Voting in Malta

Paul Brincau (February 12) assumes that I have only recently moved to Malta and failed to carry out any research before coming to live here. In fact, I had been regularly coming to Malta for over 20 years before moving to live here in 2017.

I came here with my eyes open, and, despite not having the vote, I have not been disappointed. I have British friends who come to Malta three or four times each year and refer to their visits as “coming home”.

Brincau claims that the decline in the percentage of Maltese people who vote in general elections is because they are coming to believe that voting is pointless.

At Malta’s last general election in 2022, 85.5 per cent of the qualified electorate voted. However, at the last UK general election in 2019, the corresponding figure was 67.3 per cent. In Brincau’s own constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Conservative candidate was Boris Johnson, the figure was 68.5 per cent.

How would Paul explain that?

ALAN COOKE – Sliema

Pregnancy through rape

Klaus Vella Bardon (February 12) wrote in answer to my letter of February 5 and thereby confirmed my perception that the position of the so-called pro-life faction is solidly based on misogyny.

Pregnancy through rape is a gross invasion and a denial of almost every right the person concerned has. PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Typically in such pieces, the word ‘woman’ is conspicuous by its absence; in fact, Vella Bardon uses it just once when he trots out the tired, jaded cliché that “Every woman facing a difficult situation when pregnant deserves the maximum support of the community through family members, friends, counsellors, etc.” 

Well, of course she does but that is just a platitude, no more effective than “sending thoughts and prayers”. Women in such tragic circumstances do not want flowery promises – they want a solid right to decide for themselves what is best for them. Vella Bardon seems to take comfort in his perception (though he did not back it up in any way) that rape victims becoming pregnant is an “unlikely event”. People are not numbers. Even if there was only one single case of pregnancy through rape in the whole world, that woman would still have the right to decide for herself what her course of action should be.

To assert that when a woman made pregnant through rape decides to terminate the pregnancy she is “punishing” or “passing a death sentence” on the rapist’s offspring is beyond ridiculous.  She is simply exercising her right to refuse to accept being made pregnant against her will. 

And that right exceeds by far any rights that the (not baby, though the so-called pro-lifers like to use that term as a form of sly emotional blackmail – not even a foetus) embryo may have.

No one can force another person to donate, say, a kidney, against their will, even if the proposed recipient will die as a result. So how can a woman be forced against her will to donate her whole body to bear a rapist’s offspring? Even the prominent jurist Giovanni Bonello has written that an abortion carried out on the basis of a danger to the woman concerned is a form of self-defence.

I would probably agree with Vella Bardon that “a society that demeans women by trivialising sex, promoting pornography and treating women as glorified sex toys has a higher incidence of rape”, though I would like to see some hard statistics.

But I fail to see how this is relevant to the matter in question. Unless, of course, Vella Bardon thinks that only women who are part of the “society” he mentioned suffer rape; a chauvinist attitude very typical of the so-called pro-life camp.

There can be no doubt that a pregnancy through rape is a gross invasion and a denial of almost every right the person concerned has. And that person has a right to refuse to accept it through any means they see fit.

VICTOR LAIVIERA – Naxxar