Last Friday, the Prime Minister welcomed a delegation from the Gift of Life Foundation to his offices at Castille in order to discuss – for the billionth time – their blessed Constitution amendment proposal (and, in a separate incident, Carnival also got under way). Strange but true: Lawrence Gonzi is unwilling to discuss immigration in parliament (which most would agree is of something of a passing concern at the moment); he had no time to receive delegations from 11 trade unions to discuss the crippling cost of energy in this country; and he even chickened out of a debate on the St John’s issue, which had provoked nationwide discussion and worked people up into a veritable furore.
And then, all of a sudden, he has all the time in the world to discuss an issue which is of absolutely no relevance to anyone in the here and now.
I don’t know. Shouldn’t our Prime Minister be altogether too busy working to deliver on his long overdue electoral promises – the MEPA reform, for instance, or the tax bands revision – to have time for such nonsense? Evidently not. Dr Gonzi, it seems, is only interested in those items that were nowhere to be seen on his party’s electoral manifesto last March... and for which his government has absolutely no electoral mandate to implement.
If anything, it is quite the other way around. Gift of Life evidently hasn’t realised this yet, but what the result of the March 8 election strongly indicates is that the general public does NOT approve of its Constitutional amendment at all. I mean, look at all the Nationalist MPs who positioned themselves in the front line: the two who presented GoL’s petition to parliament in 2007 – Franco Galea and Michael Asciak – didn’t even get elected in 2008.
The reason is not too difficult to understand, though Gonzi has been surprisingly slow to take it on board. Maltese voters are not as stupid as they are sometimes portrayed, and while they undeniably feel strongly about abortion, they are less concerned with the infinitesimal possibility of its introduction some time in the distant future, as they are with the many, urgent problems staring us all in the face right now.
These include immigration, inflation, unemployment, the cost of water, electricity and pretty much everything else... you know, all the stuff that deputy prime ministers and members of parliament would otherwise have to occasionally look into, if they weren’t so busy battling abortion in a country where it is already illegal.
But let’s leave the government to its many woes, and instead turn our attention to Gift of Life. Who the heck are these guys, anyway?
It is not an easy question to answer, for with the exception of the omnipresent Paul Vincenti, nobody else is ever named as a member. In fact, the foundation’s website does not even feature the standard “Who We Are” section... which is ironic, when you consider that it never hesitates to “name and shame” those people that Gift of Life decides to label as “abortionists” (whatever that word means).
But then again, the website does offer the intrigued web surfer a few clues... as well as some glaring contradictions.
Gift of Life claims to be “a group of lay voluntary professionals”, and has to date resisted any attempts to be labelled as a religious organisation (examples include the time when Vincenti urged a candle-lit vigil not to recite the Rosary outside Rebecca Gomperts’ lecture last year... so as not to alienate any secularist pro-lifers in their midst).
And yet, the same GoL is listed as the official Malta branch on the website of Human Life International: a direct offshoot of the Catholic Church, founded and directed by a Catholic priest with the full blessing of the Vatican (to which it is also affiliated), and dedicated to Our Lady of Guadeloupe.
As one might expect, Gift of Life’s parent organisation is also viscerally opposed to all forms of artificial contraception... about which it seems to enjoy spreading malicious falsehoods (my favourite graphic from the website depicts a grinning human skeleton under the words “Faithful Condom User”).
And in particular, HLI is against all forms of artificially assisted procreation technology: such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which it opposes on the grounds that infertility is a “cross” that certain unfortunate persons “have to bear” in order to attain “spiritual liberation”.
There is more: GoL is also affiliated with UK Lifeleague, which likewise dubs itself a “secular” organisation, but then lists among its employees’ prerequisites “a love of God and all his children”. And lastly, GoL is a member organisation of Heartbeat International (USA): “a non-profit, interdenominational Christian association of faith-based pregnancy resource centres... endorsed by Christian leaders nationwide.”
All of this adds up to make of Gift of Life, contrary to its own claims, a very deeply religious and faith-based institution... which I hasten to add is all very well and good.
But then again: why does Gift of Life go to such lengths to keep these facts from view? What is it about its mission, that they fear might alienate people and derail their plans?
Join all the dots in the above observations – and add to them Paul Vincenti’s oft-quoted statement that he intends to make of Malta a “pro-life centre of the world” – and you will no doubt come to the same conclusion as I have.
What GoL have in their sights is not so much abortion itself (which is wildly unpopular in Malta, and in any case already illegal), but instead, a Constitutional excuse to ban its parent organisation’s “Great Satan”... IVF.
Let’s face it: the unfettered existence of IVF in “super-Catholic Malta” has long been considered an anomaly in certain quarters. Former Children’s Commissioner Sonia Camilleri once described the practice as the “murder of millions of children”. The practice has also been assiduously criticised by consultant neonatal paediatrician, Dr Paul Soler. But despite the existence of a concerted campaign against IVF, it cannot be legally challenged without a serious change to the instruments of law.
It works like this: abortion is currently catered for only by Article 241 of the Criminal Code, which makes it illegal to “cause the miscarriage of any woman with child”...“by food, drink, medicine, or by violence, or by any other means whatsoever”. This on its own is clearly not enough to mount a legal case against IVF, for the simple reason that there is no deliberate termination of pregnancy involved. Instead, egg cells are artificially inseminated in a laboratory, and then implanted back into the womb... where they are largely left to their own devices.
In Malta, the process remains entirely unregulated – despite a draft bill on the subject issued in 2005, and since never debated in parliament – so theoretically, there is no limit to the number of allowable implanted embryos. But the standard maximum limit is around four... of which only one would realistically be expected to survive.
However many are implanted, it remains a fact that large numbers of fertilised ova will not survive the process (which is what Dr Camilleri probably had in mind when she passed the above, incredible remark).
With the law as it stands today, IVF is therefore perfectly legal. But if you go ahead and endow those same, single-celled organisms with full human rights – in a country where the State is already committed to safeguarding the human rights of “all persons” – well, suddenly you have a very solid case to make in court.
In fact, the Constitutional amendment proposed by Gift of Life, and foolishly endorsed by our Prime Minister, will overnight empower any fanatical pro-life organisation or individual to institute a Constitutional court case against the government of Malta for not doing enough to save those human lives.
And seeing it is clearly beyond PM Gonzi’s power to dive within the womb and rescue them all in person, the only available option will be to stop them from being implanted in the first place... in other words, to ban the procedure altogether.
(The same, by the way, goes for those methods of artificial contraception anathematised by the Catholic Church for being “abortive”: among them, the coil.)
Of course, GoL will probably now claim that it has no intention of filing that Constitutional case; that it is not against IVF; and that I am just being a conspiracy theory nut. But even if this is true – and I sincerely doubt it – the Constitutional case can always be instituted by some other lunatic society: of which, in case no one’s noticed, we have quite a few in this country.
Meanwhile, I sincerely hope you can all produce your own children without recourse to fertility therapy. Otherwise... well, tough.
Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below. Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.
Search:
MALTATODAY
BUSINESSTODAY
All the interviews from Reporter on MaltaToday's YouTube channel.
Strange but true: Lawrence Gonzi is unwilling to discuss immigration in parliament (which most would agree is of something of a passing concern at the moment); he had no time to receive delegations from 11 trade unions to discuss the crippling cost of energy in this country; and he even chickened out of a debate on the St John’s issue, which had provoked nationwide discussion and worked people up into a veritable furore.
