Abortion and moral rights

Poor Paul Vincenti, self-styled frontman of the anti-choice association, Gift of Life, always seems to get it wrong! When we last locked horns over two months ago, he had claimed that Christopher Tietze was "one of the world's most experienced abortion statisticians", a statement with which I concur. Through his work on abortion, Dr Tietze had discovered that, "the criminalisation of abortion did not reduce the numbers of women who sought abortions..." As a result, he fervently believed that legal abortion saved many women's lives, which would otherwise have been lost through unsafe, illegal abortion.

Just as I was beginning to think that Mr Vincenti had disbanded his deluded organisation on the basis of Dr Tietze's reliable evidence, he pops out of the woodwork once again (February 20) to indulge in his favourite pastime - quoting perceived adversaries out of context.

Now, unless Mr Vincenti has been taking a snooze for the past several weeks, he ought to know that the concept of personhood I find most appealing, in the abortion debate, is the one based on the mental development, not the viability, of the foetus (and, yes, foetus is the correct medical term). In fact, as I have mentioned in previous correspondence, my cut-off point for ethically justifiable abortion is about five months (unless the woman's life is under threat or the foetus is grossly abnormal), well before the onset of independent viability for most foetuses. So, any mention by Mr Vincenti of partial-birth abortion of 35 to 40-week-old foetuses in my regard is beside the point and just an exercise in the brand of sensationalism in which he delights.

My only reference to the viability of the foetus (February 15) revolves around the clash between the full moral rights of the pregnant woman, who does not wish to take her pregnancy to term, and the moral rights of the foetus, which is as yet unable to live outside her womb. If it could, then no such clash would exist and there would be no abortion debate, because it would be in society's interest to hold the foetus' rights in trust until it achieved personhood.

Mr Vincenti's fatuous claim that the advocates of women's rights promulgate a culture of deceit has probably more to do with his religious beliefs and chauvinistic inclinations than with a genuine concern for women's well-being. How else is one to explain his opposition to legal abortion when, according to Dr Tietze, it saves many women's lives? As to Mr Vincenti's insistence that he has experience of women who have undergone abortion, I should like to know how this came about. Surely not in Malta, where it is illegal; and since he is not a medical practitioner, psychologist, nurse or social worker but a telesales specialist (as evidenced by his inadvertent use of such terms as "packaged" and "close the sale" - a Freudian slip, perhaps?), his own use of the internet is more prolific than he would care to admit.

As a pro-life campaigner, Mr Vincenti has to account for all stages of foetal development, from conception to birth. And yet, the photographs and models, which regularly accompany his articles and meetings, including that ghastly monument in Mosta, all attest to a foetus in the later stages of development, never when it consists of just a clump of cells. Now that is duplicitous.