Labour MEPs: Cashman report was ‘not about abortion’

Labour MEPs Edward Scicluna and Louis Grech have expressed outrage at Nationalist MEP David Casa’s comments that they had ‘voted in favour of abortion’ in the European parliament this week – arguing that the report approved this week by the EP was in fact about global poverty, and contained only a fleeting mention of abortion in one of its 67 clauses.

Submitted by British MEP Michael Cashman (Labour), the report contains numerous recommendations to improve the international efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

In one paragraph (42), the report “calls on all the Member States and the Commission to reverse the worrying decline in funding for sexual and reproductive health and rights in developing countries and to support policies on voluntary family planning, safe abortion, treatment of sexually transmitted infections and the provision of reproductive health supplies consisting of life-saving drugs and contraceptives, including condoms.”

Nationalists MEPs David Casa and Simon Busuttil both voted against the report, which was carried largely by the European Socialists and Greens.

“The bottom line is that this report was about the EU's progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals to help the world's poorest people –not a report about abortion,” Scicluna said with reference to Casa’s criticism. “The report contained 67 paragraphs, of which para. 42 was just one, and it received a large majority in the Parliament, with many EPP members supporting it.”

Among the considerations featured in the report were international aid to poor countries, educational programmes, plans to improve co-ordination international aid efforts, mitigating the effects of climate change, the need for good governance, and many other social and political considerations.

“You would have to be a fanatic to vote against the entire report simply because it contains a single reference to abortion,” Louis Grech said. But in a front-page article in today’s In-Nazzjon, the Cashman report is dismissed as one that ‘deals with the killing of children before they are born.”

Labour Party insiders told MaltaToday.com.mt that they expect this sort of strategy to become more commonplace as elections approach.  “They have nothing else to fight us on, so they have to resort to nonsense like this,” a party spokesman confided.