The abortion amendment, as they call it, has been proposed to introduce abortion by request step by step. The Labour Party has absolutely no mandate to introduce abortion and the law as it stands at present has always treated the lives of both the mother-to-be and the child-to-be-born equally. It also ensures doctors’ discretion to ensure that both lives are as secure as can be throughout the entire process.

In acute situations, when the life of the mother is directly at risk were the pregnancy to be allowed to continue without an intervention, doctors have always acted according to their Hippocratic oath and the courts have protected them.

Yet, now, what is being proposed is to alter the balance of equal rights to life of the mother and the unborn child. If this law were to pass as it stands, even danger to the health, mental or physical, of the mother would be enough to set the conditions for an abortion. Thus, in the future, a mother-to-be whose health is at risk can allow the taking of a life to cure or reduce the effects of the illness.

This reduces the life of an unborn child to the equivalent of the cost of medication or of an operation or a blood transfusion in those cases where the mother suffers from mental distress and a risk for a physical incapacitation that is not in any way putting her life at risk.

Pregnancy and childbirth will always remain combined with health risks with which one could live the rest of one’s life after having allowed the baby to be born.

A cure for mental illness or medication to reduce its effect is what any mother-to-be should have a right to. To be allowed by law to ask for her child to be to cut up and killed instead is an abhorrent imbalanced choice between two equal rights.

How can such an inhuman choice be made?

Whether killing the child would reduce her mental distress or her physical disorders or not is never assured, even after an abortion.

In fact, the killing of a person should never be allowed as a cure for a disease. If this is the case, we would soon be asking for the killing of people to accede to their vital organs to cure another person who suffers from a breakdown of an organ.

I am happy that Labour politicians like former president Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca have protested while President George Vella this time has offered to resign if the amendment passes as is. The latter could have been as crass as he was last time when he went on holiday to allow the acting president to sign in his stead. This time the issue is too grave.

Fighting the religious convictions of the Maltese has always proven to be the downfall of our rulers- John Vassallo

But the Labour Party seems to be acting even more insensitively and seems to be convinced that the unborn child has no rights when it proposes this amendment, adding the risk to the mother’s mental and physical health to the risk to her life with an ulterior motive.

In my opinion, one of the reasons behind this proposal, and I sincerely hope that I am wrong when I come to this conclusion, is another.

Some suspicion grows in my mind that Robert Abela would like to get rid of Chris Fearne by sending him off to Brussels as Malta’s next European commissioner, in the same way that Lawrence Gonzi had done when he sent John Dalli away to Brussels in his time.

Both Dalli and Fearne were a threat to their prime ministers, having contended against them for the post.

Dalli proved an embarrassment to Malta and Fearne would suffer the same fate as long as Malta would not show the more liberal MEPs and other member states that some movement has been made on the abortion issue.

Should Fearne be proposed as European commissioner for health, he would have no chance to be chosen if Malta stands firm on the abortion issue.

So, to kill two birds with one stone, Abela gets Fearne to leave for a bigger job and the ultra-liberal elements within the Labour Party get their way.

The only real victims are the unborn children who will be sacrificed upon the altar of political expediency.

I hope I am wrong.

However, if I am right, voters, the majority of whom are Catholics and who are convinced that the unborn child has a right to life from conception until it dies a natural death, preferably of old age, would be disgusted by the absolute lack of morality of their leaders.

Therefore, the amendment to the law should only decriminalise an abortion when the mother is in imminent danger of losing her life.

This may be the downfall of the present government. Fighting the religious convictions of the Maltese has always proven to be the downfall of our rulers.

The French were expelled after ransacking a church in Mdina in the 18th century. Dom Mintoff started his downfall when he attacked the Church schools and religious-based education. Divorce proved the end of Gonzi and, now, abortion will lead to an uprising of all Catholics of all political colours against Abela.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.