In his article (March 8) Martin Scicluna again lends support to the view that abortion is merely an autonomous choice by a woman about her own body.  He considers abortion in Malta to be a “non-subject”, because there is no demand for it, since women who want to have an abortion can go to England or Italy.

Rather patronisingly, he does not “condemn anyone for being opposed to abortion”, adding that this is their “religious” view, which he respects.  He then adds: “The problem is that these people want to impose their morality on others.”

There are sound scientific, ethical and legal considerations that preclude abortion, and therefore the issue cannot be reduced to a purely religious one.

As others and I have already argued, abortion does not only involve a woman’s choice but also the life of the human being in her womb. While really appreciating that a pregnant woman may be in a serious predicament and genuinely feeling for her, one may not deny the reality of nascent life within her womb.

Science tells us that, at the time an abortion is being considered, the foetus in the womb is a growing individual human being and will be killed if and when the abortion takes place.

At the ethical level, there exists a responsibility to respect the life of others, to the extent that many, on ethical grounds, now rightly query the death penalty where it still exists.  The same respect is due, at an ethical level, to the unborn child.

Standing up for the unborn child’s right to life does not amount to people imposing their morality on women

Serious legal studies, like that of PJ Flood  (in his learned 2006 article ‘Does international law protect the unborn child?’), show that in the debate on whether international law upholds an unborn child’s right to live, or, conversely, a pregnant woman’s right to abort, the evidence in the relevant universal and regional legal instruments clearly supports protecting the child’s life.

Flood shows that, apart from an African Protocol, the preference in all universal and regional instruments for nascent life is firm and strong. Therefore it is a gross oversimplification to reduce this complex matter to the 1973 US Roe v Wade ruling.

Given the scientific, ethical and legal dimensions of the issue of abortion, serious reservations about the matter are harboured not merely by people with religious convictions but by many other persons of goodwill. This undermines the facile assumption of Scicluna and others that the opposition to abortion comes only from religious-minded people.  This must be stated clearly.

It follows, equally on scientific, ethical and legal grounds, that standing up for the unborn child’s right to life does not amount to people “impos[ing] their morality on women” and telling them “what they can and cannot do with their bodies”.

When there is a pregnancy, there are two human beings, not one: besides the mother, there is the child in her womb, as yet fully dependent on her, but who is not her ‘body’.

The right to life, of the unborn child and of every other human being, including those old, weak or challenged, is the most fundamental human right, affirmed by article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).  It is reasonable to argue that, ethically and legally, it has priority over the woman’s (not universally recognised) right to choose to abort.

Indeed one awkward question, in ethics and at law, is how some can consistently consider  the right to life a fundamental human right and yet consider simultaneously as a “right” that of taking it, as in abortion and euthanasia.

In this and similar articles, one notes that sadly Scicluna, while pleading for rational argument, curiously does not disdain the use of belittling, offensive personal attacks on “anti-abortionists”.

The Minister for Civil Rights (March 8) wrote about Malta’s being “bolder” in the area of women’s rights than it already is.  Contrary to Scicluna’s stated assumption, could this be coded language that, among other things, even “reproductive rights” (alias the “non-subject” of abortion) are to become the subject of legislation in Malta too?

Fr Robert Soler is a member of the Society of Jesus.