Mater board priest says hospital can’t carry out abortions

The Irish Times reports today August 7^th that Fr Kevin Doran a member of the Mater Hospital Board has said the Mater hospital in Dublin “cannot comply” with the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act and cannot carry out abortions.

Fr Kevin Doran was speaking to The Irish Times as the board prepares to meet in the coming weeks to discuss how or whether the hospital will abide by the legislation.

The Mater Misericordiae University Hospital is one of 25 “appropriate institutions” named in the Act where abortions may be carried out to save the life of a pregnant woman.

Mission statement

A Catholic voluntary hospital, part-owned by the Sisters of Mercy who founded it in 1861, the Mater is managed by the board of governors independent of the HSE.

In its mission statement, the hospital says that by caring for the sick, “we participate in the healing ministry of Jesus Christ”.

Fr Doran, who sits on the board of governors and the board of directors of the Mater, said it was “incumbent on the hospital to consider its position on the Act . . . The Mater can’t carry out abortions because it goes against its ethos. I would be very concerned that the Minister [for Health, James Reilly] sees fit to make it impossible for hospitals to have their own ethos.

“The issue is broader than just abortion. What’s happening is the Minister is saying hospitals are not entitled to have an ethos.”

Serious discussion

Asked his view of what should happen if the board were to decide it would comply with the legislation, Fr Doran said: “I suppose I can assume there would be very serious discussion between the Archbishop [of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin] and the management of the hospital.”

Sr. Eugene Nolan, nurse tutor and member of the board of directors, described the situation facing the hospital as “very, very grave”, adding the legislation “is being imposed on us.

“It is against our ethos. The main thing is we have an obligation to preserve the ethos of the hospital and still try and do the best we can. [The legislation] will have to be looked at very carefully.”

A spokesman for the hospital said it had no formal position as yet on the legislation. “It is going to be discussed by the board of governors in the coming weeks.”

Single-member company

The Mater hospital is a single-member company. Its parent company is the Mater Misericordiae and the Children’s University Hospitals (Temple St) Ltd.

Its website says the majority of the members of the parent company are Sisters of Mercy and the remaining members represent the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, the Catholic Nurses’ Guild of Ireland, the Society of St Vincent de Paul and the medical consultants of Mater Misericordiae University Hospital and the Children’s University Hospital.

St Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin, is also a Catholic voluntary hospital, part- owned and part-managed by the Sisters of Charity. It is also named in the legislation as an “appropriate institution” to perform abortions.

Its mission, says the hospital website, is to provide care and treatment “through the continuance and furtherance of the ethos, aims and purposes of the Congregation of the Religious Sisters of Charity”.

A spokesman for St Vincent’s Healthcare Group said it would “as always, be following the law of the land”.

Opt-out system for organ transplantation approved in Wales

SPUC reports that ethical campaigners have expressed their sadness following final approval of a bill in Wales to create an opt-out system for organ transplantation. See previous BLOG POST on this topic.

Members of the Wales region of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) www.spuc.org.uk are saddened that the Secretary of State for Wales has decided not to use his powers to block the Human Transplantation (Wales) Bill from being sent to Her Majesty the Queen for Royal Assent (see Note 1 for Editors below).

Michael Wendell Thomas, vice-chairman of SPUC's Wales region, said: "A collective weight of opinion has demonstrated that implementation of the Bill will be fraught with risk. This opinion has been presented by medical and ethical professionals, faith communities (Christian, Muslim and Jewish), patient care organisations, plus the vast number of people who made individual submissions to the Welsh Government during three years of consultations."

"The case for 'deemed consent' as a valid form of consent was not investigated by the Welsh Assembly's Health or Legislative Committees. The only basis for this kind of law is that the Welsh Government has deemed it so. This is probably the most important law that the Welsh Assembly has ever passed, seeing that it deals with the rights and lives and health of every Welsh resident. It therefore reflects very severely on the reputation of Wales, of devolution, and of all Welsh Assembly members, as well as the current Wales Government. To the ordinary non-lawyer, 'deemed consent' is a meaningless idea; to many eminent or expert people, such as the Archbishop of Wales, it is a "fiction". True consent is explicit and voluntary, and is the only sound basis for laws concerning personal autonomy and permission to remove someone’s organs", said Mr Thomas.

"The Bill as described by successive Assembly Health Ministers and the First Minister was for a 'soft' opt-out option, with a family veto on 'deemed consent' cases, as supported by the First Minister (see note 2 below). However, the version of the bill passed by the Assembly on 2 July is for a 'hard' opt-out system. Public and expert submissions had therefore been made on a false premise.

"Evidence has shown the current voluntary organ donation system to be successful. However, the number of organs available for transfer has fallen recently. Some feared that the new legislation could lead to more patients on the waiting-list dying before organs became available. It is highly unlikely that, even if the bill does produce more organs, it will save the lives of those Welsh people on the waiting-list."

Mr Thomas added: "There is also a myriad of cross-border and human rights issues which will arise once the legislation is implemented.

"Members of SPUC's Wales region will remain vigilant regarding this ill-considered piece of legislation. We will campaign wherever possible to mitigate the effects that it may have on the weak and vulnerable in our midst. We shall also seek to ensure that the professional standards of clinicians involved in organ removal are not eroded by pressures from unscrupulous people to produce ever-more organs for transplant, irrespective of the dangers to those dying. We remain committed to real, voluntary and informed organ donation by the individual dying patient", concluded Mr Thomas.

Activists Vandalize Church in Chile During Mass After Girl Rejects Abortion

LifeNews.com report that pro-abortion activists attacked and vandalized Chile’s main Catholic Cathedral while Mass was in progress because an 11 year-old girl pregnant following rape had decided to keep her baby.

 Upset that an 11-year-old girl who became pregnant after she was raped decided to reject having an abortion, abortion activists in Chile vandalized a prominent Catholic church in the country — during Mass.

From an AP report:

Abortion-rights demonstrators vandalized Chile’s main cathedral during a Mass and used pews as barricades during clashes with police.

A group of demonstrators broke off from a largely peaceful protest calling for the legalization of abortion Thursday night and stormed into the Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago, interrupting the homily.

They painted walls with pro-abortion messages, broke ornaments and hauled pews all the way to the Plaza de Armas square in front of the cathedral. Police in riot gear rushed to the cathedral to contain them, and arrested at least two people.

President Sebastian Pinera condemned the vandalizing of the cathedral, which remains closed for repairs.

“We repudiate and reject these types of acts,” Pinera told reporters outside the presidential palace on Friday. “This means not respecting the rights of others,” he said. “They’re not tolerant and are contradicting their own views.”

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Population trends cloud Europe's post-recession outlook

The Independent reports that population trends are clouding Europe's post-recession outlook. This is in fact an issue that some commentators have been warning about for a number of years. For a nation’s population to survive it is necessary that the minimum fertility rate should not fall below 2.1. Most European nation states are below this level, many being as low as 1.2 - 1.5. See my BLOG POST of August 2010

Much has also been written about the consequences of this population collapse for national economies and national pension funds, which will inevitably lead to further recession and eventual collapse.

One of the basic questions to be answered is why is this happening, why are whole nations choosing a path that will lead to economic suicide? There are many answers to this question but the most obvious ones are often overlooked because they are inconvenient truths. The now, almost global, push for more and more access to contraception and abortion is central to the population collapse and European Governments should take cognizance of this before it is too late.

The following is the text of the Independent article.

Slowly but unsurely, Europe is facing up to population trends that will sap long-run economic growth and force nations to choose between cutting pensions and welfare benefits or paying higher taxes to maintain them.

Some countries are getting an early taste of difficulties that await Europe as the continent's baby boomers retire and, because of flagging fertility rates, the average age of those left in the labour force rises.

In France, trade unions are planning protests against modest plans to rein in the country's pension funding gap of €14bn and rising.

Spain, pressed by the European Commission, is drawing up reforms to tackle underfunding in its pension system that forced the government to dip into the social security reserve fund last year.

"There's a recognition that something needs to be done, and it's just a question of the pace at which they move," said Edward Hugh, an economist and demographer in Barcelona.

Spain's pension plight is partly cyclical: more than 3 million workers have lost their jobs since the onset of recession and have stopped paying into the pensions system.

Emigration is making the funding crunch worse. More than half a million foreign workers - lured to Spain during the boom years - have left since the start of 2010, while young Spaniards are moving abroad in droves in search of jobs.

Spain, Portugal and Ireland all lost about 2pc of their working-age adults between 2010 and the first quarter of 2013, said Marchel Alexandrovich, an economist with Jefferies, an investment bank, in London.

In the medium term, he said, this raises the question of who pays for pensions and age-related health care costs in countries that are educating their youngsters only to see many of them emigrate and pay taxes elsewhere.

"Without some corresponding system of fiscal transfers (i.e. U.S.-style federal taxes), this is not a sustainable arrangement," Alexandrovich said in a note.

VICIOUS CIRCLES

Spain is also paying the price of a low fertility rate for the past 25 years - a trend compounded by the recession - which is reducing the number of entrants to the workforce.

The risk is that low fertility, high emigration and a rapidly ageing labour force form a vicious economic circle.

"So even when the recession ends, the damage to some euro area economies will be more permanent than may be commonly recognised," Alexandrovich said.

With fewer workers having to pay for more retirees, Spaniards who are braced for lower pensions will tend to save rather than spend, holding back the recovery and thus further eroding the tax base, Hugh fears.

"Since they're not going to get the kind of economic recovery they're expecting, and since young people are leaving, they're going to have to do even more pension reforms than they imagine," Hugh said.

Countries across Europe are feeling the demographic pinch.

Bulgaria's population has shrunk by 582,000 people in the past 10 years to 7.3 million. In 1985 it was almost 9 million. The Baltic states have also witnessed extensive emigration.

NOT ENOUGH BABIES

Many countries fall well short of the total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 children that women need to bear to hold the population constant in the absence of net migration.

The TFR in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia fell by more than 30pc between 1990 and 2011. Hungary had a TFR of just 1.2 live births per woman in 2011, with Poland and Romania at 1.3 - considered by demographers to be the danger level.

Germany is already experiencing the fallout of a fertility rate that has been far below replacement level for 30 years.

Across the 28-member European Union, Germany has the smallest proportion of people in the 0-14 age bracket, the joint-highest proportion of pensioners (with Italy) and the highest median age, according to the European Commission.

Germany's domestic labour force fell by 70,000 in the past year. Immigration is coming to the rescue for now - foreigners accounted for all the employment growth in 2012, Alexandrovich said - but the country's growth prospects are darkening.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reckons Germany's potential growth will fall to less than 1 percent a year after 2020, from an already low 1.5pc today, due to population ageing.

By 2050 France and Britain, with much more favourable demographic profiles, are projected to have bigger economies than Germany, whose population is set to shrink to just over 70 million from nearly 82 million now.

The danger of intergenerational conflict as fewer workers have to provide for more pensioners is a future risk, but adverse demographics are already affecting parts of the economy.

Car sales in Germany are falling in part because an ageing population drives less, exacerbating industry-wide overcapacity, according to Douglas Roberts, an economist with Standard Life in Edinburgh.

"As with changing pension conditions, restructuring of a major industry such as autos will be difficult and meet major resistance both from unions and governments," he said.

More broadly, a shrinking workforce will make it harder to meet future pensions - as Detroit has discovered - and to service the increased public and private debt that Europe has racked up in recent decades, especially since the recession.

The Commission's central projection is that EU employment will fall by 5 million, or 2.5pc, between 2010 and 2030.

Rich economies will lose more than 1 percentage point of annual growth in the decade 2012-2021, mainly due to the ageing of their workforces, a 2012 Bank of Spain research paper found.

Not everyone is confident that Europe will rise to the challenge and make its welfare states affordable.

"Age-related spending plus slow-to-negative growth in labour forces will keep driving most developed nations toward bankruptcy until they reform their governments and financial sectors," wrote Leigh Skene with Lombard Street Research, a London consultancy.