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Irish media often present surrogacy as an uncontroversial option for couples who struggle with infertility but we rarely hear reports about children who have been abandoned by commissioning adults, or about the poor women who have acted as surrogates and regret it....

By Margaret Hickey New mother Ruth Davidson cited personal reasons as the primary reason for resigning as leader of the Scottish Conservative party. The care of a small baby and fulfilling a demanding public role didn’t combine well for her. But then every young...

When it comes to information, humanity has been playing a vast game of Tetris for thousands of years. New blocks of information are constantly being formed as we acquire new knowledge. As we encounter them, our objective is to rotate and place these informational...

You can read more here: http://www.positionpapers.ie/2019/08/august-september-2019/

When 17 year old Noa Pothoven died recently in the Netherlands following a long period of mental illness, it was initially and erroneously reported that she died by lethal injection under her country’s euthanasia law. In fact, she was allowed to refuse food and...

Both commercial and so-called ‘altruistic’ surrogacy could amount to the sale of children, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children has warned. Our Government normally likes to listen to the UN. Will it do so on this...

Do marriages that end in separation or divorce share certain traits, risk factors that allow us to predict which couples will stay together and which ones will not? The answer is, yes.In my previous blog I referred to the studies of Paul Amato, a sociologist of...

We are in the middle of a referendum right now on whether the waiting time required before a couple can divorce should be removed from the Constitution. It therefore seems a good time to look at the general issue of divorce, and in particular on what makes a person...

The UK Office for Nationals Statistics has released the 2017 data on pregnancies in England and Wales. When compared with the statistics about abortion, those data give us a frightening account of the situation: pregnancies and births are decreasing while abortions...

We hear a lot in the papers about ‘rogue’ pro-life counselling agencies. But what of rogue fertility clinics? The fertility business is huge and anxious couples pay a very great deal of money in their efforts to become pregnant, efforts that often result in failure....

Ireland needs to have a debate about the use of ‘CRISPR’ technology, a gene-editing technique that can affect the DNA of future generations of human beings. A number of eminent scientists and bioethicists have recently called for a moratorium on techniques to make...

The Oireachtas Health Committee met recently for the last pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill that will regulate Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR). The hearings have confirmed that the Committee suffers from huge blind spots about some of pitfalls of AHR and the...

Health Minister Simon Harris wants the State to provide free contraception as a way of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. Evidence from other countries suggests that his plan won’t work and may be another waste of public money that would be better spent...

A big review of the way Relationships and Sexuality Education is underway, led by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. Yet, an absolutely crucial question that needs to be considered in all this is whether RSE-type programmes even work. What outcomes...

The diagnosis of a life-limiting condition in an unborn baby is always devastating. These hard cases played a big part in last year’s referendum and moved many people to vote to repeal the 8th amendment. However, new studies show that the vast majority of couples who...

Earlier this week the Joint Committee on Education presented a report on Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE). This report has two main flaws: it undermines the role of the school ethos in RSE and it fails to address the question of what the purpose of RSE...

In a foretaste of the next big right-to-life debate in this country, a major conference was held in Dublin last week on end-of-life issues. Many of the speakers present had no qualms about defending the so-called “right to die”, often on very broad grounds.The...

Minister Simon Harris has promised to introduce “exclusion zones” to prevent protests outside hospitals, clinics and GP surgeries where abortions take place or abortion pills are prescribed.  This would make us the only country in Europe to have such a law, as Lawyers...

The General Scheme of the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill was before the Oireachtas Health Committee this week. The proposed law covers such issues as sperm and egg and embryo “donations”, pre-implantation diagnosis and sex selection, embryonic and stem cell...

Should single people pay less tax and married people pay more than under the present Irish system? That seems to be the gist of an article in the Irish Times this week. In tones of regret, it said that “while society has moved forward in so many ways over recent...

This year's Rally for Life, organised by the Life Institute, takes place on 6th July in Dublin City Centre.It sounds like a cliché to say that it’s more important than ever that pro-life advocates gather and stand up for life, but it really is vital in these deeply...

You can read more here:http://www.positionpapers.ie/2019/06/june-july-2019/

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There is careless and sloppy journalism and there is cold calculated malicious journalism. Sadly both fit into the spectrum to which Janet Malcolm notoriously drew attention in a New Yorker essay thirty years ago when she wrote:”Every journalist who is not too stupid...