When I first saw how the wording of Bill 28 was changed, I felt a chill down my spine.

As a mother of a 25-year-old woman who might decide to have children in the future, I felt the horror only a mother can feel when they know, deep down in their guts, that their own child’s life could be endangered. 

Such laws cost lives. Take Poland, where Dorota Lilik died on May 24 after her waters broke three days earlier.  Doctors in hospital told her that her pregnancy could be saved and reassured her that her health was not in danger. After her health started deteriorating rapidly, she had to wait for hours until the consultant approved the abortion. It was too late. She died two hours later of septic shock and multiple organ failure.

Lilik became another name on an ever-growing list of women dying in similar situations, in Italy, in Ireland, in the US. It is no wonder that I am not reassured when we are told that

Andrea Prudente and Marion Mifsud Mora were simply ‘panicking’ when they asked their doctors to follow international medical protocols and terminate their pregnancies.

The law in Poland allows termination of pregnancy in cases of rape and when the life and health of the pregnant woman are in danger. Yet, doctors hesitate due to the atmosphere of fear and intimidation caused by restrictive laws.

Whether intentional or not, this is exactly the situation that legislators have created with the amendments to Bill 28 that require three specialist consultants to approve an abortion in cases of risk to grave health which might lead to death. 

The message to doctors is clear: We do not trust your expertise or good intent as the caring doctor to make such a clinical decision with your own medical team; on the contrary, we are assuming you are either incompetent or have criminal intent and, therefore, require two other approved specialists to confirm your decision.

In practice, this requirement will only serve to create barriers and delays in potentially life-saving care.

Another significant contrast between the new law and the one previously proposed is the reduced level of protection it provides for pregnant women’s health. While the original bill allowed termination of pregnancy in circumstances of grave risk to health, this new law only allows abortion when the condition may lead to death.

Is surviving death the new standard for pregnant women’s healthcare?- Andrea Dibben

Is surviving death the new standard for pregnant women’s healthcare? In no other circumstance is it considered acceptable for a patient to suffer a permanent disability or a chronic life-debilitating condition because they have been denied the care they need.

The new law clearly shows how patriarchy closes ranks whenever there is an attempt to resist it. Patriarchy can manifest in many forms and there is no point in speculating about what made the Labour government capitulate to its forces.

Was it the conservative groups banding together for a campaign of scaremongering and misinformation? Medical professionals, who, for decades, ignored international gynaecological guidelines, did not question the status quo and, consequently, forced women to continue pregnancies that could harm them?

Or was it the president of Malta himself, who claimed he would never sign a law that permitted abortions, yet, has done just that? Because, whatever way it’s spinned, this law has acknowledged that abortion is healthcare and has legalised it, albeit in very restricted circumstances.

The irony in all this fiasco is that while the espoused goal is to “save the unborn”, this could not be further from the truth. 

Women who want to terminate their pregnancies for whatever reason will continue to do so by purchasing pills online and self-managing their own abortions. Women with medical complications but who are stable enough to travel will continue to do so, sometimes supported by the same medical professionals who opposed the original Bill 28.

This law was meant to protect pregnant women who clearly wanted the child but who were unfortunate enough to develop serious complications that landed them in hospital. It ended up as a law to control doctors and ‘prevent abuse’, assuming women in such a vulnerable situation would also have nefarious intents and cannot be trusted to make decisions about their own health and lives.

‘Abuse’ was never going to happen. The truth is that the Labour government passed this law in its current form to appease the prejudices of those who the late Daphne Caruana Galizia rightly termed “the plastic foetus army”.

Andrea Dibben is a social policy academic at the University of Malta and campaigner for Voice for Choice.