Clear and present danger

The present campaign to depict the amendment being debated in parliament – to give the final word to both doctors and women whose pregnancies become a very serious threat to their health and life – as opening the road to “abortion-on-demand” reminds me of the campaign against the introduction of divorce. Many of the present campaigners were crusaders against divorce then.

Today, they never utter a single word about divorce, knowing that their doomsday predictions regarding marriage have not happened. The same will happen this time.

Today’s campaigners are focusing their objection on the fact that even the very real threat to the “health” of the pregnant woman could qualify her for termination of the pregnancy “on demand”.

What if the pregnant woman happens to be your wife, daughter? Photo: Shutterstock.com

What if the real, very serious threat to the pregnant woman’s health, if not death, is that if the pregnancy is not terminated she may probably suffer both physical and/or mental permanent disability?

May I ask each one of the campaigners, none excluded, to answer this simple question with hand on heart: What if the pregnant woman who finds herself in such very serious danger happens to be your wife, daughter, sister, mother or even a very close dear relative or friend? Would you still object?

Scaremongering in today’s Malta can only impress the uninformed, easily gullible section of society, who still take seriously whatever is said by a PN-riddled Archbishop’s Curia and the ultra-conservative faction of the PN, which has hijacked the Nationalist Party.

Eddy Privitera – Naxxar

Trust

How can one trust doctors when some of them are pro-choice? These would perform an abortion if the mother complains of mental distress.

Will pro-life doctors be free to refuse an abortion where there is no question of the mother’s life being in danger?

Maria Meilak – Tarxien

Is BCRS caring for Gozitans?

Here in Gozo, no one could digest the hollow declaration made by a spokesman for BCRS to this newspaper (December 8), namely that 90 per cent of its 320 machines had been “fully functional in spite of huge demand”.

This is certainly not true for Gozo. On Sunday morning, December 4, people outside the Lidl outlet, where the BCRS machines were not functioning or were full, were heard lamenting that they had already been to both Nadur and Marsalforn and were unable to use these BCRS machines for the same reasons. In Gozo, this does not seem to be the exception but the rule.

I am in full agreement with Kevin Cassar who, in The Sunday Times of Malta on the same day (December 4) wrote that this is nothing but “a tax on the poor and the infirm” and, may I add, on us Gozitans, who are facing malfunctioning machines every day of the week.

Has BCRS posted a technician in Gozo to service these machines?

Joseph Bezzina – Victoria