Quality life for the unborn child

Pro-life Day is being marked every year in Malta and Gozo by both the civil and the Church authorities on the first Sunday of February (tomorrow).

The official annual birth rate in Malta and Gozo is slightly under 4,000. There is also an unknown number of unborn children whose lives are terminated during pregnancy through miscarriages or procured abortions.

In his book The Secret Life Of The Unborn Child, Thomas Verney, a psychiatrist and professor of human development at St Mary's University in the US, says that by creating a warm, emotionally enriching environment in the utero, a woman can make a decisive difference in everything her child feels, hopes, dreams, thinks and accomplishes throughout life.

An undisclosed number of unborn children in Malta and Gozo may be suffering from grievous bodily harm, physical, mental or emotional, wilfully or not, because of the consumption of drugs, alcohol and tobacco by their parents, in marriage and outside of it during, or before, pregnancy.

Official statistics do not show these facts clearly yet, especially in connection with alcohol or tobacco.

Clear facts are coming out, however, and are appearing in the official statistics in cases of consumption of drugs by parents. The Drugs Detoxification Centre at St Luke's Hospital can supply the statistics of children put on methadone for a number of months immediately after birth because of the drugs habit of one or both parents.

There are fears also that would-be mothers and pregnant women are being exposed to chemical and toxic substances at places of work, and unknowingly even in their own homes, with great harm to them and their unborn children.

Every year a considerable number of unborn children in Malta suffer an indiscriminate torturous death, through abortion, despite this being illegal. Official UK statistics include these abortions. Others procured elsewhere,outside Malta, do not appear in any set of statistics. Others still, maybe procured locally, may be escaping the attention of the authorities.We rarely, if at all, hear of cases of abortion being taken to court.

In this regard, one may consider a suggestion to introduce legislation to register an unborn child in the early stages of pregnancy. Mothers, and others, including medical doctors will be asked to account for the well-being of the unborn child throughout pregnancy.

Four national conferences were held between June 2004 and May 2005 either by the movement or by one of its affiliated member organisations.

In the last one, last May 6, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice and Home Affairs, Tonio Borg, announced the "national proposal" to entrench the law on abortion, which makes abortion a crime, in the Constitution.

The same rationale as that used in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is behind this initiative - "that the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth".

Section 9h of the 2003 Commissioner for Children Law empowers the commissioner "to promote the highest standards of health and social services for women during pregnancy and to promote social care and protection, including adequate legal protection, for children both before and after birth".

Also, by means of a clause in the new law on domestic violence to be enacted soon, the unborn child will be considered "a member of the household" for protection purposes.

The movement, together with sedqa and the Malta Midwives Association, will be holding another national conference on March 30 to study further these developments and suggest possible preventive and remedial action in the overall interests of unborn children.

The movement has also drafted a Charter on the Rights, Protection and Development of the Unborn Child in the Maltese Islands. This is scheduled for publication soon.

Mr Mifsud is coordinator of the Movement for the Rights, Protection and Development of the Unborn Child.