There are innumerable vital and urgent issues that need considered discussion and debate in Malta.  The environment, systemic corruption, migration, violence against women (including murder), racism and state capture.  The chances of having a serious, reflective, and respectful debate on these is almost completely zero. 

If you had undertaken a poll in the past two years on priority issues needing debate and policy change in Malta, abortion would most likely not have featured.  Now, it is the only show in town and the country is in meltdown over a messy and poorly prepared legal amendment the government claims will change little if anything.

There can be no doubt that abortion is a highly charged and contested issue, not just in Malta but worldwide. There are deeply rooted, and heartfelt existential issues involved to say nothing about ethical, health, rights, and equality issues. 

The debate touches on the role of faith and religion in private and public life; the role of law and the place of the constitution; institutional power, and the individual as well as culture, tradition, history and much more besides. 

Overall, a complex and highly emotive agenda worthy of great care, consideration, and mutual respect.  If ever an agenda needed clarity about choices, extensive public consultation (most probably a referendum), professional input and personal reflection, this is one.

And yet, into this sensitive and fragile agenda wades Robert Abela and his Labour Party colleagues with all the sensitivity and style of a blunderbuss. Official statements, political posturing by both parties and personalities and social media commentary have only added to the chaos, confusion, and conflict. 

Leadership, mistake, or devious tactic?  Times of Malta readers can make up their own mind, but I am in no doubt which is at play.

All in all, as on so many issues and on so many occasions with this government, it is deliberately an exercise in how not to engage in public dialogue most especially on a hugely divisive agenda like abortion. 

But it does offer a mega diversionary agenda which helps take pressure off a PM and his government under the cosh for ever-deepening and spreading corruption and criminality.  On cue, the official political opposition smells opportunity and presents itself as the guardian of ‘national’ morality.

As a result, the dominant national debate is now polarised on a fundamental ‘red button’ issue it was not prepared for.  Individuals, families, communities, and political groupings are being bludgeoned into taking sides in an ever more hard-line, routinely hysterical, and accusatory ‘dialogue of the deaf’. 

As elsewhere, there is precious little room for considered reflection and deliberation.  In the megaphone exchanges around this issue, abortion is presented as a simple black or white equation – there is virtually no space for complex personal, medical, legal, gender or moral argument. 

And there appears to be absolutely no time to listen to and hear the voices of the many women who have faced into the gut-wrenching moral dilemmas that affect them in the current legal and political framework. 

The words, language, emotions, and style involved are now at fever pitch and likely to increase many octaves.  As in other countries, the debate becomes a marker for far more than abortion but is about competing individual and collective religious, moral and rights perspectives.  

A cursory examination of the way in which Robert Abela and many of his colleagues characterised opposition to the proposed amendment and in particular their reaction to the Nationalist Party’s response highlights how primitive tribal poli­tics are in play. 

Individuals and groups are now being labelled, branded, and pilloried all for short-term political advantage regardless of chaos, damage, or consequence, especially for women, medical practitioners, or the courts.    

The manner, context, and politics around which this agenda is being manipulated today is precisely what Malta does not need.

As a result, the loser will most definitely be Malta.