Earlier this month the group Gift of Life invited Rev. Denis Wilde from Priests for Life all the way from the United States to tell us, among other things, that abortion is bad.

I don't know whether any of the reporters who attended Rev. Wilde's news conference asked why he physically crossed the Atlantic to tell us what we already know. As far as I can gauge from the constant contact I have with my constituents and other people, I have never come across anyone suggesting the decriminalisation of abortion.

There is no question as to where the political class stands on abortion. It is a crime, and annexed to Malta's EU Accession Treaty is a protocol that ascertains that "Nothing in the Treaty on European Union, or in the Treaties establishing the European Communities, or in the Treaties or Acts modifying or supplementing those Treaties, shall affect the application in the territory of Malta of national legislation relating to abortion."

So why Gift of Life's obsession with pasting bits of the Criminal Code to our Constitution? It doesn't make sense and that's why there are people, including myself, who suspect that Gift of Life's pointless campaign is being stepped up because an election is close. They've been there before.

According to information on their website, Priests for Life encourage activists to inundate newspaper editors with letters "as a key way to prepare people for upcoming elections" (last year's US elections) and to start them with a "grabber", a "startling fact" such as "One of the top causes of death in America today is abortion."

The timing of Rev. Wilde's visit was perfect. When in election mode, every little bit of help from friends, in the hope that abortion will make it to the centre of the electoral debate, is welcome. This is an old trick; we saw it happening during the American (remember Sarah Palin?) and the Italian elections last year, with Silvio Berlusconi asking for "a United Nations moratorium on pregnancy terminations". In these two countries abortion is legal and so those against have something to fight for. In Malta it is illegal, so what is there to campaign for?

This is not to ignore the fact that governments have been burying their heads in the sand to the reality that Maltese girls and women avail themselves of abortion services overseas. I may not judge and will never imagine that I can understand their position because I have not been in it.

As Archbishop Rino Fisichela wrote recently in La Stampa on the case of the abortion of the twin foetuses of a nine-year-old child who had been allegedly raped by her stepfather: "How should one act in these cases? An arduous decision for the doctor and for moral law itself." He urged for respect for the girl and for the excommunicated doctors who performed the abortion, addressing her directly: "There are others who merit excommunication and our pardon, not those who have allowed you to live and have helped you to regain hope and trust."

I have given birth twice and never had an abortion, so maybe I am slightly better placed to speak on the issue than the men doing the chasing around, petition in hand. I will not heed any man from Gift of Life or any American priest patronising me on abortion or presenting me with a plastic foetus on my way to work. I did not accept it and told the man offering the piece of plastic that, unlike him, I know what a real foetus feels like, so I don't need a plastic one. Can you imagine a scene more absurd than a man handing a woman a plastic foetus?

What is most despicable then, in this Gift of Life tragicomedy, is that if one disagrees with their constitutional entrenchment fixation, then one must favour abortion. Give us a break!

Another thing I cannot understand about Gift of Life is that they quote the case of Ireland as having the prohibition of abortion article (40.3.3) in the Constitution (added in 1983) without realising that we have the advantage of learning from hindsight. Ireland had to amend article 40.3.3 in 1992 after the case of the 14-year-old girl who was raped and impregnated by her neighbour. Kept under house arrest to ensure she did not go for an abortion abroad, she aborted naturally because of the trauma she underwent.

The two amendments included that the prohibition on abortion would not limit the freedom of pregnant women to travel out of the country and that it would not limit the right to distribute information about abortion services in foreign countries. There is today in Ireland a rather strong call for the repeal of the abortion article from the Constitution altogether; what Gift of Life here want to cut and paste to our Constitution, 26 years on.

This does not make sense. That is why I suspect it's the perennial election-time ploy in the hope that someone will take the bait.

The author is a sociologist and a Labour member of Parliament.