There has been more irritating posturing by the Gift of Life movement. This time, a prancing couple has thrown a black veil over the baby-statue on that Naxxar roundabout. The baby is held in the badly-proportioned arms of a stunted woman, and there is no man around. That statue reveals a lot about how Gift of Life thinks: in terms of motherhood, rather than of parenthood. Mothers are sacred like the Virgin Mary, but fathers are cast in the ambiguous role of Joseph if they are ever discussed at all.
The black veil will stay on the baby until parliament bows down to the wishes of Paul Vincenti and his crew and amends the country’s Constitution to his liking. A good strong gale like last Monday’s should put paid to that, but no doubt they have a garage full of black veils to deal with such eventualities. That group certainly loves its stunts.
Paul Vincenti would win a lot more brownie points from people who don’t have mashed banana between their ears if he paid as much attention to life after birth as he does to life in the womb. Eight hundred people were wet and freezing in tattered tents at Hal Far over the last few days, but I didn’t see any press coverage of Gift of Life members rushing there with a stock of quilts and heavy jackets, like they rushed to the Castille Hotel with their candles to counteract the evil they thought emanated from within, as Rebecca Gomperts spoke about abortion. In seeking to have God put gold stars in their copybooks, they kind of missed the point. The God they believe in must be an odd one if he would rather his followers stood about reciting the rosary and holding candles in the street instead of lending a practical hand to the least of his brothers who are wet and frozen in a gale.
Among those 800 people there are several pregnant women. The life in their wombs seems not to count for much for the Gift of Life movement. To get some attention from that group, they will have to clamour for an abortion first. Then Gift of Life won’t leave them alone. Imagine being pregnant, wet and icy cold in a torn tent in the kind of weather we had last Sunday and Monday. I was in a plane at the time, jolted about and feeling ill, and all I could think about were the people who were at that moment drowning somewhere down below – people we will never find out about because they wouldn’t have had the time to radio for help and because their bodies will never be found. Nobody could have survived that weather in rickety craft. Even many of the strong boats participating in the Middle Sea Race, crewed by able and experienced sailors, were forced to withdraw or take shelter.
As I went to bed, I thought about all those other people freezing in the mud at Hal Far, and wondered at the strange mindset of those who think they are God’s chosen ones, who will go straight to his right hand for speaking against divorce and abortion, while doing nothing to help the ones who are suffering right beneath their noses. Worse still, many of these breast-beaters think that the people at Hal Far deserve their suffering, because they brought it on themselves. God-fearing or God-loving as they make themselves out to be, they hate their fellow human beings beneath those tattered tents and wish they would just disappear. No way are they going to help them. Being a Catholic is one thing; being a Christian is another. And being a decent human being is another thing altogether.
The pregnant women at Hal Far didn’t rush straight to the waiting arms of Paul Vincenti and Gift of Life when the gale reached force 9 last Monday. Instead, they went to the nearby Peace Lab, clamouring to be let in for shelter. The parallel with the Christmas story which we have had repeated to us time after time since childhood would have gone straight over the head of Gift of Life, which spends its time in horse-blinkers.
If Gift of Life wishes to be taken seriously by people other than the Minister for Justice and parties of card-playing women from my old home-town, then its members and ‘chief executive officer’ should control any distaste they may feel for black people who might be – horrors – Muslim and help those pregnant women with antenatal and postnatal medical care, and buy them a few packs of the kind of things women with babies can’t do without. That’s a better way of spending their money than buying plastic foetuses to hand out to parliamentarians at their publicity stunts.
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Last time I wrote that Gift of Life is a hysterical group that is short on logic and rational thinking. There was another point I wanted to bring up, but couldn’t for lack of space: its constant harping on the depression and remorse suffered by women who have abortions. This strikes me as a completely loony argument against abortion – firstly because it is a complete non sequitur, and secondly because if we are going to use the consequence of depression as an argument against abortion, then we can also use it as an argument against childbirth.
As Rebecca Gomperts pointed out, there is no such thing as post-abortion depression. There is regret – the sort of regret we all feel when we take decisions we don’t like but which we felt we had no choice about. That kind of regret doesn’t mean that the women in question would like to turn back the clock and not have an abortion. It simply means that they would rather not have been in a position where they had to choose an abortion. In other words, their regret is about getting pregnant, and not about having an abortion.
It is childbirth that causes depression and even deep psychosis which leads to women being hospitalised and treated. There is no parallel post-abortion syndrome. Postnatal depression has destroyed the lives of many families and left countless women unable to form a proper bond with their baby or even with its father. It has led some women to kill themselves and their children – yes, even here in sacred Malta. Or have we already forgotten the headline-making case of that poor young woman who drove into the sea with her baby, killing them both, while the whole of Malta tried to find out where they were? I don’t see Paul Vincenti warning women against having babies because of the risks of serious depression – and so he shouldn’t. Nor does he claim that childbirth is bad because of the mental illness that often follows. By the same token, he should not be using regret and perceived depression as ‘proof’ that abortion is bad. If resulting depression makes abortion undesirable, then it should also make childbirth undesirable.