Hey, remember this story about the British 13-year-old boy and his 15-year-old girlfriend having a baby? Here’s an update:

DNA tests have revealed that a 13-year-old British boy who claimed to have fathered a child with his 15-year-old girlfriend was not the dad, according to a court judgement made public Monday.Claims that baby-faced schoolboy Alfie Patten made Chantelle Steadman pregnant when he was aged just 12 triggered national soul-searching about Britain’s high level of teenage pregnancies.

But the story, reported in February just days after the birth, sparked claims from other boys who lived nearby that they could also be the father and social workers organised a DNA test.

The results, revealed in a high court judgement last month which was only made public Monday, showed the father was 15-year-old Tyler Barker, who lived on the same housing estate as Steadman in Eastbourne in southern England.

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Véronique adds: Phew! So the dad was really 15. What a relief…

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In case you haven’t been following the story, here’s a pretty decent summary of the Notre Dame scandal. I don’t understand why a Catholic institution would go out of its way to honour the least pro-life president in recent memory. Apparently, I am not alone.

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Andrea adds: There’s this in today’s Post, too, about Obama and the honorary degree, and his position on abortion: 

If there is any abortion–anywhere, at any time, for any reason– that President Obama does not think should be legal and funded by the government if need be, he has not indicated it thus far. 

Very conciliatory, that Obama.

Ontario PC leadership candidate Randy Hillier writes about freedom of conscience:

Last year, Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons came close to implementing a policy that would have made it “unethical” for doctors to decline, as a matter of conscience, to perform controversial medical procedures on otherwise healthy patients. If adopted, the policy would have compelled doctors who consider abortion the taking of innocent life to provide such a “service” themselves or risk losing their license to practice medicine in Ontario.

Fortunately, after an outcry from the public prompted some sober second thought, the College stepped back from the policy, allowing doctors to continue exercising their conscience in the performance of their duties. In doing so, however, it also warned doctors that they could still be subject to prosecution by other quasi-judicial bodies such as Ontario’s human rights tribunals. [Read more…]

A few pictures from the Hill. Wet and cold. But we had fun!

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Michael Coren on today’s March for Life in Ottawa.

Today, the 12th annual March for Life will take place in Ottawa. Up to 10,000 people, half of them under the age of 25, will walk, sing and pray for an end to abortion in Canada. If past patterns are repeated, there will be hardly any mention of the event in the media — a contrast with the numerous protests a fraction of the size that tend to receive full and fulsome coverage. There has never been any abusive or violent behaviour from the participants — though there are occasionally obscene and provocative gestures from opponents –and numerous MPs and religious and ethnic leaders will attend. The march is also intensely reflective of the authentic Canada, unlike most other demonstrations: Conservative and Liberal, able-bodied and handicapped, black and white, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, from every region and background.

One would think this diversity would make it almost worthy of a heritage moment on the CBC or a government grant. Instead it makes the shapers of establishment opinion extraordinarily uncomfortable. As does, of course, any mention of the abortion issue. What one regularly hears from the marchers is best described as an informed incredulity. Why, they ask, is someone automatically excluded from the public square and considered extreme if they merely embrace the scientific proof that life begins at conception?

I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for the CBC to do a heritage moment about it. OK, so the mainstream media is ignoring the issue. Fine. Nobody said our job would be easy (heck, even the weather seems against us today – it’s cold in windy and quite grey in Ottawa this morning). But so what? See you there!

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Véronique adds: Actually, the march was mentioned on CBC radio’s 4 pm newscast. It wasn’t last year.

More good news for Baby Océane, who seems to be recovering very well from her pre-birth surgery. The whole story is interesting and uplifting to read, but here’s the bit that got my attention:

Doctors are increasingly performing interventions on fetuses, including transfusions, bladder stents and draining cystic masses, says Dr. Greg Ryan, head of the fetal medicine unit at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, the only Canadian hospital that performs fetal cardiac interventions and one of only six around the world.

A developing fetus has an amazing ability to heal itself, although it is still not clear what it is about the in utero environment that makes that possible. “The tissue has the ability to modify and correct itself,” says Ryan.

Science can’t always explain everything.

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Tanya adds: I know I’m just saying what we’re all thinking here, but if we can get in there to intervene and help save a fetus, why may we also get in there and destroy one?  Could you ask a doctor to help save your ebbing tapeworm, I wonder?  Or how about elective pancreatectomy?

See what’s happening in Sweden:

Stockholm, Sweden, May 12, 2009 / 06:02 pm (CNA).- Sweden, which legalized abortion in 1938, has taken its abortion extremism one step further by legalizing “gender based” abortion which allows a mother to decide to abort her baby solely due to his or her sex.

The Local reported that a pregnant woman in South Sweden, who already has two girls, arrived at Mälaren Hospital and inquired whether or not she would be giving birth to another girl.   She went on to tell her doctors that her previous two pregnancies ended in abortion because she did not want to have another girl – and if this child was another girl, she would have it aborted as well.

Doctors expressed concern over this and brought it to the attention of Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare. They asked how to handle requests where doctors felt “pressured to examine the [fetus’s] gender” without a medical rationale.

The Board came back and said that requests to for abortions based on a child’s gender cannot be refused.

When you maintain that abortion is only a matter of choice, and that it only concerns the pregnant women in question, that’s where you end up. Don’t believe for one minute that this can’t happen here. In fact, as Andrea can tell you, it already is happening here and nobody is doing anything about it.

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Andrea is really disgusted: But also adds–this is what “family planning” means. It means you get to plan your family, dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s–controlling the minute aspects, which in this unprecedented age, we can control. Just a couple of years ago, this would not have been possible. Have two girls already? Get rid of the next couple as you try for the boy. Because you want a boy. Now if you are pro-choice, this really, really shouldn’t bother you. This is what they wanted–they being the Planned Parenthood types of the world. I hate to be so harsh, but when they said we should be able to “plan parenthood” including abortion when all else fails, did they honestly mean to exclude choices about sex?

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Rebecca adds: “I hate to be so harsh, but when they said we should be able to “plan parenthood” including abortion when all else fails, did they honestly mean to exclude choices about sex?”

The grim but blackly funny part is that in my opinion, this is exactly what the abortion lobby wanted – abortion in any and all cases, except when it gores their sacred cow.  And most of them still don’t see the difference.  A number of gay rights activists (in the US more than here) oppose abortion, full stop, because they think that when the genetic basis for gay identity (sorry for the question begging) is discovered, people might abort gay fetuses.  The thing is, they have the intellectual integrity to work backwards and realize that if they don’t want babies being aborted for being gay (or likely to become gay), they also have to speak up against babies being aborted for being the wrong sex, or having other medical problems.

If we can use this as a lever to get feminists to rethink abortion, I’m glad.  But as I’ve said before, it is no more or less offensive or immoral to abort a baby because it’s the wrong sex than it is because it’s conceived at the wrong time, or because it was conceived with a guy you’ve since broken up with, or because it has the wrong chromosomes.

I swear they’re trying to drive us all bananas:

Riyadh — A Saudi judge told a conference on domestic violence that a man has the right to slap a wife who spends money wastefully and said women were as much to blame as men for increased spousal abuse, a newspaper reported.

Made out of court, the remarks do not carry the weight of law. But such pronouncements by Saudi judges, who are also Islamic clerics, are often widely respected.

A rights activist decried the remarks and said she and other campaigners viewed them as the latest setback in women’s efforts to gain the right to vote, drive, freely participate in politics and be protected from violence.