The gap between women’s wished-for and actual fertility has grown wider according to a new study from the UK.
The paper by the Institute of Economic Affairs shows that while the UK’s total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.44 children per woman in 2023, women’s intended fertility has remained stable at around 2.2 children since 1979. This means they are having fewer children than they want.
The report by Dr Clara E. Piano examines the evidence on the best way to close the fertility gap and tackle falling birth rates. It finds that while ostensibly pro-natal policies focused on cash transfers and financial incentives have limited success, they do not address the root causes of birth rate declines, and are prohibitively costly for most governments.
However, evidence from the US shows states with greater economic freedom – especially in labour market regulation – tend to have smaller fertility gaps. Work-family compatibility emerges as a crucial constraint, with flexible labour markets naturally providing parents with more options to customise work schedules around family goals.
Housing and land use regulation also significantly impacts family formation. Spacious, affordable housing with multiple bedrooms is what economists call a “child-complement” – couples have higher fertility when they can achieve these conditions.
Turkey is systematically targeting Christians under the guise of “national security,” expelling hundreds of foreign believers and leaving local congregations without spiritual leadership, according to a legal advocacy group.
Speaking at the OSCE Warsaw Human Dimension Conference, Lidia Rieder, Legal Officer for ADF International said “Turkey’s labeling of peaceful Christian residents as ‘security threats’ is a clear misuse of law and an attack on freedom of religion or belief”.
“When governments manipulate administrative or immigration systems to exclude people based solely on their faith, it undermines both the rule of law and the very principles of tolerance and peaceful coexistence that the OSCE was founded to protect.”
Since 2020, more than 200 foreign Christian workers and their families—affecting roughly 350 individuals—have been expelled from Turkey, many of whom had lived there for decades. The Ministry of Interior has assigned these individuals so-called “security codes” such as N-82 and G-87, effectively banning their re-entry and classifying them as national security threats. Between December 2024 and January 2025 alone, at least 35 new codes were reportedly issued against foreign Christians.
The case of two prominent Finlanders who stand accused of “hate speech” for publicly expressing their orthodox Christian beliefs on sexual morality will be heard in the Supreme Court of Finland tomorrow.
Finnish parliamentarian Dr. Päivi Räsänen Räsänen, the country’s former Minister of the Interior, faces two criminal charges for expressing her deeply held beliefs on marriage and sexuality—through a 2019 tweet and a 2004 pamphlet which was later re-published by Lutheran Bishop, Juhana Pohjola.
The Supreme Court’s decision will set a precedent for the future of free speech and freedom of religion in Finland and across Europe.
“In a free society, it should never be a crime to share a Bible verse or express beliefs rooted in faith. The burden of the legal ordeal of the past few years has been challenging, but I remain hopeful that justice will prevail — not only for me, but for the wider principle of free speech in Finland. No one should face criminal charges for peacefully voicing their convictions,” said Räsänen ahead of the trial.
The defendants have already won two unanimous acquittals in lower courts but the prosecuting authorities appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
She was objecting to the Lutheran Church, to which she belongs, supporting a Pride march and tweeted a verse from the bible which begins: “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.”
Two-thirds of humanity — more than 5.4 billion people — is now living in countries without full religious freedom, according to a new report by the international pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).
The biennial report “Religious Freedom in the World 2025” offers a global overview of the state of this fundamental right and warns of a worrying decline.
The report analyses the situation in 196 countries and documents serious violations of this right in 62 of them. Of these, 24 are classified as countries of “persecution” and 38 as “discrimination”. Only two nations, Kazakhstan and Sri Lanka, showed improvements compared with the previous edition.
The report identifies authoritarianism as the principal driver of religious repression. In 19 of the 24 countries in the persecution category, and in 33 of the 38 countries with discrimination, governments apply systematic strategies to control or silence religious life. In China, Iran, Eritrea and Nicaragua, the authorities employ mass surveillance technologies, digital censorship, restrictive legislation and arbitrary detentions to suppress independent religious communities.
“The control of faith has become a tool of political power”, states the executive summary, which denounces an increasingly sophisticated “bureaucratisation of religious repression.”
Extensive details on abortions carried out in hospitals across the country, including post-operative complications, will be made available by the HSE for the first time. However, the big majority of terminations are facilitated by GPs via the abortion pill.
The move comes as there are growing concerns about the risk to women’s health for those undergoing the procedure in Ireland.
The HSE confirmed the scale of the expanded detail in a parliamentary response to Independent Ireland TD Michael Collins.
Up to now, the brief annual report has been limited to statistics and to what section of the law abortions fell under.
The wider detail will initially be focused on hospital-based procedures and will include patient demographics including age, previous pregnancies, contraception use and previous terminations.
It will detail the mode involved such as through drug-induced, surgical or surgical under general anaesthetic.
It will also include the gestation at the time of the procedure and any post-termination complications and the care provided.
These will include suspected or confirmed infection, suspected incomplete termination, heavy or prolonged bleeding and presentations to hospital following early medical abortion in the community or following a termination carried out abroad.
The Government has rejected a UN recommendation that surrogacy be abolished and is instead determined to implement legislation to widely facilitate the practice.
Earlier this month, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, described surrogacy as a “system of violence, exploitation and abuse against women”, and called for its global abolition.
On Tuesday, Independent TD, Carol Nolan TD, questioned Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill about the intervention.
The Minister replied that the report highlighted “some legitimate concerns”, but she disagreed with its central recommendation that all forms of surrogacy should be prohibited.
Rather, she said, the Government will stick to the approach that “it is preferable to seek to regulate surrogacy rather than enforce a blanket ban”. Almost all European countries ban commercial surrogacy and some ban all surrogacy. Ireland will facilitate people who enter into commercial surrogacy arrangements overseas.
“The aim is to provide for surrogacy which is ethical, altruistic and, most importantly, protects the health, safety and welfare of the two most vulnerable parties: the surrogate mother and the children born as a result of surrogacy”.
She further claimed that policy has “wide, if not near-unanimous, agreement across political parties and groupings in the Oireachtas”.
A Spanish law mandating the creation of a registers of doctors who, for reasons of conscience, prefer not to perform abortions is meeting resistance from the regional Governments tasked with implementing it.
The Central Government say the lists are not made public, but they will enable medical personnel to be redistributed so that access to abortion is made available everywhere.
However, the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has refused to compile what she calls a ‘blacklist’.
Manuel Martínez-Sellés, president of the Madrid College of Physicians, said: ‘This is difficult to see as anything other than an attempt to restrict freedom of conscience [and] to discriminate against doctors who refuse to take part in acts they consider morally wrong.’
It has been suggested that it would make more sense to publish a list of doctors who do perform the procedure.
The Government is planning to commemorate the bicentenary of Catholic emancipation in 2029.
This aligns with the commitment given in the Program for Government to mark the 250th Anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell in 2025 and, following that, “the bicentenaries of some of the most pivotal moments in his career”.
Wicklow-Wexford Fianna Fáil TD Malcolm Byrne, who sought a specific commitment on marking the end to discrimination against Catholics in the nineteenth Century, said: “I believe strongly that we should mark this important social, political and religious historic milestone. “
In response to a parliamentary question from Deputy Byrne, Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan said the 200th anniversary of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 2029 has been identified by the newly formed Commemorations Advisory Committee, chaired by former RTÉ newscaster Bryan Dobson, “as worthy of recognition and remembrance”.
“My Department will work with our project partners to develop a programme that will be shared in a Memorandum in due course. The aim will be to ensure that this anniversary is remembered appropriately, following the established commemorations framework”.
There is a return to faith among teenage boys tired of the emptiness of virtual reality, according to the new principal of St Vincent’s Castleknock College, secondary school in Dublin.
Elaine Kelly has previously worked in coeducational and all-girls schools.
Aware of the different challenges facing boys and girls, she said, “Really what boys need is to feel that they have a purpose.”
And one of the things that attracted Kelly to St Vincent’s is its Catholic ethos.
“Gen Z – that cohort of young male boys – they are returning to their spiritual lives, to their faith, to their own spirituality; that sense of reflection. Because there’s nothing actually else out there for them. There’s nothing at the end of a mobile phone. It’s vacuous. It’s empty.”
“You can keep scrolling. The dopamine fix, it isn’t actually sustaining young men any more. I’m actually struck here in the school by the strength of faith that I see among the young students in the school,” she adds.
The US has called for the release of 30 leaders of one of China’s largest underground church networks who were reportedly detained in overnight raids in various cities.
The Chinese Communist Party promotes atheism and tightly controls religion – still, some Christian groups are calling this the most extensive crackdown against the faith in decades.
Christians have long been pressured to join only state-sanctioned churches that are led by government-approved pastors and toe the party line.
Urging China to release the church leaders, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement on Sunday that “this crackdown further demonstrates how the CCP exercises hostility towards
Christians who reject Party interference in their faith and choose to worship at unregistered house churches”.
