This includes hospitals with a Catholic character, the Irish prime minister says.

Prime Minister Leo Varadkar says doctors, nurses and midwives could opt out of performing procedures on conscience grounds.

If they want to keep government funding, entire institutions will not have that option, however.

Irish citizens voted by a landslide in May to liberalise the country's abortion laws.

The new law currently being drafted will allow abortions in and up to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.

Varadkar says the new law will keep certain aspects of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act of 2013.

This permitted individual medical professionals to refuse to perform an abortion if it clashed with their conscience.

It also allowed abortions up to 24 weeks in extreme medical cases. This is at least two weeks past the point newborns have survived a premature birth.

Last month nearly two in three Irish voters opted to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution, which recognised the equal right to life of both the pregnant woman and the unborn.

At the time, Varadkar, who had campaigned for a repeal, welcomed the result. "What we have seen today is the culmination of a quiet revolution [that has been taking place] for the past 10 or 20 years."

Source

• BBC
• Irish National Review
• The Guardian
• Image: CNN.com

I saw similar horrors while working in a northern Syrian field hospital under airstrikes in August. I operated on children who had the bone fragments of obliterated bystanders embedded in their skin. Children shot by snipers were pronounced dead in front of grieving parents. Civilians with bellies torn open from shelling held their intestines in their hands while pleading for help. Some lucky enough to have survived shrapnel wounds succumbed to gangrene and required amputations.

Only so much is possible in a besieged hospital where cellphones illuminate underground operating rooms when the power goes out. In Syria, the front lines are everywhere and many who are armed do not respect medical neutrality. Like many makeshift hospitals, the one I worked at does not display Red Crescent emblems to help prevent its discovery and destruction.

As international attention to Syria wanes, all of these horrors are still happening. Continue reading.

Samer Attar is a United States-based assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery who recently carried out volunteer work in Syria.

Source: Dominion Post / Fairfax NZ News

Image: Narciso Contreras, showing Dar Al-Shifa hospital which was bombed by a plane

Supporters of the Irish abortion bill say it would give "conscience-clause" protection to health-care personnel who did not wish to be involved in abortions, but the bishops question that claim.

Ironically, the proposed legislation is entitled the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill.

In fact, the bishops say, this "dramatic and morally unacceptable change to Irish law" would "make the direct and intentional killing of unborn children lawful in Ireland".

The pressure to modify Ireland's abortion law intensified last year after Savita Halappanavar died in Galway University Hospital. Her death was originally attributed to doctors' refusal to perform an abortion, but an inquest found she died of an undiagnosed infection.

Suggesting that the bill appears to impose a duty on Catholic hospitals to provide abortions, the bishops said: "This would be totally unacceptable and has serious implications for the existing legal and constitutional arrangements that respect the legitimate autonomy and religious ethos of faith-based institutions."

But the independent IrishHealth website said "in practical terms, there are no institutions which can still be termed 'Catholic hospitals' which would be obliged under the Bill's terms to perform terminations".

IrishHealth says only one maternity hospitals, the National Maternity Hospital in Dubliin, could still be deemed, in technical terms, a "Catholic hospital", since the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin is chairman and three priests are on the board.

But it says the Church has had no active role in the hospital in recent times and the current archbishop, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, has sought to be removed as chairman.

The bishops urged Catholics to contact their political representatives and encourage a vote against the bill, but they did not suggest any disciplinary action against the sponsors of the legislation, including the government leadership.

Questioned as to whether politicians who vote for the bill should be barred from receiving Communion, Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh answered: "There would be a great reluctance to politicise the Eucharist."

Sources:

Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference

Irish Times

Irish Health

Image: Irish Examiner

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops declined to comment on the Obama administration's latest modification to the Health and Human Services mandate that many Catholic employers are challenging in court.

But other organisations defending plaintiffs in some of the 44 current legal challenges to the HHS mandate said the modifications would not help most of their clients.

Significantly, the Catholic Health Association, which a year ago expressed initial support for the Obama mandate, offered no endorsement of the administration's latest proposal.

Under the latest proposal, Catholic dioceses will probably be exempted from coverage by the HHS mandate. Catholic hospitals, social agencies and universities will not — though the administration proposed other ways to provide the required benefits without any direct financial or administrative involvement by objecting religious non-profits organisations.

The government's plan is to allow Catholic hospitals and universities to offer employee health plans that do not directly provide free contraception and other "preventive services" for women.

Employees or insured students who wanted contraceptive coverage would be able to arrange it through outside insurance companies, at no cost to themselves and without financial or even administrative support of the faith-based institution.

For-profit companies and non-profits that do not have an explicitly religious mission, such as pro-life organisations, could not avail themselves of this stand-alone policy.

Yuval Levin, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, said in a National Review Online post that that new proposal "betrays a complete lack of understanding of both religious liberty and religious conscience.

"Religious liberty is an older and more profound kind of liberty than we are used to thinking about in our politics now. It's not freedom from constraint, but recognition of a constraint higher than even the law.... It's not the right to do what you want; it is the right to do what you must."

National Catholic Register

Catholic News Service

National Review Online

Image: Salon