This isn’t about abortion. I’m on record, for the nth time, as being against abortion, though far be it from me to dare to judge any woman who resorts to it. This fact, that I am on record as being against abortion, will not, of course, deter the “Pro Lifers” from slagging me off and tarring me with the brush they reserve for anyone who doesn’t slavishly jump to the crack of their whip.
No, this isn’t about abortion.
It’s about bullying and sharp tactics. It’s certainly not about me agreeing with Joseph Muscat, surprising as this would be to all the Lil’Elves. I don’t, precisely, agree with him about the question whether the unborn child’s right to life should be entrenched in the Constitution, because I don’t have reservations about this. I’m not shilly-shallying or sitting on the fence: I know this right should not be entrenched.
I disagree with Joseph Muscat in the same way I disagree with him about the introduction of divorce. He says there should be a debate, I say that the time for debate is long passed: the right to civil divorce has been denied to those of our citizens who can’t afford to get it in the time-honoured fashion for way too long and it’s time for us to crawl out from under the soutane. So, again, no more fence-sitting, Malta is a secular state and there’s an end to it. Allowing the civil contract of marriage to be dissolved by the civil courts does not render it a mandatory procedure for anyone who does not believe that divorce fits in with his or her belief system.
And no more guff about how the rights of the children will not be protected or anything like that. Anyone who says this with a straight face hasn’t had the fun experience of being involved with (or even hearing about) a separation procedure. Likewise the “protection of the family” myth: does anyone really think that a family undergoing separation proceedings is “protected”?
If anyone does, then as far as I am concerned they are terminally deluded and shouldn’t have any say in setting national policy.
So, this isn’t about abortion, it isn’t about my (dis)agreeing with Joseph Muscat and it isn’t about my personal morality, anyone’s opinion about which leaves me utterly uncaring anyway.
As I wrote earlier, it’s about bullying and sharp tactics. The Right To Life Lobby, has been trying to strong-arm politicians into jigging to their little tune for many, many months now.
You will remember, I trust, one of the earlier mild trials and tribulations that Dr Harry Vassallo went through, when it was put about, if memory serves, that he had signed that confounded petition. The Pro Lifers or whatever they call themselves had put this about, again if memory serves, and when they had to lap that one back up, it was said that there was a bit of misinterpretation or something like that. I seem to recall that Dr Vassallo was forced to make it public that he wasn’t particularly amused by the whole thing.
Well, it seems that this sort of publicity stunting has been resorted to again.
Not content with leaning very heavily on anyone they can get their claws into, the lobbyists have now broadcast a statement that was so up-beat about Joseph Muscat’s take on their visit with him that the MLP was constrained to put out its own statement, making it very clear that Muscat, while being against abortion personally (with him on this I am as one) had reservations about the appropriateness of entrenchment.
As someone had once put it, losing one parent is unfortunate, losing two is sheer carelessness. You can use the comments section to demonstrate your literary erudition. Similarly, making one slightly disingenuous statement about a party leader (as Vassallo then was) accepting to sign a petition might, with judicious application of some tolerant parameters, be classed as carelessness, but making a second such statement smacks of a bit more than that, and then a bit more than that again.
Do the people who run this particularly strident lobby really think that they’re helping their cause? This is a European country with a (relatively) sophisticated media audience, where freedom of thought and expression are prized above many other freedoms. It is true, and this is why I am against it, that abortion denies a basic freedom to the unborn child, but manipulating and bullying politicians and the media is not the way to educate society to eschew it.
Another thing I didn’t particularly like, though it was a welcome rest, was the, forgive me, cynical way the Pro-lifers “suspended” their campaign during the elections and for most of summer. This rather savvy approach to campaigning and media presence points towards the inescapable conclusion that they carefully and with much thought calculate the effect of their actions.
So, now that they want to mix it with the media and come out with guns blazing, I’m easy with having a bit of a blaze back at them. As far as I’m concerned, I hope this campaign comes to a juddering halt, before the perfectly understandable reaction that many thinking people are having creates a climate where abortion becomes acceptable.