Up to the year 2156, Maltese historians had still not resolved a puzzle in their country's history. Their nation's commitment to abortion rights for women was not in doubt: the country considered itself a beacon to the rest of the Eurasian Union, which over the previous 50 years had been progressively restricting this right, assaulting the fundamental sacred value of a woman's right to choose. It was a long-standing passionate commitment, part of the very tissue of Maltese culture since the year 2013, when Malta legalised abortion.
The puzzle for Maltese historians was this: No matter how much the Maltese people might claim that being pro-choice was part of their traditional identity, they, the historians, knew it was not always so. Indeed, the records clearly showed that, only a few years before abortion was legalised, the country was equally passionately against it. How could this swift cultural change be explained?
In mid-2156, however, some light was thrown on the issue. Workers, digging deep to lay the foundations for a new supermarket in Mosta, discovered a statue dedicated to the foetus. The monument was unveiled on March 25, 2006 by the President of the Republic, in the presence of the Prime Minister and other ministers of state.
The monument was commissioned by an anti-abortion foundation called Gift of Life. The statue depicted a young mother, a Madonna-like maiden, caressing a nine-week-old foetus, which is inside her but visible to the viewer. The monument stated that it was erected in homage to the Maltese "culture of life" and to praise the beauty of motherhood.
The statue attracted a multi-disciplinary attention. Linguists were interested in the curious Maltese spelling, geneticists in the very, very long arms of the young mother, environmentalists in the gigantic butterfly nestling on her left hand. But the statue was a coup for cultural historians, who could finally explain how Malta completely shifted its consensus on abortion in a few short years.
The statue showed clearly that there was a point where the anti-abortion Maltese adopted the unspoken assumptions of pro-choice Euro-America (as it was then). Once certain assumptions were shared, the pro-choice arguments began to seem more reasonable and forceful.
One unspoken assumption was individualism. The statue was dedicated to welcoming life, but depicted only the mother, or "maternity". Paternity was bracketed out, as were family and friends. The complex relationships into which new life entered were over-simplified.
The 20th-century abortion movement in Euro-America always insisted that the final decision over the life of the foetus must lie with the mother, who had ultimately to care for the baby. The reasoning was enshrined in the Italian law permitting abortion, which never called the beauty of maternity into question (abortion was permitted under a law called "the care of pregnancy").
This rationality was reflected at street-level. A 1982 study by Harvard professor Carol Gilligan showed that some American young women had justified their emotionally painful abortions by an appeal to their duty as a mother: they saw themselves as liberating their child from an unworthy life.
Some early 21st-century Maltese diaries indicate that certain expectant mothers had aborted potentially, severely disabled foetuses on these grounds: their maternal duty to their other young children, they thought tearfully, precluded giving so much attention to just one.
Such documentary evidence suggests that some Maltese women were already thinking in radical individualist terms. What the pro-life statue revealed to the historians was how much such thinking was beginning to permeate the highest offices of state.
It seemed as though the Maltese were forgetting what gave strength to their anti-abortion rationality. The support of the family was often motivated by a complex concern with defending social status - of the pregnant daughter/sister as well as the child, who was, after all, "family", too. Solidarity had undercurrents of pretence and shame, not just love, but such support helped the expectant mother see she was not alone.
And in the early stages of pregnancy, when the new life was still a grainy shadow on a sonogram, where imagination was needed to recognise humanity, intimate friends were helpful, too. They accompanied expectant mothers to the gynaecologist. They cried with their pregnant friend when they saw the results of the scans. They squealed and giggled as they played games to see if they could recognise different anatomical parts. They approved and vetoed possible names for the child.
These seemingly trivial rituals helped pregnant women incorporate this alien life that was making them sick and distraught. In the conversations about the unknown unstable future, the expectant mother was brought to see her child as part of her life-story and the life-story of her friends, whose narrative would remain meaningful, even if radically changed.
And, yet, despite the fact that these practices of family and friendship were well known to Maltese politicians, the monument to the foetus ignored them. Instead, it borrowed from the language and propaganda techniques of the pro-life movement elsewhere, which was, however, deeply imbued with the individualist assumptions of the societies in which these movements were to be found.
Historians reckoned that by adopting this language, the Maltese began to lose touch with the cultural resources, of discourse, thought and feeling, which bolstered their pro-life position. It was only one element in a process, but an important one.
ranierfsadni@europe.com