personhood as intrinsically embodied.
This embodiment is especially manifest in the “complementarity of male and female”, itself “sanctified in nuptial union” and “perfected in the Lamb’s marriage feast at the end of history.
In the UK, parents of children born through surrogacy will become the child’s legal parents at birth under proposed legal changes in a move that ignores all ethical criticisms of surrogacy including that it commodifies babies and exploits low-income women who rent out their wombs to make a living.
After consulting on surrogacy reforms in 2019, the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission published their final report detailing a new system to govern surrogacy.
Family law commissioner Professor Nick Hopkins said surrogacy has been increasingly used in recent years to form families ‘but our decades-old laws are outdated and not fit for purpose’. Many European countries ban surrogacy in all forms because of ethical concerns.
Under the current law, the legal mother of the child is the surrogate and the father or second parent is usually either the surrogate’s spouse or civil partner. An ‘intended parent’ can use the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 to become a second parent. However, often at the time of birth, neither, or at most only one, of the intended parents will be the legal parent.
The Euthanasia Expertise Center granted 1,240 requests for euthanasia last year, 11 percent more than in 2021.
The number of requests increased by 13 percent, from 3,689 in 2021 to 4,159 in 2022.
The Center helps people whose own doctor won’t honour their request for euthanasia, for example, because they find the request too complicated.
Only about a third of the patients who went to the Center last year were killed via euthanasia.
Around a fifth of the euthanasia requests the Center received last year came from patients with ‘psychological suffering’. Of those 781 requests, the center granted 90.
The number of euthanasia requests increases nationwide by almost 10 percent per year. The number of times doctors throughout the Netherlands granted euthanasia last year will be announced next month. In 2021 it was 7,666 times.
Both attacks took place in Zangon Kataf County, where 10 Christians were killed on March 14 in Langson village and 17 slain in Ungwan Wakili village on March 10, residents said.
Residents of Langson said dozens more were wounded in the attack that began at 9pm.
“I urge the government to match words with action by arresting the perpetrators since the government knows them and where they are,” said Sam Achie, president of the area community development association. “I appeal to Nigeria government to as a matter of urgency deploy more security agents to Zangon Kataf Local Government Area in order to arrest the recurring attacks on innocent Christians whose lives and property are being destroyed for no justifiable reason.”
A new review of the State’s abortion law is likely to recommend the axing of a safeguard designed to allow women breathing space before deciding whether to have an abortion.
Such a move would significantly increase the number of abortions taking place every year, according to the Pro-Life Campaign (PLC).
Two senior political sources told the Irish Times that the review recommends a “loosening” of the current law, including the potential removal of the three-day wait to access an abortion.
Commenting on the media report, the PLC’s Eilís Mulroy said in the first three years of the abortion law 3,951 women did not proceed beyond the first consultation, calling it “solid evidence” that thousands of women used the period to decide for keeping their baby.
Axing that would “without question” lead to another significant rise in abortion numbers, she said.
Ms Mulroy also noted that many people who voted Yes in 2018 did so following assurances that this three-day period would be a central component of the eventual abortion law. It was part of the ‘strict guidelines’ which then-Tánaiste Simon Coveney said impacted his decision to call for a Yes vote.
She concluded that removing that safeguard now would be “a betrayal of voters and of women in need”.
