Last week, six Nationalist MPs abstained from voting on a parliamentary motion championed by their own leader, Adrian Delia. If you think the story is essentially about discrimination against lesbian couples and about PN disunity, you only have Delia to thank.

He took on a significant, sensitive issue – fertility and conception – with a worrying background. It called for gravitas. Instead he addressed it in a way that came across as hypocritical opportunism, while deflecting attention from the government’s own hypocrisy.

It’s difficult to see how he messed up without some background. At the heart of it all is the current IVF law, which forbids surrogacy and the donation of sperm or eggs (gametes donation). Among other consequences, it means lesbian couples cannot have IVF treatment in Malta.

It doesn’t mean that the law directly discriminates against lesbian couples. The law discriminates between kinds of conception. The motive is not to interfere in adult freedoms. It’s to avoid any possible unintended harm to children: the psychological consequences of having a biological parent who is ‘merely’ a donor cannot be known with certainty, at least just yet. The total number of cases is too small, the variables too many.

In any case, Labour has promised to update the law. Meanwhile, the current law still stands.

Despite the law being as it is, the government has approved the granting of employment leave for couples seeking IVF treatment abroad. It’s obvious that lesbian couples obtaining such special leave can only be seeking treatment that is currently illegal in Malta.

So, the government is saying: you have a legal right to claim days off to do something that is illegal in Malta. It may be illegal here but you have a legitimate right to do it.

No serious government would say this. It de-legitimises the actual law and discriminates against couples that cannot afford to go abroad. A self-respecting State would first change the law and then immediately recognise the right to employment leave.

Delia’s motion essentially asked for congruence. It’s a reasonable request but the way Delia went about it was not. He effectively asked for the leave not to be granted to lesbian couples (the only ones you can be sure are pursuing something not permitted here), at least not until the legal incongruence is resolved.

Before we get to what is so hypocritical and flippant about that, it’s important to see the government has been just as guilty.

Joseph Muscat accused Delia of wanting to undermine lesbians’ rights. However, if lesbians do indeed have a right to seek IVF treatment (and to obtain leave to do so), then the Prime Minister is the current prime denier of their rights. It’s in his power to pass a law, any time he wishes, recognising that right.

If it’s a right, then it should be a right in Malta as well. Muscat’s hypocrisy lies in declaring it a right but not fast-tracking a law he has long known he wants to pass. The first time he intimated that he considers the 2012 law to be inadequate was when voting for it back then.

The flippancy, if not callousness, lies in treating the law and these women’s lives as pawns in a cat-and-mouse game with the Opposition.

Delia has likewise treated the matter as a game. He turned it into a motion he knew he was going to lose (even if all the Opposition MPs voted with him). He did so anyway just to send a signal to his core supporters, many of whom are conservative on family and gay rights that the PN under him wasn’t going to be a pushover for liberal laws.

The government is saying: you have a legal right to claim days off to do something that is illegal in Malta

Had he treated the matter with the seriousness it deserves, he had other options. For all his protests that his motion was ‘legalistic’ (technically true), the issues – ignoring a law, simultaneously recognising and not recognising a right, discriminating on the basis of income – are really political.

Beyond that, there is the change in the fundamental principle underlying the 2012 law. This favours the precautionary principle over adult freedoms. The government’s promise to change the law – and the awarding of special leave for IVF treatment abroad – shows that bias is to be changed in favour of adult freedoms.

That is not bad in itself, and I say that as someone who favours the precautionary approach. But it does mean that our social welfare system needs to keep pace with the legal framework.

If the State decides that it believes that nurturing loving families can help children overcome any anxiety (which is what favouring adult freedoms means), it is the State’s duty to declare it will have resources and services in place to support families with children born of the techniques to be made legal. Some long-term studies suggest there are special needs, even if they are nothing to fret about.

Delia need not have zeroed in on lesbian couples (which was at odds with his protestations that he bears them no ill will). The real urgent issues are broader.

In practice, the situation in Malta since 2012 has become complex. Rumours are rife – in medical circles at least – of surrogacy being practised informally, often with the ‘assistance’ of foreign household help, and hence in a deregulated, potentially exploitative way.

Delia could have drawn attention to the widespread rumours and demanded – in the same spirit of the 2012 IVF law – that Malta would have an enforceable legal framework, not informal deregulation.

Around these points – equality of opportunity, equality of solidarity, effective regulation of ethical issues – he could have unified his party. Instead, he trivialised a grave subject by turning it into a technicality. In doing so, he risked scapegoating a small group instead of tackling a real problem holistically.

He’s been hypocritical for a different reason. He hasn’t declared what his own position is on the law itself. We do know his party won’t have one. He wants to give the PN a free vote. In the name of principle, the PN will avoid taking a principled position.

Delia also wants Labour to grant a free vote to its MPs. We all know the real reason. It’s the only chance he has of winning a vote on a position he won’t declare, until the votes are counted.

He will protest all this is far from his mind. If that’s true, the mess he’s created for himself is even bigger. I’m not sure I know anyone, not even among his strong sympathisers, who doesn’t believe he didn’t have ulterior motives.

ranierfsadni@europe.com