The President of COMECE, the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community has condemned a bill put forward by Progressive Party MP Silja Dögg Gunnarsdóttir and eight more MP's to ban circumcision in Iceland.

German cardinal Reinhard Marx condemned the bill which calls for the ban of circumcision of all children, not only girls as the law states today.

Marx, who is a close counsellor of Pope Benedict calls the bill an attack on religious freedom pointing to the fact that Jewish and Muslim boys are often circumcised.

He has urged institutes within the EU to take action and prevent the bill going through.

Prominent Jewish Rabbis in Europe have also voiced their concern about the bill. MP Gunnarsdóttir however has said that the bill is simply put forward toa new aspect of the problem. Former criminal abortion laws, for example, relied on a distinction between hospital and clinic services. After decriminalization, both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick prohibited the performance of abortions outside of hospitals, a prohibition later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Other provinces restricted public funding of abortion services based on the location where services were provided.

Time Cover November 15, 2005

Since 1977, there has been a steady decline in public sector hospitals performing abortions. In fact, a lack of hospital-based therapeutic abortion committees to authorize terminations was named as a dysfunction of the old criminal regime. An increasing proportion of abortions today are performed in single-purpose clinics limited to large urban centers. This shift to clinic-based services may also explain the