Abortion Not Applicable, Marriage Optional

Funny story this - not ha ha, but a little odd.

A Portsmouth couple who have been trying for a baby for a reported seven years have finally conceived but in a cruel twist of fate, the twins Lisa Chamberlain is carrying are are conjoined with a rare form of the condtion called dicaphaly.

They have separate heads and brains but a single body.

Doctors have advised an immediate termination but 25 year old Ms. Chamberline is not interested, calling them a gift from god, telling the Sun:

"To me, my twins are a gift from God and we're determined to give them a chance of life."

You might expect a pretty sharp response from me being an atheist. But I'm also pro-choice and it's Ms. Chamberline's choice to keep the babies despite the overwhelming medical evidence.

US-born twins, Abby and Brittany Hensel have the same condition and survived not only birth, but recently celebrated their 18th birthday.

In reality most conjoined (Siamese) twins do not survive to term and to make a spectacle of these unfortunate children and this family is fucking disgusting. Still, the smiling Ms. Chamberline and partner Mike Pedace, 32 don't seem phased - so that's alright.

I am phased at the double standards.

Ms. (read MISS) Chamberline is not married to Mr Pedace - and that's no real news in the 2008 - or in 2001 when they started trying for a family. It's no news the couple have been trying for a family but then there's a small point of relgion:

Now Ms. Chamberline is supposed to be "staunch Catholic" which may be the reason she opposes the termination.

But hang on - this isn't entirely consistent.

Staunch Roman Catholics teach marriage before family.

And what sort of god delivers this cruel blow to these children? I don't really care what Ms Chamberline thinks - she has a choice - but to believe that a loving, caring god could deliver the gift of life so cruelly beggars belief. Should these babies survive to term, their chance of ultimate survival is poor; and even then, they are destined to live out their days as freaks.

UPDATE: 20:00

At just 25 she has years of childbearing left. The suggestion she has been trying for seven years speaks volumes - has she never heard of a fertility clinic; or even a GP? Hell's teeth, perhaps the poor girl is pre-disposed to produce faulty embryos - we just don't know.

Please, please someone tell me it wasn't the lure of a tasty packet from a tabloid (the Sun in this case) that forced their hand. Tabloids are known to promote these freakish incidents because people love the lurid details of how these "determined" women are going to keep the multiple foetus despite being told none are likely to survive.

Anyone else remember Mandy Allwood - back in the mid-90s, she had fertility treatment and ended up the talk of the nation after receiving money from the tabloids and even engaging Max Clifford to represent her. Refusing a selective termination which would have given some of the children a fighting chance, Mandy lost all eight. It caused a sensation at the time and irritated the hell out of me.

Human females are "designed" for singleton pregnancies - like Kangaroos. Twins and triplets are unusual, but as the number increases, the chance of any foetus surviving to anything near term drops away sharply. Eight was fucking ludicrous.

I just thank common sense that termination is still an option for those who choose it.

Tony Blair Is Still Interfering

It's said you can't keep a good man down; but, as the marketing goes you can't keep a Weeble™ down either.

Former British Primeminister and Catholic convert is now trying to meddle in American politics by leaning on Barack Obama to, "Unify the world." Writes Joe Murphy in the Mail.

Mr Blair is now an international peace envoy, which is sort of ironic considering his hand in deceiving the British people and leading us into an unjust and possibly illegal war against Sadam Hussain. He also claims to remain on friendly terms with President Bush (jnr.). Says Blair:

"I'm not a fair-weather friend. I say this to people all the time, even [to] liberal people who cannot believe I can possibly like George W Bush."

Now I believe Blair likes Dubya because if he said anything else, he'd come across looking like a hypocrite - oh wait...

Blair went on to say of the Iraq war and Bush's "war on terror":

"He [Dubya] had very difficult decisions to take after September 11th, and I think he took the right decisions, actually. I'm afraid that if there was any collective mistake that was made, it was not understanding how deep the struggle is and how long it's going to have to be fought."

You think, Mr Blair? You THINK! Dubya had some hard decisions to make for sure, but if there's one thing we've seen admirably demonstrated over the last eight years, he's prone to make the wrong ones - and run with them no matter what the cost is: provided it doesn't cost him.

So here we have a warmonger rubbing shoulders with an idiot (you decide which is which) and both of them have the gall to call on President elect Obama to fix their mess for them. Religious wars have gone on for as long as religion has existed: even the Abrahamics (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) have fought through history vying for power: and they still are despite all claiming to be one people under the same god!

The best way to win a religious war is to not get into it in the first place, but thanks to this idiot and his puppet, we're all neck-deep in shit and resentment. I want to know which fucking idiot thought that a guy responsible for the Middle East hating Britain thought it would be smart to give him a job as a peace envoy. For fuck's sake, he's a new-born member of the most hated and power-hungry major Christian sect of them all.

Thank god for atheism, I say.

Tony Blair is still confused

In an interview for the BBC, Tony Blair continues to live in denial that his faith actually scares the shit out of a lot of us. The fact that he's now joined the largest Christian cult is nothing surprising, his letterbox-mouthed spouse has been Catholic for years and his family are being raised with invisible friends.

What is amazing (or perhaps it isn't) is that Blair (or B'Liar as many call him) admits in one breath that he feared a palaver if he admitted to being a God-botherer while in office, yet in another he thinks that people: "in one sense, are a little comforted if they think the person leading them has some sense of spiritual value," he said. "Probably we could have been a little more adventurous on this without bringing the house down."

You know, I rather wish he had.

Blair rose to power with a grin. He is, I cannot argue, charismatic but he's about as much use to the world peace his puppeteer, George 'Dubya' Bush.

It's simple. In all likelihood there is no god. We can't prove a negative, so the best we can hope for is to attempt to find evidence of some supernatural force.

There isn't any.

Not a jot. Not a single solitary drop in the ocean (because if there were, I wouldn't write this).

We simply don't know how some things work and how some things came around - the Big Bang event, the origins of life (even though Miller-Ulrey came close) and so on.

Invisible friends and belief in things that contradict what we can prove give me chills. I don't really care if Bob around the corner thinks the world is flat, but if the bloke running my country thinks that, then I've got serious cause for concern.

Either Tony Blair is a liar or he's self-deceived and either way, I'm glad he's not running Britain any more.