I too am a member of the Nationalist Party executive. I was always of the opinion that if you belong to a political party you must toe the party line. The same can be said for any club, society, association or Church you belong to. If you do not agree with their statute, you either work from within to bring change or look for membership elsewhere.

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong in having a personal opinion. It is practically impossible to be totally in conformity with every entity’s policies and guidelines. Putting forward personal opinions in the right fora is healthy and eventually may bring change as was the case with civil unions and our outlook towards LGBT.

There are red lines which we have to evaluate very carefully before crossing. You can hardly compare a civil union to an abortion. By their very substance, one unites and the other destroys.

I am pro-life. I could never allow myself to belong to any entity that supports abortion. This is a red line none of us should cross. I stand against abortion with the same conviction I had when I stood to defend the right to IVF in this same newspaper years ago, in 2005.

Political parties must evolve else they will be banished into oblivion but while undergoing this process of evolution we must not lose sight of our basic principles, else we will become worse than those we criticise. We must always stand for what is right even if this means that we have to work much harder to achieve our goals.

We should never compromise our basic principles or undermine our values and we should move on with what we stand for.

We have no right to destroy life in whichever form it comes. Our sense of superiority among living things tends to make us think that we have the right to give life and take away the life of the unborn as we please. We have no such right.