Since Robert Abela took over from Joseph Muscat and promised continuity, Malta has been thrown into what amounts to a dictatorship. Apparently, the elected and co-opted MPs on the government side have decided to stop thinking and acting independently of their whip and their party diktats in matters of conscience, turning them from representatives of their electors into Abela’s yes-men.
The last straws are two bills. One would force through a parliamentary standards commissioner by changing the law requiring appointment by two-thirds majority to one needing only a simple majority of yes-men and women. The second bill, now in committee stage, is the more serious: the government has no mandate to introduce abortion and has promised multiple times that it would never do so.
The government is trying to fool the public that a foetus and an embryo are different things and that neither is human. This is nonsense and goes against the teachings of our national religion, the Catholic faith.
Most MPs are professed Catholics and even those who are not represent a majority of their electors who are. In principle, our MPs who approve this law would be declaring that there is no human life at conception, nor for the first six months until the unborn child is considered to be able to survive if removed from the womb.
These members would be allowing simple excuses of health risks, that could be reduced or solved by medication and treatment in the first six months of pregnancy, to be sufficient to kill the unborn child because the law would have called it a non-viable foetus.
Yet, even if one is a non-believer there is no scientific evidence that a non-viable human being will not remain a human being whatever politicians may write into their laws. Upon conception, the ovum and sperm, coming from two different humans create a new human being from the very moment of their fusion.
That this new unborn human looks unformed in the first weeks makes no difference to its humanity. An old human being whose brain has stopped functioning remains a human being. An old person who cannot feed himself or herself but is confined to a bed needing support of machines and other humans to remain alive is still a human being.
A newborn baby would die if not clothed, heated, fed and cleaned and, as such, is still not viable if left to care for itself and, yet, it is a human being and cannot be killed.
The same applies to an unborn child; the product of two different people cannot be considered other than a human being who has the right to live.
The government has no mandate to introduce abortion and has promised multiple times that it would never do so- John Vassallo
It is only when the life of another human being is in imminent danger of being lost and can only be saved if the life of another human being, that is the direct cause of the risk to that person’s life that the other human being can be killed.
Our present law as it stands and the medical practice in our hospitals follows this principle. We have always successfully followed this principle and doctors have made the choice to attempt to ensure that both mother-to-be and the unborn child are protected equally.
As long as the lives of either of the two are not at risk then both are cared for. Ailments, sicknesses, medical conditions, both physical or mental of both mother and unborn child, have always been treated by our doctors, nurses and hospitals with 100 per cent success, losing neither of these two lives.
No change to the law is required or needed. The proposed changes are led by a small minority of politicians and activists who, for the cause of ultra-liberalism, want to offer up the lives of many future as yet unconceived children for the sake of convenience.
All those who vote for this introduction of abortion at will, within the first five or six months of pregnancy, just to make Malta look more like other countries in Europe, do not deserve to be called Maltese. They are the fifth column and are abhorrent to the majority of Maltese. If Chris Fearne is proposed as the next European commissioner after the abortion amendment is forced through, we will know why this amendment has been suggested.
If this law passes with a majority vote by all or most of the Labour MPs then I suggest that, as was done following the 1981 election, opposition MPs should abandon parliament. They should walk out and stop attending so that the world and the EU will see that what we really have in Malta is a dictatorship.
Then we would see Abela and his cronies all alone running our parliament and explaining to the world why Malta has become a dictatorship, at least until the next election when Maltese voters who do not like to live in a dictatorship will have a fourth chance to change the system and to return to a government that listens and cares for the rule of law whether the next government is a ‘true’ socialist or a conservative one.
John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.