Opinion: The game changer

Malta joined the European Union on May 1, 2004 in the shadow of two major scare objections spun by the Labour Party, namely the paucity of future EU financial aid packages and the inevitable introduction of EU’s liberal abortion laws.

Labour’s anti-membership campaign in the 2003 referendum was that EU annual aid would not surpass the measly figure of one million Malta liri.

This was on all the billboards and repeated in articles written by a certain journalist named Joseph Muscat.

Nineteen years have passed. Labour has changed its priorities. Many went for the joys of an EU salary where they soon learnt the ropes of EU funding. They became overnight experts.

The wife of sitting cabinet ‘socialist’ minister Anton Refalo applied for and received no less than €270,000 of EU funds to refurbish one of their many private properties for development as a ‘yoga-meditation boutique hotel’ in the Qala ODZ.

And silly you thought that EU funding could not be worked in this way.

Nineteen years down the road, in November 2022, Robert Abela, the game-changer of continuity, the sworn enemy of the status quo, stumbled upon an opportunity to target the votes of the pro-choice lobby by introducing abortion rights for women with mental stress connected to their pregnancy, similar to the UK experience where 95 per cent of hundreds of thousands of legal abortions are carried out for purely mental health reasons.

Andera Prudente was a tourist who was refused an abortion in Malta and who finally boarded a plane to Spain to abort her baby.  Doctors for Choice and the pro-choice lobby had long waited for a cause célèbre to launch their campaign.

With a national average of 4,800 births each year there was no doubt within theological, legal and medical circles that Maltese professionals have always correctly gone for saving the life of the mother when this was in grave danger.

No doctor in memory has ever been threatened with prosecution under the present law for doing so.

The Labour parliamentary group naturally rode on the back of the Andrea Prudente case- Eddie Aquilina

The Labour parliamentary group naturally rode on the back of the Prudente case and on the usual pseudo-discrimination argument that only the daughters of the rich could travel overseas to abort.

Despite this, their spin was that “this was not a bill about abortion” while, in contrast, the Doctors for Choice celebrated the government’s original legal amendment as a partial victory.

Abela was simply after votes and a split in the opposition benches. But, a few weeks later, his clever plan hit a brick wall.

The old party establishment, from the president and president emeritus downwards, came out against the amendment. The opposition held firm. The party pollsters came running to Abela with new data that showed a sudden massive dip in his popularity.

In June, the police arraigned an abused woman and charged her with an illegal abortion.

The court gave her a suspended sentence in the spirit of compassion and mercy.

Totally out of options, an uncomfortable Abela finally settled for a simple clarification of what the existing law already was understood to be and, in true populist fashion, he threw the pro-abortion lobby under a bus.