I imagine Martin Scicluna is very pleased with himself (October 28) for carrying out what he must have perceived to be a needed piece of demolition work of all those in the pro-life movement who are defending human life from conception in Malta, including the Catholic Church.

He went on a rampage degrading all those who do not see eye to eye with him on embryo freezing. He used all sorts of descriptions to discredit activists in the pro-life movement: “bigotry”, “zealotry”, “hysteria”, “fanatical”, “scaremongering”, “dogmatism”, “medieval superstition”, “rag-bag of pro-life groups”. He should come down from his high chair and respect really those who hold views different from his own.

In his analysis of the controversy about embryo freezing he was inconsistent.

While trying to give the impression that he was writing on the “creation” of human life, when he tried to describe abortion and saying that in Malta it is a criminal offence, he made no mention that abortion is criminal in Malta precisely because it is equivalent to the deliberate killing of a human life, as in murder.

He also said: “Abortion is a very broad term whose strict meaning is the deliberate termination of any pregnancy under any circumstances, including natural miscarriage.” His construed definition, however, seems to have been intended more to include the last phrase… including natural miscarriage. This because immediately after, he enlarged, unnecessarily, on “spontaneous abortions [which] occur in nature all the time”. Then he blames the pro-life movement “for entirely disregarding” this natural fact. Was he expecting a solemn condemnation of nature?

Substantially he only said that “this country is most unlikely ever to introduce it simply because there is no call for it [because] those women who want an abortion get one by taking a flight to the UK or Italy”. Not because it is bad to kill an unborn child and intrinsically repulsive.

He brings in no moral considerations at all. While declaring himself unreservedly in favour of embryo freezing, which dehumanises very little human beings, he made no similar declaration that he is against abortion. Curious.

Or is it? He writes about “defenders of the mother’s right of choice” but defenders of the right to life and human dignity of very little unborn children against freezing, thawing and resultant deaths, to him only “…hold that human life is sacred and begins at the moment of conception”.

The pro-choice lobby in Malta seems to have now started firing its guns in many directions

That is they can only assert, but can display no scientific proof that life begins at conception. In fact he says: “The pro-life’s unscientific musings are a short cut to thinking, as well as a sickening [an unkind adjective again] substitute for compassion for the suffering of infertile couples.” He also confirmed he looks at embryos as a commodity not as human beings.

Bernard Nathanson, the renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and once the big provider of abortion services in the western hemisphere, when he realised he had made mistakes he resigned from his lucrative position and wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that he was deeply troubled by his “increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,00 deaths”.

Later on, to remedy the harm he felt he had done, he made the film The Silent Scream which displays the horrors of abortions. In it he declared: “Modern technologies have convinced us that, beyond question, the unborn child is simply another human being, another member of the human community, indistinguishable in every way from any of us.” That’s what an embryo is.

Again, in February 2000, when Nathanson was speaking before the US Congress on reproductive technologies, on embryo freezing he said: “There is a very large market in frozen embryos. There are about 50,000 embryos in various cryobanks across the country. What are we to do? Freezing can only preserve an embryo five or six years. Some entrepreneurs have the answer. Sell them.

“One enterprising reporter showed that if you go to Colombia University you can tell them what kind of baby you want matching your physique, your ethnic background and your educational background and they will pick out a frozen embryo that perfectly matches what you want and sell it to you and implant the embryo in the womb of your wife, or girlfriend, for all of $2,750.”

Cryobanks and abortion clinics have been turned into commercial outlets with the abortion clinics run by Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortion services in the world, now even selling body parts of live aborted babies. And the slippery slope continues with abortion clinics now turning also into butcher shops.

So much for the pro-choice lobby which in Malta seems to have now started firing its guns in many directions with what appears to be its standard-bearer charging regardless, and seemingly underestimating the resilience of the pro-life movement.

Ashley Montague, geneticist and professor at Harvard andRutgers, also affirmed unequivocally that “the basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth,but conception”.

Martin Scicliuna rightly writes also about “compassion for the suffering of infertile couples”.

Yet he shows no compassion for the freezing of very little unborn children and the deaths of a number of them while thawing, or worse when they are willingly discarded or negligently left to die.

He must know that, besides compassion, to enlarge thepossibility of infertile couples conceiving there’s not only embryro freezing.

There is an alternative, not medical, as in vitrification, freezing and thawing, but physical, emotional, psychological, nutritional, sociological and occupational.

Is it likely that his next article will be on this alternative?

Let’s see.

Tony Mifsud is coordinator, Malta Unborn Child Movement.