The recommendation by parliamentary committees that the use of the morning-after pill be linked to a doctor’s prescription is, as the Leader of the Opposition put it, a ‘balanced compromise’. In fairness, he did also say he is personally in favour of the over-the-counter option; as a politician, however, he backs the balanced compromise.

Except the qualifier is missing: it is a balanced political compromise. It appears to keep a motley bunch fairly happy and secure in the knowledge that, somehow and somewhere, something will slip through and produce unwanted pregnancies. That’s because a good number of the motley bunch like nothing better than to take risks with other people’s lives.

The equation collapses the second it steps beyond the political fray and into everyday experience. In practice, the pill-by-prescription is no balanced compromise. Rather, it is a fairly unhinged non-solution that is very wrong on very many counts. Minister Helena Dalli, among others, is right to be bashing it, and I hope the Prime Minister tears up the committees’ recommendations and throws them in the dustbin of rubbish politics.

Certainly a compromise should be very worrying to the Church and Gift of Life. Let us for a second assume, as they do, that the pill is probably or potentially an abortifacient. Should the recommendations be accepted, doctors would suddenly find themselves free to help terminate pregnancies. The State would effectively be legalising potential abortion and leaving it up to doctors to sort it out with their conscience. Which looks suspiciously pro-choice to me.

The argument is not wild, because it’s exactly what the Medical Council told the parliamentary committees. As they put it, doctors should be free to act as conscientious objectors when deciding whether or not to prescribe the pill. Evidently the people at the Council think that the morning-after pill is potentially an abortifacient, because why else might doctors object to it? Doctors are not free to conscientiously object to asthma inhalers or antibiotics, for example.

No doubt unwittingly, the Council’s position and the committees’ recommendations are a strong bid for abortion by creep. There can be no compromise on this one. If the pill is not an abortifacient, the whole thing was a waste of time. If it is, it has no place in a country where abortion is illegal.

If it may or may not be, a doctor’s conscience is not a terribly good precautionary measure. A doctor could believe that the pill is an abortifacient and still prescribe it: thus my point about pro-choice. Thousands of abortions are carried out by doctors who presumably have consciences. Unless conscience is a Maltese speciality, that is.

I am not for a second suggesting that the MPs who came up with the recommendations are actually trying to let in abortion through the back door. I’m simply saying that the whole business of conscientious objection and compromise does not square up.

In practice, the pill-by-prescription is no balanced compromise. Rather, it is a fairly unhinged non-solution that is very wrong on very many counts

There’s another thing. A good chunk of what was said at the committee hearings had little to do with the pill itself. It did, however, have rather a lot to do with the wisdom or otherwise of having babies.

It’s telling that one of the parties at the hearings was the Family Affairs Committee. The point seems to have slipped by unnoticed, but it always struck me as rather odd that at least part of the discussion was about the family.

There are two kinds of people who might want to take a morning-after pill. The first is women who are happy with their families as they are and who do not yearn to add new routes to the school runs. The second is women who, family or no family, do not wish to have a child, for whatever reason.

I really cannot understand how Etienne Grech, Anthony Agius Decelis and the rest of the Family Affairs Committee might come into the picture. I struggle even harder to understand the ways in which a doctor’s prescription might be necessary in the context of family affairs.

In practice, women will be forced to discuss family matters with their doctors. The whole thing gives a new twist to the term ‘family doctor’, in fact. It now means a doctor who can, on pain of conscientious objection, force a woman to talk family, at a moment when she least wants to.

Of course the Medical Council and their retainers sugar-coat this newfound power with fantastical and chocolate-box renditions of the benevolent and wise family doctor who knows the woman and her kin so well that he or she can see the grander picture in a way that no one individual possibly could: a kind of priesthood of medics, in other words.

This is no compromise, but rather intrusive nannying of the worst possible kind. It dismisses the intensely physical and intimate aspects of pregnancy, and the personal (and possibly family, but that’s not the doctor’s business) choices involved in having children.

There are other, perhaps more minor, matters. I was shocked, for example, to hear members of the committees speak of ‘doctor-patient relations’. Since when is a woman who has had sex a patient? Except she would become that, if the recommendations are accepted. It’s called medicalisation, and it’s not a pretty thing.

There are two camps, and only two, who have a coherent argument here. The first consists of people like me who think that the pill is not an abortifacient and should be freely available over the counter. The second is made up of the Church, Gift of Life, and those who think it is and should therefore be outlawed. The terrain in between is that of warped logic, insufferable nannying, and political expediency known as ‘balanced compromise’.

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