LifeZine No. 743: 7th Jan 10
Euro Court Cannot Enforce Its Decisions Here, Says Ireland’s Chief Justice
Irish courts are entitled to ignore decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unless the Oireachtas votes to change Irish law, according to the Chief Justice. In a ruling as part of the Supreme Court’s unanimous pre-Christmas decision in a case involving a sperm donor, Mr Justice John Murray stated, ‘‘Orders or declarations of the [European Court of Human Rights] are not enforceable at national level unless national law makes them so”. The ruling will affect how the courts interpret any ruling by the ECHR on the abortion case it’s currently considering. Two Irish women and a Lithuanian woman who lives in Ireland have asked the ECHR to rule that Ireland’s abortion laws violate the European Convention on Human Rights. The three women, who all aborted their babies in England, alleged they were ‘‘stigmatised and humiliated’’ by being unable to have abortions in Ireland because their lives were not in danger. At the European court, the Irish Government has robustly defended Ireland’s constitutional protection of the equal right to life of the unborn baby and his or her mother. Following a hearing in Strasbourg before Christmas, the 17 judges of the court’s Grand Chamber are due to deliver their decision in the Spring. Murray was one of five judges who ruled that the High Court was wrong to exclude a sperm donor from access to his son. The High Court judge—formerly a judge of the ECHR—had ruled that the boy’s mother and her lesbian girlfriend were a de facto family under Article 8 of the convention. But in the Supreme Court, Mr Justice Hugh Geoghegan noted that, although the expression “de facto family” was a ‘‘useful shorthand’’, it could foster misunderstandings about “particular applications of it by the European Court of Human Rights’’. The Chief Justice declared that states may freely ignore the ECHR’s decrees. ‘‘It is clear that the convention is not directly applicable as part of the law of [Ireland], and may only be relied upon in the circumstances specified in the European Convention on Human Rights Act", he explained. ‘‘Even though the contracting parties undertake to protect convention rights by national measures, the convention does not purport to be directly applicable in the national legal systems of [Council of Europe member states]. Nor does the convention require those parties to incorporate the provisions of the convention as part of its domestic law”. Mr Justice Nial Fennelly added that ‘‘Any consideration of the convention in Irish law requires reference to be made to Article 29, section 6, of the Constitution, which provides that ‘No international agreement shall be part of the domestic law of the state, save as may be provided by the Oireachtas’”. The Sunday Business Post. December 13.
Nuclear Family in Ireland “Gone in 20 Years”, Observer Warns
The concept of the nuclear family in Ireland could be dying, the Iona Institute has warned. Speaking in the wake of new findings in Britain that the nuclear family there is “broken”, David Quinn, director of the pro-family think tank, said Ireland is not far behind trends emerging rapidly there. “The nuclear family [here] isn’t as badly off as in Britain, but we’re getting there”, he told The Irish Catholic. The warning came as Britain’s Family and Parenting Institute (FPI) unveiled the results of a new study that indicates child-rearing will increasingly fall to extended family members as marital breakdown and work commitments increase, and non-marital cohabitation becomes the norm. Already, one in four children in Britain lives in a single-parent family, and almost half of all births are outside of marriage. The FPI says some two million families in Britain already rely on older relatives for childcare, and at least 200,000 grandparents are sole carers for children. Further, the FPI insists that government attempts to save the nuclear family now are futile, and within 20 years there will be no “typical family”. Mr Quinn offered Irish figures to parallel realities in Britain: “One in three births is now outside marriage. One in four children does not live with their two married parents. Many children do not even know who their father is. Marriage is disappearing from some of Ireland’s most socially disadvantaged areas and has been replaced by serial cohabitation”. He added, “cohabitation itself is now as common as in Britain”. Only Ireland’s divorce rate is significantly lower than Britain’s, but, says Quinn, “it is also rising”. “The ethic of ‘personal freedom first’ is destroying the commitments we make to one another, and above all to our children”, he warned. “To this extent, and to the extent that we won’t address the breakdown of marriage properly, we are failing children”. The Irish Catholic. December.
Doctors Cannot Go in Two Directions at Once: ‘Assisted Suicide’ Contrary to Medicine, Says Care Expert
Writing in The Times (London), Dr Bill Noble, Professor Baroness Finlay and Dr Bee Wee, all of the Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland, criticised the Ipsos MORI poll that portrayed a sample of MPs as supporting “physician-assisted suicide” for using the euphemism “helping to die”, which perpetuates the myth about how people die. The writers noted that “assisted suicide” and euthanasia don’t involve using morphine or similar drugs; the massive overdoses of barbiturate used require no medical skill. “Our speciality cares for dying patients, working to relieve distress and accompany those facing death. But that is fundamentally different than deliberately foreshortening life by months or years. It is a doctor’s duty to relieve suffering; that does not mean killing the sufferer”. “Religion is not relevant here”, they continued. “As specialists in care of the dying, we have met countless terminally ill patients who viewed death as their solution, only to say weeks or months later that they never realised that life could become so rich and fulfilling again”. They added that “doctors cannot go in two directions at once: striving to relieve distress and simultaneously giving up such efforts by assisting suicide. We have seen countless patients whose situation was viewed as hopeless, but for whom much could be done to restore quality to the end of their life; it did not involve killing them”. The Times. December 19.
Family Group Raps Spain’s New Abortion Law for Protecting “Lucrative” Abortion Industry
Despite huge national protests and the labelling of abortion as “Mega Genocide” at a recent pro-life conference, the Spanish Government, to the dismay of life and family groups, has enacted a radical new abortion law. The Spanish Family Forum said the new “Law on Abortion” imposes the ideology of a temporary majority to protect the abortion industry. But the new law doesn’t end the abortion debate in Spain. Family Forum continued, “Today is a day of sadness for Spanish society because the Congress of Deputies, ignoring not only the opinion of more than two million Spanish citizens in their recent demonstration in favour of life, but also the majority of public opinion as shown in all the recent surveys, has passed the new ‘Law on Abortion’ and imposed the view of a short-term majority to protect the lucrative abortion industry. The new law in effect means the following: a) Total vulnerability of the unborn child during the first 14 weeks of life. These children will have less protection than many flora and fauna. b) Limit-free abortion and fraudulent application of the law until the 22nd week of pregnancy under cover of ‘grave danger to the mental health (of the mother)’. c) Abortion for reasons of eugenics or euthanasia until the end of the pregnancy, with no time limit whatsoever”. The statement concluded that “The Law which was passed today in the Congress is one of the most radical in the world, because it not only makes the unborn child more vulnerable than ever before, but it also establishes the right to abortion as a part of women’s right to health and puts in place mechanisms to impose this doctrine throughout the Spanish educational and health systems. As far as I know, there is no precedent for a law which, apart from legalising abortion, imposes the view that abortion is a good thing and forms part of the right to health and life of all women”. Family Forum. December 18.
Population Controllers Try to Hijack Copenhagen Climate Talks
In a recent opinion piece, the European Life Network (ELN) highlighted the protections guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: “The child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”. Despite this guarantee, the ELN reports, “One of the ways currently being proposed of reducing global warming and its effects is to decrease human activity and the (Chinese proposal at Copenhagen climate talks) suggests that the best way to do so is to decrease population”. The ELN spokesman added that “The coercive and draconian population control methods of the Chinese are well known and rejected by all right-thinking people, and yet they are now being proposed as the solution. Sadly, we have heard of solutions like this before, and even a so-called ‘final solution’. World governments must not go down this pathway”. European Life Network. December.
Legal Abortion Does Not Save Women’s Lives, Report Shows
The Elliot Institute, the leading organisation in post-abortion research, is reporting that “Many abortion advocates have long argued that abortion is necessary to protect the health and safety of women, since many would otherwise seek unsafe abortions. But an analysis of data from a new report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) has found that countries that permit abortion don’t have lower maternal death rates”. The Elliot Institute noted that the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam) in New York looked at the data from various countries in the WEF’s 2009 “Gender Gap Report” and found that countries with the most baby-protective abortion laws also had the lowest maternal death rates, and countries with more permissive laws tended to have higher maternal death rates. In Europe, Ireland had the lowest maternal death rate, with only one mother dying for every 100,000 live births, and Poland was ranked 27th, with eight maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Both countries have strong laws protecting babies in the womb, whereas the USA, which has “virtually no restrictions on abortion,” suffers 11 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. Data from other regions also revealed that the countries with the most baby-protective laws also lost the fewest mothers: in Africa, the country with the lowest maternal death rate (15 per 100,000) is Mauritius, which also has the firmest laws against abortion, yet Ethiopia, which recently legalised abortion, has a maternal death rate 48 times higher (720 per 100,000). The African country with the most liberal abortion laws, South Africa, has a maternal death rate of 400 per 100,000 live births. In Asia, Nepal gives no protection to her unborn babies and has one of the world’s highest mortality rates (830 per 100,000); Sri Lanka had the lowest maternal death rates in Asia (58 per 100,000) and one of the firmest abortion bans in the world. In South America, Chile has constitutional protection for her unborn babies and a maternal death rate of 16 per 100,000. The continent’s worst maternal death rate (430 per 100,000) was found in Guyana, which gives her babies almost no protection from the abortionists. Ironically, C-Fam says, “one of two main justifications used for liberalising Guyana’s law was to enhance the ‘attainment of safe motherhood’ by eliminating deaths and complications associated with unsafe abortion”. The Elliot Institute agreed with C-fam’s conclusion that the WEF findings “show that legal abortion does not mean lower maternal mortality rates”. Elliot Institute News, Vol. 8, No. 13. December.