Following widespread protests in Poland after the country’s highest court found that the exception for disability in Polish abortion law was discriminatory, Hilary Freeman explains from her own experience why ‘a near-total abortion ban, including for foetal abnormality’ is ‘so dangerous’. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/had-late-term-abortion-spare-

Freddy McConnell, ‘who was born a woman’ but ‘wants to be registered as the “father” or “parent”’ on ‘his’ child’s birth certificate, ‘has failed in his Supreme Court bid to prevent his name being recorded as the “mother”’; the journalist, whose claim was dismissed last year by the High Court and later the Court of Appeal, was ‘denied permission to mount an appeal’ against the ruling, ‘on the grounds that the case did not raise “an arguable point of law”’, therefore ‘will not be able to take his case any further in the UK courts’ (‘Transgender man cannot be “father” to child’, Telegraph, No

After the disastrous effects of the Government’s earlier pandemic policy of sending untested patients to residential care,  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-news-covid-deaths-cases-local-lockdown-latest/  the blanket issue of Do Not Resuscitate orders to be signed by the old and mentally vulnerable, 

Dr Mike Fitzpatrick sympathises with the effects of the Covid pandemic lockdown on the elderly, but warns against older people disregarding the restrictions, not least because robustly proclaiming that the interests of young people should not be sacrificed to those who have lived much longer ‘gives succour to those who are inclined to the view that the lives of the elderly are less worthy than those of the younger generation’; he maintains that ‘[d]evaluing people by their age is wrong’ (Doctor’s Diary, Telegraph, November 16

Tim Stanley complains that The Conservative Woman website, in an article entitled ‘Down with Tim Stanley-ism’, condemned him for being ‘the embodiment of a “wishy-washy, we-are-all-in-this-together, on-the-one-hand-this-but-on-the-other-hand-that sort of conservatism” that must be exposed for what it really is: “weakness and cowardice”’, insisting: ‘I see my job, when on television, to explain to the audience what both sides of an issue think and why’ (Telegraph, November 16, 2020).<

Marie Stopes International, ‘[t]he world’s best known reproductive rights charity’, which ‘provides family planning services to women in 37 countries worldwide’, has rebranded itself as ‘MSI Reproductive Choices’; they have dropped ‘the feminist’s name’ coinciding with the launch of ‘a 10-year strategy’, in view of ‘increasing discomfort about its links to Dr Marie Stopes’. Simon Cook, chief executive of the tax-funded charity, told the Telegraph: ‘“Although undoubtedly a family planning pioneer and incredibly successful in her field ...