The annual March for Life is set to take place in Dublin tomorrow starting on St Stephen’s Green at 2.30pm. It is set to be the last large outdoor pro-life gathering of 2022.
At the March, people and groups will be uniting with pro-life Oireachtas members to demand that the Government address Ireland’s rising abortion rate and stop standing in the way of positive alternatives to abortion being being promoted. In the first three years of the law’s operation that have been around 20,000 abortions.
Among the speakers will be Carol Nolan, TD, and the Aontu leader, Peadar Toibin.
It is expected they will address the Government’s ongoing three year review of the 2018 abortion legislation.
French President Emmanuel Macron has announced a national debate on end-of-life options that will include exploring the possibility of legalising assisted suicide.
A 2016 French law provides that doctors can keep terminally ill patients sedated before death but stops short of allowing assisted suicide.
Macron said in a written statement that a panel of citizens would work on the issue in coordination with health care workers over the coming months, while local debates are organized in French regions.
The government plans to hold parallel discussions with lawmakers from all political parties to find the broadest consensus, with the aim of implementing changes next year, the president’s statement said.
Assisted suicide, which involves patients self-administering a lethal dose of drugs, is allowed in Switzerland. Euthanasia, a process in which a medical professional directly gives the drugs, is currently legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain under certain conditions. Assisted suicide and euthanasia numbers tend to rise fast and the grounds expand once it is introduced.
Macron’s announcement came the day the family of famous French director Jean-Luc Godard said he died by assisted suicide at his home in the Swiss town of Rolle.
French polls in recent years steadily showed a broad majority of people are in favor of legalising euthanasia.
The current law allows patients to request “deep, continuous sedation altering consciousness until death” but only when their conditions are likely to lead to a quick death.
Doctors are allowed to stop life-sustaining treatments, including artificial hydration and nutrition. Sedation and painkillers are allowed “even if they may shorten the person’s life.”
A Fianna Fáil Minister of State who called for a No vote in the 2018 abortion referendum now wants the current radical law liberalised even further.
Unlike other pro-life voices at the time, Anne Rabbitte did not believe in a prohibition on abortion, or retaining protection for the right to life exactly as it was enshrined in the constitution. However, she did think the proposal before the country was too permissive. Now she says she was out of touch with her electorate.
“People have amazed me. Women that I would meet in my own area, that would be in their 80s would turn to me and say: ‘Yes, I voted yes because I remember the marriage bar, and I remember the mother and baby homes, and I know what happened and yes, I think it’s right that women would have their own say.’”, she told the Examiner.
While Ms Rabbitte wouldn’t comment on the current review of abortion legislation, she said: “Where couples are given news that perhaps the baby won’t survive, and it’s clinically the opinion of the gynecologist, we have to leave the choice of their healthcare to the couples themselves. I do think it’s wrong that they have to leave the State.”
Legislation allows abortion up to nine months where a doctor deems the unborn child would likely die within 28 days of birth. Some campaigners want this restriction on disability abortions abolished meaning children who could survive for months, or even years after birth, could be aborted.
In the 2020 General Election every TD who voted against abortion legislation at the end of 2018 returned to office.
The Irish Catholic Bishops’ charity Trócaire has been forced to end its operations in Nicaragua after its registration to work and provide supports in the central American nation was cancelled by the state.
The crackdown by local authorities has hit both NGOs and religious groups such as Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity who were expelled from the country on July 6th.
After more than three decades working in Latin America’s second-poorest country, a spokeswoman for the Irish Catholic Church’s overseas development agency confirmed that Trócaire is one of “several hundred NGOs that have had to cease operations in Nicaragua due to the cancellation of our registration by the state of Nicaragua”.
The charity, which began running aid programmes in Nicaragua in the 1970s and opened a full-time country office in 2002, supported more than 51,000 people in need last year, said the spokeswoman. “We are deeply disappointed that we can no longer deliver vital humanitarian assistance to communities we have worked with for over 30 years.”
Every woman in Ireland between the ages of 17 and 25 can avail of free contraception from today, despite earlier Government advice that the policy would probably be ineffective and a waste of public funds. The Government estimates that the scheme will cost €9 million for the rest of the year which means it could cost around €35 million in a full year.
The policy was discussed in a a 2019 Working Group on Access to Contraception, under the then Health Minister, Simon Harris.
It said, “there is a considerable risk that simply making contraception free to the end-user will only displace private expenditure without necessarily modifying behaviour or yielding the level of desired health benefits.”
The Government adopted the policy anyway and it went into effect today.
The scheme is designed to remove the financial burden around contraception from younger people and it is not linked to having a medical card.
Currently the cost of these prescriptions are mostly covered for medical card holders, but those without a card can pay hundreds of euro in fees and prescriptions.
The deal covers the pill and long-lasting contraception, including coil insertions and women will need to show their PPS number as eligibility will be checked.
Women seeking abortions in Hungary will be presented with evidence of their unborn child’s heartbeat before they can go ahead with the procedure.
In a decree issued on Monday, Hungary’s interior ministry urges gynaecologists, obstetricians, and other pre-natal healthcare providers to present pregnant women with a fetus’s vital functions in a “clearly identifiable way” from 15 September onwards.
According to medical practice, the sign of an unborn child’s vital functions can be a heartbeat, which is usually present from six weeks into pregnancy.
Doctors will have to submit a report confirming that this has been done.
Women in Hungary are allowed to access an abortion up until 12 weeks of pregnancy, sometimes later if there are severe health complications at play. They are also required to complete a counselling session first.
A record proportion of men and women in Japan – almost one in five – say they do not intend to marry, a trend experts have warned will undermine efforts to address the country’s population crisis.
The National Institute of Population and Social Security – a government-affiliated body in Tokyo – said the results of its 2021 survey, published this month, would add to concerns about the low birth rate.
According to the survey, 17.3% of men and 14.6% of women aged between 18 and 34 said they had no intention of ever tying the knot – the highest figure since the questionnaire was first conducted in 1982.
Experts have attributed the trend to several factors, including a growing desire among young working women to enjoy the freedoms that come with being single and having a career.
Men say they also enjoy being single, but also voice concern over job security and their ability to provide for a family. Experts have called on the government to make it easier for women to return to work after having children and to address Japan’s notoriously long working hours.
Teacher Enoch Burke has failed in a bid to be released from Mountjoy Prison.
Mr Burke has refused to use a pupil’s preferred gender pronouns and name after the pupil declared themselves to be ‘gender non-binary’. He was suspended with pay after having a row with his principal and barred from the school pending a disciplinary hearing. When he turned up to the school anyway, he was arrested and jailed for contempt of court. He is refusing to purge the contempt on the grounds of conscience rights.
He was committed for contempt on September 6th, after saying he could not, arising from his Christian beliefs, comply with an injunction of August 30th preventing him attending or teaching at the school.
Mr Burke has received the support of prominent gender-critical feminists such as Irish psychotherapist, Stella O’Malley.
On the other hand, Senator Ronan Mullen has called on Mr Burke to purge his contempt of court: “Citizens must have respect for the rule of law and only in extreme situations should somebody consider defying a court injunction.”
The number of deaths recorded from suicide in the State in 2019 was down on the previous year’s figures, reducing from 540 to 524 according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
Despite the decrease, 2019’s figures remained above that of 2017, when 510 such deaths were noted, and 2015 which saw 497.
The data shows the rate of suicide among males increased by 4.6 per cent between 2015 (390 deaths) and 2019 (408 deaths), while female suicides rose by 8.4 per cent, from 107 to 116 in the same period.
The 116 deaths by suicide among females in 2019 represented a 17.7 per cent decline on 2018’s figures, however the CSO noted that 2018 had recorded the highest number of female deaths from self-harm (141) since its records began in 1950.
Compared to other European countries, Ireland’s standardised suicide rate in 2017 was 11.0 per 100,000 people, above the EU member state average of 10.1.
An Italian religious sister, aged 83, was brutally murdered in an armed attack on a church mission in Mozambique.
Sister María de Coppi, a Comboni religious sister who had been working for 59 years in the country, was shot and died instantly in the attack on the Chipene mission in the diocese of Nacala, which began at 9.00 pm and continued until 2.00 am. The attackers ransacked and burned not only the mission church but also the school, the health centre, the dwellings of the priests and of the nuns, the library, the boys’ and girls’ boarding houses and the vehicles belonging to the mission. “They destroyed everything”, reported Bishop Alberto Vera of Nacala, speaking on the telephone to the Portuguese national office of Aid to the Church in Need.
“The attackers broke open the tabernacle and vandalised part of the sacristy, looking for whatever they could find – probably money”, the bishop continued. Speaking to ACN, Bishop Vera said he did not think this was in fact an attack against the Church, but rather a way of seeking international attention. “This is a major coup for them because there were foreign religious here… They are seeking some kind of international publicity. I don’t think it was directed against the Church. What they did was an act of terror.”
