There’s a short story by Oliver Friggieri that tells of a certain Koranta, who was unique among the women in her village. Koranta was in her 40s, unmarried, and childless. This placed her at the receiving end of insults, mockery, and cruelty. Unable to put up much of a fight, her only defence was to withdraw to her four walls and weep in silence.

Friggieri was in no mood to add his voice to that of Koranta’s tormentors. Rather, his story is a parable of sympathy with the downtrodden as well as an indictment of the vicious intolerance of traditional society. A more feminist reading might point out that the story is also about the injustice and sexism of limiting women to their biological role as wives and mothers. Koranta was that, or was nothing.

There would be a lot to say about the new and strangely named Embryo Protection Bill. For example, the bit that obliges would-be parents to give unused third embryos up for adoption is, frankly, bizarre. It’s clear that its only purpose is to stave off the (tiresome, admittedly) orfanatrofji tal-embrijuni (embryo orphanages) rhetoric. What it means is that people who wish to have a good chance of successful IVF will be forced to enter into a contract that could come back to haunt them years later. Still, it’s Koranta I’m interested in. The mindset of which she was a casualty seems to be doing very well indeed. So well, in fact, that it is being peddled by the Prime Minister in his sales pitch for the new Bill.

To put things in context, the Prime Minister likes to cast himself and his government as an extended masterclass of progressive thinking. There he was at the Commonwealth talking shop last Wednesday, perorating about the ‘feminist approach to poverty reduction’ and such. No surprise there: he once described his government as the most feminist in the history of this country.

Problem is, playing about with eggs and test tubes doesn’t necessarily make you progressive. Nor does it necessarily make you feminist, and especially not if you say the sort of things the Prime Minister said at a Labour rally last Sunday. The following quote is taken from a One TV report. It’s safe to assume that it will not have been voiced-over or otherwise tampered with to damage the Prime Minister:

“A mother who cannot have children is unlikely to humiliate herself by showing her face on television. Instead, she will weep in silence in the solitude of her home. There are only a very few people who have the strength to say openly, ‘I can’t have children’… we need to speak on behalf of the weakest members of our society… we will be a voice for the voiceless.”

This is to feminism what a heavy metal concert is to a Carthusian monastery. There is so much that’s regressive and sexist about the Prime Minister’s wisdom that I hardly know where to begin. Still, I’ll try.

Playing about with eggs and test tubes doesn’t necessarily make you progressive

First, what exactly is ‘a mother who cannot have children’? I imagine it would be a woman who is not a mother, but no, all women are mothers in Joseph Muscat’s progressive book. The only difference is that while women with children are fulfilled mothers, those without are the opposite. ‘Woman’, then, is simply a word for a life-supporting machine for a womb.

Second, it appears that it is only childless women-mothers who weep in the solitude of their homes (where else?) for their missed appointment with completeness. Men have no such problems, presumably because they have other things to think about – things like jobs, football, finches, and so on. So, while a woman who is not a mother doesn’t even exist, a man who is not a father is none the worse for it.

Third, people who can’t have children are neither weak nor voiceless: they are simply people who can’t have children. I know quite a few, and none are particularly linguistically challenged. They are, in fact, as assertive as the rest of us, and I doubt any of them are waiting for Joseph Muscat to speak on their behalf.

Fourth, the Prime Minister seems to socialise with the wrong people. (More on that another time.) None of the childless people I know – and I’m a very average person with very average connections – feel terribly humiliated about it. They know, and their friends know, that there’s absolutely nothing to feel humiliated about. In fact, they speak very candidly about what might have been, and what wasn’t. Little wonder Joseph Muscat feels all progressive, if he’s surrounded with people who think that childlessness is a blot on humanity.     

I’m not saying that the Prime Minister would have been among those mocking Koranta. He’s not the type, and I think he may well have minded his own business or possibly even sympathised. Problem is, that doesn’t change the fact that he thinks the way he does. By analogy, if I said that I sympathised with homosexual people for their condition, the implication would still be that I thought there was something the matter with them. Much less nasty than mocking them, to be sure, but equally unprogressive and homophobic.  

There are other things about the sales pitch for the Bill that smack of the values of a mountain village in Crete, ca. 1920. Take the proposal that would decriminalise altruistic surrogacy. No problem there, except what I’ve heard so far seems to limit the definition to surrogacy offers by close relatives – mother to daughter, sister to sister, and not much else.

The implication is that the only, or at least the best, kind of altruism is the one found in families; or, to put it differently, that morality is best kept within the family. More Corleone than progressive, then, and leaves us clueless as to why people might donate, say, a kidney to someone who is not their relative.

It is said, not without substance, that the Prime Minister is a shatteringly able salesman. It is also as a salesman that his slip shows most shatteringly.

mafalzon@hotmail.com