Call No Man "Father"...

Surely someone with the surname “Abbott” should've foreseen the possibility of men’s genes ending up in unexpected places.

(For American readers: Tony Abbott, Member of the House of Representatives and Australia’s federal Minister for Health, is approximately – in politics, religious views, and personal style – the equivalent of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum).

Four comments on this:

1. Didn’t more or less the same thing once happen to Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation?

2. Pacê Mrs Donnelly, the withdrawal method is not “Vatican Roulette.” Rather, it's usually referred to as “the Queensland Rail method” (“we always pull out just in time”) or, by the Vatican itself, as “the grave sin of onanism” (since it's what Onan did in Genesis 38:8-10 -- albeit with his late brother’s widow, whom he wasn’t supposed to have sex with at all except for the specific purpose of giving her a child: see Deuteronomy 25:56). “Vatican roulette” is the nickname for the timed-abstinence method where the couple deliberately schedule their intercourse for a safe (read: non-fertile) time of the woman’s cycle. Its supporters prefer to call this method “Natural Family Planning,” because there's nothing artificial about it (since thermometers and vaginal temperature charts have been found growing on trees in the wild for millennia).

3. Objectively speaking, I would say this reduces to somewhere around 0.001% the Australian Law Reform Commission's hopes of persuading the Howard Government to put legislation before Parliament to outlaw DNA tests in disputed child-support cases.

4. After this episode, will Mr Abbott still want to base Australia’s constitutional arrangements on a system of government that places such a high premium on paternity being reliably evidenced?