In an interview, writer Guy Kennaway reveals to Rosa Silverman how, three years ago, he was asked by ‘his elderly mother and her third husband’ to help them to die, telling him: ‘“We have decided to kill ourselves … I need to get hold of the right drugs. Can you buy me some heroin?”’ Susie […]
The consequences of the one-child policy continue to live with China. The latest demographic news from the world’s largest country is that its birthrate has dropped to its lowest level since the Communist Party took power in 1949. According to Al-Jazeera, the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics has recently released data for 2019 […]
I am a pro-life Democrat. From where I sit, I continue to be horrified by the Democratic Party leadership. They seem to be behaving in ways calculated to drive away all but the most ideologically committed members. Let’s start with Hillary’s defeat in the 2016 elections and the victory of Donald Trump. This came as […]
With the US elections just around the corner however, it is likely that the level of hysteria in the media will rise, not fall.
A landmark ruling has recognised the right for German pharmacists to refuse to sell the so-called morning after pill (MAP) on grounds of conscience. No such right has ever been recognised in Ireland. The drug is used as a post-coital contraceptive but, when conception occurs, it also prevents implantation in the uterine wall, causing the […]
In a tragic reminder that surrogacy is not only morally fraught, but dangerous, a San Diego wife and mother of two has died giving birth to a baby for another couple. Michelle Reaves was acting as a surrogate mother for the second time for the same family when she died on January 15. Apparently she was the […]
The debate over abortion is not just about women’s reproductive rights. It is also about science. And none of these debates is more heated than foetal pain. Many contend that the upper time limit for abortion should be 20 weeks, as from then on, it can feel pain. Mother Jones – not a scientific journal, mind […]
The Canadian province of Quebec will expand the eligibility criteria for euthanasia to include people with severe and incurable mental illness, says Health Minister Danielle McCann. The guidelines will be drafted by the Quebec college of physicians. Both the minister and the college believe that few people would be affected. “We don’t expect many of these patients […]
Not long ago, the gay rights movement was a small group of people struggling to follow their dispositions within a larger heterosexual culture. Gays and lesbians were underdogs, vastly outnumbered and loosely organized, sometimes subject to discrimination and abuse. Their story was tragic, their suffering dramatized by AIDS and Rock Hudson, Brokeback Mountain and Matthew […]
Sherelle Jacobs is right to warn that ‘climate change is complex’ even while Sir David Attenborough’s warnings, in ‘onomatopoeically crumbly prose’, echo in our heads, and visions of Australian bush fires and other disasters are held up by the BBC as warnings of climate apocalypse; she is also right to be sceptical about ‘the world’s […]
Charles Moore notes that actor Laurence Fox, ‘who shot to fame in political debate last week after neatly repelling claims on the BBC’s Question Time that criticisms of the Duchess of Sussex are racist, has identified this as the central false doctrine. Don’t automatically believe, he says. Instead you should “listen to the victim”, and […]
Time is ticking for Europe, as it begins to take its demographic challenge seriously. The European Commission recently appointed Dubravka Šuica from Croatia to the position of Vice-President for Democracy and Demography. Her mission letter outlines her job for the next five years: “ensuring that Europe understands and responds to one of its deepest lying […]