Roamer's column

Louise Brown was conceived three decades ago, not in a womb where, since the creation of man and woman and the immortal words "Flesh of my flesh" were uttered, it has been natural for conception to take place. Brown started life in a laboratory. The French geneticist Prof. Jerome Lejeune remarked at the time that we had moved "from sex without babies to babies without sex".

Writing in The Tablet, Mary Kenny observed that the technology that made Brown possible may put abortion in another perspective. For the first test-tube baby proves one thing categorically: here from conception is a separate being.

"This embryo, which can be put back into the mother's womb, or put into another woman's womb, or kept in a deep freeze, or will quite soon perhaps be developed in a laboratory - this embryo can hardly be called, anymore, merely a part of a woman's body, like an appendix, or a piece of liver tissue... Here is categorical proof that the new life is a separate one. 'If the bottle which held the embryo argued that the embryo was part of its property, no one would believe the bottle', says Jerome Lejeune."

Science, in other words, had demonstrated, confirmed in a startling manner, what the Church maintains with such vigour. This has not persuaded sceptics from dithering over the evidence, still less from getting into nitty-gritty arguments that do nothing to disprove what Brown's conception demonstrated beyond a scintilla of doubt: an embryo is a separate, albeit dependent being; within it there is everything that makes it human.

Inside the womb, the moment conception takes place is the gift of life, a human embryo, not the embryo of a dog or the seed of a dandelion, which are qualitatively different gifts and are flown to their destination by other storks. Every relativistic argument to the contrary is by its very nature, banal.

For all this, it is clear that the attempt to remove ethics and religion as inputs for the guidance of medical science has led to a situation where the direct taking of human life became in the US, for example, and as a result of the Supreme Court's infamous ruling on Roe vs Wade, not merely a civil but a constitutional right. The US Supreme Court, not the elected Congress and Senate, so decreed.

I have yet to read anybody in Malta saying how anti-democratic that imposition was - the judiciary acting as legislator. Issuing from that decision, the once sacred duty of the physician to do no harm has regressed into an anti-life ideology paralleled in many academic environments by anti-religious ideologies.

Church and rights

In the divorce debate that is going on at the moment, divorce is being referred to as a civil right. In the case of abortion, nobody of any consequence in Malta has claimed that status for it - yet. This has not prevented the argument being made that what is in the woman's womb during pregnancy is something a woman has a right to remove if that is her choice.

We may assume it is a matter of time before there will be those who will agitate to make abortion a civil right in Malta, too, the progressive thing to do; which is why it is not "extremely unfair" as Prof. Kenneth Wain was quoted as saying, for Archbishop Paul Cremona and Gozo Bishop Mario Grech to place divorce, abortion and euthanasia "in the same category".

"It's as though the Church", he continued, "were trying to exploit a widespread phobia of abortion and euthanasia to make a case against divorce. This is not a fair and honest argument." Less fair, to my mind, is Wain's assumption that the Church was trying to exploit anything.

The bishops know full well that campaigns for divorce, abortion and euthanasia abroad followed one another in that sequence. For them to recognise that sequence of events regardless of whether there is any promotion for abortion, or euthanasia, to enter into our statute books was not a matter of fairness or unfairness. It was a matter of logic and common sense.

Wain seems to find difficulty with the idea that the Church has a right and a duty to oppose secularism whenever this ideology opposes her beliefs, to warn against relativism when this touches on her beliefs, to take on what it deems to be an anti-culture whenever this makes an assault on her beliefs.

In each case the Church ceases to be herself if she fails to defend and propagate the faith for which alone it exists, or to criticise what runs counter to the fulfilment of her mission. He "expected a less militant approach. The last thing I would have thought we needed" he remarked, "was a declaration of war... particularly since the bishops themselves had earlier pronounced themselves for rational discussion".

Where, I ask, was the declaration of war? In their recognition that secularism poses a threat and militant secularism a graver one? In their public profession of principles which the Constitution grants her "the duty and the right to teach"? A timely, intelligent and calmly written reminder of this was posted in last Wednesday's Talking Point in The Times by Austin Bencini, who also asked why 'there should be so much abuse levelled at the Gift of Life group... a group of decent civilised citizens who are proposing that our Constitution accepts and recognises what in fact all sectors of Maltese society accept unanimously, namely, that abortion is not acceptable and is not to become legal'?

Imposition

Wain has often had spats with proponents of this entrenchment business. Three years ago he called on parliamentarians to ask themselves how future generations will judge them should Parliament go for entrenchment, what these would think of such an action, "which is fundamentalist by definition"? He regards entrenchment as anti-democratic, an imposition of belief on others. He is not alone.

The former Chief Justice, Giuseppe Mifsud Bonnici, does not agree. He is not alone. Writing in The Times in April of last year, he wrote, inter alia, "I agree that the proposed constitutional amendment should be formulated in such language as would determine precisely and concisely what (it) is intended to protect. In my opinion, the phrase 'from conception to natural death' inserted after the word 'life' in article 33 (1) of the Constitution would be enough. The phrase would qualify what is meant by 'life'."

He went on to note that his proposed wording would leave the interpretation as to when conception (or hominisation) begins in the hands of judges. Yes, but is that not the case with the interpretation of so many clauses in many laws, be they civil, criminal or constitutional?

As to the matter of imposition, one must be careful. A priest who holds a doctorate in neuroscience was recently asked to testify at a legislative hearing in Virginia about embryonic stem cell research. When he had finished giving testimony, a senator asked whether by arguing against embryonic stem cell research he was not "trying to impose (his) beliefs on others, and shouldn't we as elected lawmakers avoid imposing a narrow religious view on the rest of society"? Pretty well what we sometimes hear in Malta.

Fr Tadeusz Pacholczyk had some very rational comments to make on this business of imposition, a word that has become a form of standard reproach for any view addressed by believers on matters their opponents incorrectly consider to be outside the domain of belief and faith. He argued that 'law is fundamentally about imposing somebody's views on somebody else' and that it was 'in the very nature of law to impose particular views on people who don't want to have those views imposed on them' (drug laws against drug users; theft laws against thieves, etc.).

The question to ask is not whether we impose something on somebody but, rather, whether whatever is going to be imposed by the force of law is reasonable, just, and good for society and its members.

What should matter in the formation of public opinion and in drawing up legislation is the substance of an argument. Fr Tad. explained that what he had testified did not depend on religious dogma but on an important scientific dogma, specifically that all humans come from embryonic humans. "The statement that I was once an embryo is a statement about embryology, not theology."

He went on to observe that there were federal laws in America that protected the bald eagle, but not only. It protected the eagle's eggs. To destroy them was illegal. Society has reached a stage, he mused, where the embryonic eagle inside that egg was legally recognised as the bird it would become at hatching time. "What's so troublesome is how we are able to understand the importance of protecting the earliest stages of animal life but when it comes to our own human life, a kind of mental disconnect takes place."

Gift of Life in Malta is nobly trying to prevent such a disconnection. And pace its detractors, science is increasingly on its side.