Let’s discuss abortion. Oh no, wait…

Three things happened recently, that – when placed together – seem to answer the eternal question of why certain issues seem destined to just never evolve at all in this country.

Let’s start with incident number one, which also involved the fastest U-turn in Malta’s political history. Some of you may recall how, a few weeks ago, the PN’s Convention of Ideas raised the issues of ‘abortion and euthanasia’ as possible topics to be discussed in future.

Or maybe not: after all, the gestation period of this particular idea didn’t exactly last very long. Within seconds of the announcement being made in the media, the Gift of Life Foundation – remember? the same NGO that had dictated government policy on women’s rights under Lawrence Gonzi – issued a media release demanding to know whether the PN, under new leadership, was now reconsidering its position as a party sworn to “protect life from conception to natural death”.

‘Oh no’, the PN hurriedly replied… and you could almost feel the panic in its response. ‘We’re still against abortion and euthanasia in all circumstances, everywhere. We just thought it might be a good idea to, you know, discuss about how anti we actually are. We could all take turns to express our absolute condemnation of abortion in the most absolute terms imaginable. It would be fun. But now that you mention it, it was a pretty silly idea. So tell you what: let’s just pretend it never happened, drop the subject and never, ever talk about it again…’

And there you have it. Discussion aborted, after around a day of pregnancy. So everything goes back to how it was before: no discussion, no reassessment of policy… just a blanket, fundamentalist absolutism of the kind you’d associate with radical, aggressive Islam. Oh, and also confirmation that the PN, even under its new leadership, still takes its orders directly from Gift of Life.

But onto incident number two: Over on the other side of the House now, where the Labour government has just presented its budget for 2015… loudly boasting about its ‘courageous decision’ to tackle the ‘scourge’ of benefit fraud.

And which category gets singled out as an example of shameful abuse? Single mothers, of course. Raising children on one’s own, Finance Minister Edward Scicluna told us, was now a ‘profession’ in its own right. Not a very high earning one, it must be said: single mothers receive little more than €100 a month in benefits.

But hey, that’s a hundred euros coming out of our taxes! And it’s being spent on a category of women who sponge off the welfare state by deliberating having children from ‘unknown fathers’… thus robbing the Maltese state of a few million squids here and there.

Well, I think we can all agree that ‘courage’ is needed to clamp down on a tiny minority whom everyone despises anyway… because they are mostly women, and we live in a country where women are valued just slightly higher than mosquitoes. But as I have had occasion to point out elsewhere, Scicluna’s claims do not exactly stand up to scrutiny.

Just this week, Family Minister Michael Farrugia gave us an indication of how much benefit fraud actually costs the country: “The Government,” he said, “was set to save €3 million in social benefits abuse after 724 beneficiaries were stopped. He said that 1,281 inspections yielded 724 cases of abuse while other cases were being investigated…”

We were not told how much of this fraud actually consisted in abuse of the single parent scheme… which accounts for a tiny fraction of the total €870 million expenditure on social welfare. What we do know, however, is that the number of single parents on this scheme in 2013 (nearly all women) was only around 3,400. And earlier statistics indicate that only around 20% of these claims were actually fraudulent.

This puts things into a little perspective. Single mothers who fit Scicluna’s description cannot realistically cost the country more than €1 million a year. Personally, I find it hard to believe that a country that can contemplate spending €1 billion to build a bridge between Malta and Gozo, can’t afford to close an eye at the fact that one-thousandth that amount might be hived off the system by a tiny segment of the population. Especially when the same ‘courageous’ government not only ignores, but actually encourages much more costly wastage across the country’s entire public expenditure landscape.

In any case: put these two together – the opposition’s aborted discussion on abortion, and the government’s singling out of single mothers to be exposed to public opprobrium – and already a pattern begins to emerge. One side is determined to cut back on benefits to the category of woman most likely to experience an unwanted pregnancy; the other sticks religiously to a policy which criminalises the same women for taking matters into their own hands, and aborting the pregnancy themselves.

And the rest of the country? Dead silence. Not a mention, not even a squeak, of the inevitable correlation between these two scenarios. Malta is actively pushing more women into situations where they may consider abortion… while simultaneously retaining a system which punishes those same women for taking the decision they were pushed into taking by the State in the first place.

Which of course brings me to the third incident. This is how it was reported in the press: “A Tunisian woman, 30, was this afternoon given a suspended jail term after she admitted in court to having committed an abortion two weeks ago… [the woman] who is married to a Maltese man, was six to seven weeks pregnant and wanted to end her pregnancy. So she asked her friend to procure a cocktail of pills to end it because she had been told that it was going to be a stillbirth. She swallowed some of the pills and ingested others in a bid to end the pregnancy.” (Interestingly, the news report removed an adverb from the last sentence: she had ‘ingested’ that second batch of pills through her vagina.)

To the best of my knowledge, this represents the first case where a prosecution under Articles 241-243 of the criminal code – which criminalise abortion, without actually mentioning the word – has resulted in a conviction. There were two other cases in recent history, and both were inconclusive.

This appears to indicate a shift in police and judicial attitudes towards this particular crime. A law which had been gathering dust in Malta’s statute books for decades has now been brought out of the closet and given a good dusting. A warning shot has been fired in the direction of mothers-to-be who may have felt that the law was fast asleep on the issue of abortion (as indeed it was until that sentence: I still remember a 2005 episode of Xarabank, in which an anonymous woman claimed to have been offered an illegal abortion at St Luke’s hospital… a claim that was never investigated by the police.)

And all along, the Maltese state also closes all the loopholes and limits all the options for the only category of citizen that this law actually affects. Something tells me, then, that cases such as the one described above are likely to become a good deal more frequent in future… whether or not they ever end up in court.

This is clearly not a sustainable approach to such matters… especially if we’re also going to insist on banning any discussion on the subject. Even if we accept that the overwhelming country is resolutely pro-life, and will remain so ad aeternam… it does not follow that there are no areas where our legislation on abortion needs updating at all.

Why, for instance, are we not talking about the possibility of decriminalising abortion, as we are with drugs? I find it ironic that the present government considers itself ‘courageous’ for discussing drug decriminalisation… when there is no real political opposition to this initiative at all… while simultaneously lacking the balls to discuss any of the recommendations of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the United Nations, etc.: all of which have been urging a reform of Malta’s abortion legislation for decades.

The Tunisian woman’s case alone illustrates precisely where it needs amending. What, exactly, has society gained by sentencing that woman to two years’ imprisonment, suspended for four? Apart, of course, from the usual titillation of the religiously obsessed, who (in Catholic and Islamic cultures, at any rate) always seem to get a kick out of watching women being subjugated?

The usual response is that Malta’s draconian anti-abortion regime somehow serves as a ‘deterrent’ which may save unborn lives. Well, in this case, it didn’t save any lives at all. Not only was that woman (who admitted to the charge, if you’ll remember) completely undeterred by the law as it stands today… but she even risked her own life to end the pregnancy: ingesting a ‘cocktail of pills’ that could – and very often does, in analogous cases –have dispatched her along with her unborn child.

Clearly, if your circumstances are such that you would be willing to risk your life to end a pregnancy, you are hardly going to be put off by the prospect a two-year suspended sentence. The law therefore fails eminently in all its declared objectives: it does not save lives, and it does not deter crime either.

All it succeeded in doing on this particular occasion is punishing someone for having taken a clearly desperate measure… at a time when the entire apparatus of the State is also informing that person that: sorry, babe, but you’re on your own…

Yet all along, as with drugs, abortion could be decriminalised without changing its status as an illegal procedure in this country. Removing the criminal penalties stipulated for mothers in Article 241 would not change the fact that abortion is illegal in Malta. No doctor, hospital or clinic would legally be able to provide the service; the only difference would be a tiny bit more compassion when dealing with unfortunate cases like the one described above. How is that a bad thing?

A second point to discuss is the State’s own responsibility in such desperate cases, which ought to go slightly beyond merely threatening vulnerable women with prison. I’ll keep this one short and sweet: if you’re going to insist on a blanket ban on abortion in all cases, then you’re also going to have to assume full responsibility for the unwanted children who came into this world as a direct result of your policy. And (Edward Scicluna, please note) that means MORE benefits to single mothers, not fewer.

But of course all this is spectacularly irrelevant, because the only important thing – as the PN’s Convention of Ideas so recently reminded us – is that we continue to studiously avoid discussing the issue at all… for fear of annoying an all-powerful religious conservative mindset that neither of our ‘courageous’ political parties has the cojones to challenge.

Such bravery. Such cojones…