Fertility, fertility treatments, misinformation & critical health/reproductive health literacy are key areas in our #PLRG_SPRINGproject programme currently being piloted in several secondary schools across in Ireland
www.ucc.ie/en/pregnancy...
@lauralinehan.bsky.social @keelinodonoghue.bsky.social
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SPRING | University College Cork
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![As I‘ve swerved around these men on my way to appointments in Holles Street, I’ve wondered whether they also pray at Tuam or Bessborough, or the many sites across Ireland where spiritual and physical harms to very real children were committed.
I think of Matthew 6:6 and wonder why they’re there are all: “[W]hen you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” This discretion is contrasted with “hypocrites” who love praying on, you guessed it, “street corners”. Why, one wonders, do these men focus their biblically contraindicated prayer where they do? Is it because of a welfare concern, or because they dislike women exercising agency over their sexual and reproductive lives?](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:upap75uizgsqltqsigiqkus4/bafkreihgxsumpsexjzgp4ldkgoe24jdehypx3uqikdqnm7hc73i3hnos64)
![But even in my religious days, I appreciated that the modern Catholic account of personhood was a bit untethered from the more obvious priorities issued in the Bible. In Exodus 21, my Bible said “Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death” and then “When men strive together and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth (...)”. I’m no biblical scholar, but it seemed there was plenty of scope to think that the “ordinances set before [us]” suggest that causing the end of a pregnancy is morally and forensically very different from killing a fully developed person.
When my thinking changed and I realised that I no longer believed, my respect for sensible religious autonomy didn’t change. If someone believes their blastocyst or foetus is a complete moral being, they should be allowed to make decisions about their body on that basis. Beyond that, men should get off that corner, and the Government should trust us to manage mature reflection without being legally compelled.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:upap75uizgsqltqsigiqkus4/bafkreihubcn6ybtjynvw4tbkfqvnsujfeiowruk4sk2a52pz5yiajqqtnu)
