The not-so-called-by-everyone abortion debate brought out the worst in us. Truly a lowest common denominator affair. People seem to speak about abortion with arguments that convinced them before they were born – if you will excuse the partial illustration – leaving no space for any reaction to a divergent view but insult and unbridgeable distance.

Consider the polarised nature of the debate. Most countries in the world have at some point debated legislation regulating the terminations of pregnancies. The debate in some countries has been more enlightened than in others. Some countries – I am specifically thinking of Ireland – developed methodologies of debate specifically for the purpose of thinking about abortion precisely because they recognised the risks of an irrational approach to a complex topic.

Malta appears to have adopted the worst possible template for the abortion debate: not from neighbouring (and with substantial Catholic congregations) Italy, France, Spain or Ireland but the visceral maelstrom of the United States of America.

The extreme polarisation, the mutual demonisation, the inability to feel compassion with, or to muster enough intellectual openness to listen to, the other side are, in my view, the worst way to discuss whether to holiday on the beach or in the mountains, let alone whether to jail doctors who terminate their patients’ pregnancies.

Secondly, the utter failure of the government to fulfil its basic duty to facilitate a public debate. The callousness of the government’s conduct has been and remains spectacularly duplicitous. Consider the simple fact that they continue to insist that the law they are pushing through parliament does not in any way chip the marmoreal ban on abortion in Malta.

This is not simply failure to act on the courage of their convictions: arguing for allowing abortions, if that’s their belief, despite the disagreement of some of their supporters. What they are doing instead is approaching a very sensitive debate without any convictions at all: just an amoral opportunism, a gargantuan contempt for the public’s cognitive abilities and a substitution of any thinking with crafty tactics.

Thirdly, we have shown a disturbing preference for dogma over rational thought. You may be tempted to suspect that this is the accusation from someone coy about being pro-choice addressed to those who rather haughtily call themselves pro-life. But dogma, unhelpful and stubborn, abounds everywhere. Consider how the vote in parliament came down to strict adherence to party loyalty.

In spite of all the strong feelings about abortion, all Labour MPs voted in support of the law proposed by the government. I refuse to believe that none of those MPs see through the blatant lie that the government’s bill does not weaken the ban on abortion.

We have shown a disturbing preference for dogma over rational thought- Manuel Delia

There can be no doubt, however, that, at least a few of them, take comfort in that lie. The dogma of party loyalty governed their conduct whatever their prickly consciences might have been silently screaming within them.

The same can be said of opposition MPs who appear to be delighting in a rare show of unanimity while opposing this law.

Instead of presenting opposition on the grounds of the abject poverty of the law’s drafting, the fact that it promises one thing and delivers the opposite, the fact that it throws doctors of any persuasion on the subject into an opaque ocean of legal uncertainty, the opposition has mobilised behind a banner of explicit images of very born babies and implicit images of a Herodian slaughter of the innocents they are volunteering to prevent.

None of this helps anyone.

Recall some basic fundamentals of any democratic process, as this one too should be. Every individual – every doctor, every MP, every mother – has the right to be guided by their faith and the precepts of any organised religion they belong to.

It should surprise no one that in Malta, for most people, that is Catholicism. But we do not write laws on the basis of faith, even a faith professed by a great majority. Consider two examples.

Adultery is, for Catholics as indeed for most people, morally reprehensible. But we do not write laws to punish adulterers. Not criminalising adultery is not the same as legislating “a culture of” adultery. Nor can or does the state aspire to change the status of adultery as a sin.

Christ teaches us to turn the other cheek but our laws excuse someone who kills someone else in defence of their own life. So much for the legal sanctity of life.

Every legislator has the right to be guided by the moral teachings of their Church. Every legislator has the duty to legislate in the public interest. We have not yet started to debate the public interest issues of this subject.

Here’s another one. Rights are not the gift of the majority but,  in a democracy, decisions about major changes are taken, or should be taken, after informed public debate that resorts to the freely given advice of the scientific community and the insight of moral teachers and religious leaders, after an open debate within political groupings and through some form of freely taken majority vote, whether by elected representatives or by universal suffrage.

We’ve seen none of that in this debate. Labour MPs look nothing like free agents. There is no suggestion that either party debated the issue openly with their members.

There’s no hint of scientific information in the public discourse. The Church has been understandably militant in its point of view but its arguments and objections have been met with cartoonish and unjustified accusations of medievalism and reactionary obtuseness.

Frankly, there’s something both sides of this bloody spat should be able to agree on. Whether you want the absolute ban on abortions to stay or you want women to have a free choice about their pregnancies, after this law is passed we’ll all be swimming in a legal soup of confusion and doubt, setting ourselves up for an even less meaningful discussion the next time this argument flares up.

For so it will.