Age of Consent: The Evil Abortion Conspiracy…

Damn. Just when I thought I’d finally outgrown the old video game phase, they come up with a new title that I know I won’t be able to resist. I had only just uninstalled my old copy of ‘Age of Empires: The Asian Dynasties’ (Note: I was terribly disappointed to discover it didn’t actually feature a Japanese manga version of Blake and Krystle Carrington. I’ll be writing to Ensemble Studios to complain...) and what do you know? Out pops yet another instalment to the multi-award winning RTS computer game franchise.

And another smasher it promises to be, too. First there was Age of Mythology, then Age of Magic, Age of Kings, Age of Empires… and now, ‘Age of Consent’. What a worthy successor to the entire ‘Age of’ series… must have taken them ages (ahem) to come up with yet another idea for the same old extended real-time strategy game... 

In any case, it’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to review a new gaming release. So here goes: my own review of ‘Age of Consent: the Evil Abortion Conspiracy’ (Parental warning: contains hugely irrational arguments).

Like virtually every other video game ever conceived, gameplay takes place at a time when the entire known universe is under threat from the forces of evil. In this case, ‘evil’ takes the form of a rather unremarkable proposal to lower Malta’s age of consent from 18 to 16. 

Yes, yes, I know that it’s a perfectly normal suggestion – the alternative being to jail teenagers for ‘statutory rape’ simply because they got laid, for crying out loud… but don’t forget, folks: it’s just a game. 

In this alternate universe, the mere act of lowering the age of consent from 18 to 16 would obviously wreak havoc with the moral compass of the entire space-time continuum… which, as we all know, hinges very delicately on the activities of horny Maltese teenagers when legally permitted to do what they were always going to do anyway. 

And no, it doesn’t matter that the age of consent is actually lower than 16 in most European countries. It’s only if little Malta permits its minuscule teenage population to have sex without facing the threat of prison, that all Hell will break loose…

Like I said, you can’t expect too much realism from the basic story-line of a video game. Besides: it’s the gameplay that counts… and in ‘Age of Consent’ you get to play a suitably horrified pro-life campaigner who sees in this nefarious plot – hatched, incidentally, by the two villains of the piece: government whip (and former health minister) Godfrey Farrugia, and Labour MP Etienne Grech, who chairs parliament’s standing health committee – a strategy to ‘introduce abortion by stealth’. 

Hang on, let’s make this easier and just read this part aloud from Gift of Life’s Facebook page… I mean, from the instruction manual that comes with every legally-bought copy of the game: 

“The lowering of the age of sexual consent may solve problems when an 18 year old has sex with a 15 year old. But it will create a situation of multiple unplanned pregnancies. The next step will be the call to legalise abortion to solve this problem. We believe that this measure is very dangerous and may even be part of a strategic long-term plan to legalise abortion in Malta. Speak up, share, comment aggressively if you are pro-life…”

Ah yes, this brings us to the first reason why ‘Age of Consent’ fits so neatly into a category of strategy games built around the concept of destroying all your enemies and ruling the world. The objective, as you can all see, is to ‘comment aggressively’… in other words, you no longer gun down all opposition with a combination of close-range heavy gunpowder infantry units, long-range skirmishers, and maybe a couple of Falconets or Great Bombards at the rear. You just shout them all down instead, so that their arguments get lost in a barrage of irrationality. 

Same thing, really. Only you don’t have to work so hard stockpiling mountains of wood, gold and food to raise and feed your armies. The only resource you need is hot air… which is both free, and particularly abundant in the studios of the Gift of Life Foundation: developers of ‘Age of Consent: the Evil Abortion Conspiracy’.

This also means that the only ammunition available to you as a player consists of your own arguments: and seeing as these have to be shouted aggressively rather than lucidly and rationally spelt out, we can more or less assume from beforehand that they aren’t going to make very much sense. 

And in fact… let’s take a quick look at our army’s in-game arsenal, shall we? 

Irrational argument number one. Lowering the age of consent from 18 to 16 “will increase multiple unplanned pregnancies”. 

Well, that’s a somewhat odd premise to depart from, seeing as how Malta currently boasts the highest age of consent in Europe, and also (by far) the highest rate of teenage school dropout specifically due to ‘unplanned pregnancies’. Clearly, the current age of consent is routinely ignored anyway. So why would lowering it make any difference?

Besides: the argument also assumes that the rate at which teenagers have sex is this country is a direct reflection of what the law permits… for all the world as though teenagers actually acquaint themselves with the niceties of Maltese legislation on the subject of sex, before trying it out for themselves.

If this were true, I’d honestly pity the typical Maltese teenager. Just picture your average randy 17-year-old, frantically scrambling through the online version of the Criminal Code (available on justice.gov.mt, if you want to know…) just to see if it’s legally OK for him or her to cave in to those uncontrollable impulses in the heat of the moment.

I need hardly add that things don’t quite work that way out here in the real world… and there is a mountain of evidence (mostly in the form of ‘unplanned teenage pregnancies’) to prove it. But no matter. Being just a game, let’s not ruin it by insisting that its main storyline conforms to even the most basic form of known logical paradigm.

Onto irrational argument number two: having fallaciously established that the reform proposed by government will automatically spark an unprecedented tsunami of unwanted pregnancies among teenagers: “The next step will be the call to legalise abortion to solve this problem.”

Ah yes, of course. Because no sooner do a bunch of teenagers get pregnant in this country – which happens all the time anyway – than we all instantly start debating whether or not to legalise abortion.

Strange, isn’t it, how this debate hasn’t already happened… seeing as this problem already exists in Malta, and it ranks the worst in Europe even with a legal ban on sex before the age of 18? With the rate of unplanned teenage pregnancy as high as it already is… the logic exhibited here would imply that any national discussion on abortion should have already taken place years, if not decades ago. 

But it never did. I wonder why?

It could, of course, have something to do with the moral revulsion that the very word ‘abortion’ continues to evoke locally: and which has been gleefully and lovingly stoked over the years by the same Gift of Life Foundation. In the present climate, any member of parliament who even broaches the idea of a discussion on the subject of abortion – sorely needed though it demonstrably is – can pre-emptively kiss his or her entire political career goodbye.

But again, that’s the reality this country actually inhabits. The virtual reality inhabited by the radical pro-lifers of the Gift of Life Foundation, on the other hand, is clearly something else altogether.

This might explain why GoL is so absurdly confident that a discussion on abortion (oh, the horror, that we should even discuss such things…) will inevitably arise as a direct consequence of simply lowering the age of consent: an absurd non-sequitur if I ever saw one. The entire argument simply sidesteps the reality we can all see with our own eyes. No such discussion is actually possible in this country. And we have seen evidence for this, too: when the idea of a discussion was tentatively floated at the PN’s ‘Conference of Ideas’, it was shot down almost instantly.

The entire subject, it seems, it simply off-limits in Malta… and even if the predicted tsunami of unplanned pregnancies does materialise, it will not have the slightest effect. The plain truth of the matter is that Maltese politicians are too scared to even mention the word… and will remain too scared, even if it suddenly starts raining unwanted babies. 

Few know this truth better than Gift of Life: after all, our politicians have been reduced to this state precisely as a result of browbeating strategies (Comment aggressively! All the time!) such as the one outlined above.

Which of course brings us to the real strategy behind this little RTS game of ours. You will surely note, even from the above excerpt, that the stated concern is not with the actual introduction of abortion – being the no-go-area that is – but rather, that we might all start actually talking about the subject. Remember? “The next step will be the call to legalise abortion...” Please note: ‘the call’, not the thing itself.

Hence, I suppose, GoL’s own calls for ‘aggressive commenting’ on the online comments boards. Its declared purpose is to stifle all rational discussion on the subject in Malta… and having looked at its core arguments, it is not exactly very difficult to see why, either. 

Radical pro-life groups like GoL know perfectly well that they wouldn’t stand a chance in a reasoned, dispassionate debate on the subject with people who know more about it than they do. People like Dr Philip Carabot, who ran the Genito-Urinary clinic for 14 years… and who has quite rightly complained about Malta’s severely outdated legislation on the subject of statutory rape.

“Of course I’ve had 16-year-old patients who were having sex with 18-year-old partners. Strictly speaking this is statutory rape, but that’s just ridiculous. There is no way I would report these people,” was his response to the age of consent proposal.

That’s not the kind of argument that can easily be rebutted by ‘aggressive comments’. Nor can any amount of aggression possibly back up Gift of Life’s utterly ludicrous claim that the removal of prison sentences in such cases would automatically lead to the ‘introduction of abortion by stealth’. 

So rather than have the weakness of their arguments exposed to full view in an organised debate… far preferable to simply kill off any discussion on the subject, so that the only opinions to actually be heard are their own aggressive, nonsensical rants.

And as far as that particular objective goes… well, they’ve already won the game. As far as I can see, the only ones who ever mention ‘abortion’ in this country are the members of Gift of Life themselves. Everyone else is either too scared, or just not bothered.