Raphael Vassallo | Sunday, 05 April 2009

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Oh and by the way: it’s not a crime to be pro-choice

Naturally, however, some people out there will stop at nothing until it becomes one. They are not content, these people, with the mere fact that abortion is already illegal in Malta. Oh, no. Where’s the fun in that? They also want to make it illegal for people to have an opinion about abortion, which differs from their own opinion in any significant way. And make no mistake: if these people don’t get their way in the end, it sure as Hell won’t be for lack of trying.

You know what? Sometimes I try to imagine to myself what it must be really like to be “pro-life”. Not, I might add, with very much success. After all, it’s an all-but impossible concept to imagine, for someone who instinctively disavows all attempts to portray the world as though it had been designed on a “black-and-white only” template. And besides: I’m not at all sure what the expression even means. Last week, over 230 human beings drowned in two separate boat accidents while trying to cross the Mediterranean. That’s a lot of human life to be needlessly lost all in one go; and their lifeless bodies are still washing up on the coast of Libya even as I write. Did we hear a squeak about this from the “Gift of Life Foundation”? No. Nor do we ever hear anything about loss of life in entirely avoidable accidents on the workplace – often as not involving “invisible” people, whose survival on the job is evidently a trivial consideration to their employers, or to the State which always looks the other way.
Then there are other issues, like the availability of affordable drugs for cancer: a disease which, last I looked, terminates a heck of a lot more lives in this country than the illegal termination of pregnancies. Do the “pro-lifers” have anything to say about these and other life-and-death issues? Anything at all?

Of course not. For let’s be honest: the movement which claims on its website to “campaign for the protection of life at all its stages, from conception to natural death”, never utters a single word about lives lost at any other stage than pregnancy. It is almost as though abortion, despite being illegal, were somehow the single most devastating cause of death in our country... to the extent that unless we amend our Constitution without delay, we will be wiped out of existence altogether by a giant pair of galactic forceps.

But, oh! How silly of me, I forgot. Gift of Life might never breathe a word about lives lost at any point between birth and natural death... but no sooner does a Labour MEP candidate post a single comment on a pro-choice Facebook group, than lo and behold! Suddenly, its members become “alarmed”. Suddenly, they start applying pressure on the candidate to “clarify” her position. Suddenly, they go into blackmail mode, bombarding the candidate with phone-calls, in the course of which she is threatened to publicly declare herself to be “pro-life” in writing... or “face the consequences.”

What consequences, might I ask? Well, judging by the way Sharon Ellul Bonici’s words were twisted by the Gift of Life’s statement last Wednesday – appropriately enough on April Fools’ – the consequences are not unlike those faced by myself and other journalists for daring to speak out against the Constitutional amendment proposal some four years ago.
We were “blacklisted” on the Gift of Life website, on the charge that we were advocating the murder of little children.

In case there is still any confusion regarding what comment Sharon posted on the website, well, this is it: “The state should not constrain a woman from terminating her pregnancy, let alone entrench it in our Constitution. The situation in Malta is not tragic only because abortion is available elsewhere in Europe. Had this not been so, we would have faced a tragedy, with underground abortions and their consequences.”
And just in case there are still those who doubt that Gift of Life is nothing but a camouflaged extension of GonziPN, last Thursday NET TV seized on Vincenti’s public statement to make the following claim (echoed also by Roberta Metsola Triccas Tedesco, who by a huge coincidence is contesting the same election for the PN): “Sharon Ellul Bonici ddikjarat ruhha favur li pajjizna jiddahhal l-abort.”

“Pro-life”? Sounds more like “anti-Labour” to me... which is odd, because I would have thought there was already a perfectly valid anti-Labour platform called the “Nationalist Party” out there, and that – considering it has won seven out of the last eight elections – it doesn’t really need any help from Paul Vincenti and Co.
But then again, it is perfectly consistent with the rest of the Gift of Life gibberish. It makes as much sense as mounting an aggressively anti abortion campaign, in a country where the procedure is already aggressively “verboten”.

There is, however, one tiny inconsistency in all this that I have never understood. Earlier on I mentioned that Gift of Life were not “content” with the fact that abortion is illegal. Well, that was an understatement. It would be more accurate to say simply that Malta’s pro-lifers in general are not “content”, full-stop. In fact they must be desperately, incurably unhappy: and their disaffection has clearly blinded them to the point that they can’t appreciate how astonishingly lucky they actually are, to live in a land where practically everyone shares their cherished viewpoint.
Think about it for a second. If you were “pro-life” – as most of you probably are – wouldn’t you be just positively delighted with the state of affairs in Malta? I sure as hell would be. In fact, I reckon it would be hard for me to ever stop smiling, knowing how safe and snug all those cute little foetuses are in their mummies’ tummies, while Big Daddy Vincenti, in pure KGB fashion, bullies all the evil pro-choicers into making public confessions.

But that’s just me. It seems that genuine pro-lifers, in spite of all they’ve got going for them, are a miserable bunch really. Nothing is ever enough, it seems... which makes one wonder: will their precious Constitutional amendment, if successful, not be enough either? What will they be demanding next, once they have both political parties dutifully eating out of their hand?
Come to think of it – and just to illustrate the perverse extent of Malta’s unwholesome foetus frenzy – I remember bumping into one particularly grumpy pro-lifer at the Ta’ Qali football stadium some years ago, during a crucial World Cup qualifying match. Interestingly enough, Malta actually played fairly well on that occasion, and almost managed to secure our first point in the competition, by not actually losing to the Faeroe Islands.
But I missed most of the action, because Mr Pro-Life accosted me at half-time over some article or other I had written. Yes, folks. There we were, a nail-biting soccer encounter unfolding in the background, and this person missed the entire game just to tick me off about my failing to share his wholehearted enthusiasm for the unborn child.

I ask you all: is this normal? (No, not that we can’t even beat the Faeroe Islands... I mean, is it normal for a 30-something-year-old Mediterranean male to be more interested in foetuses than football?) Somehow I don’t think so. But then again: who ever said this was a normal country?

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