There has been a little too much use of the trite argument: “Where would we have been if our parents had decided to abort us?” It doesn’t make any sense. Those who have never been born have never been born, so there would be no “we” or “I” to talk about. The simple answer to that question is this: we wouldn’t have existed, and because we didn’t exist then by definition there would be no “I” to care or contemplate.

We might as well ask ourselves where we would have been if our parents hadn’t to have sex at that particular moment on that particular day. A few seconds later, and we would have been somebody else altogether. We would have been our brother or sister, except that there would have been no “we”. Think of all the potential brothers or sisters that you might have had: all the various permutations of genes. Well, they don’t exist either. Potential is one thing. Fulfilment is another.

Most of the world’s population was conceived by accident rather than design, but in these days of carefully planned babies and fertility thermometers, we tend to forget that. Even a planned baby is an accident: an accidental combination of one particular sperm with the egg. If another sperm gets there first, the baby is completely different. Somebody is born.

Our creation is entirely random, but because we like to think we’re terribly special and relevant, we forget that we are only here by utter chance. Another five seconds, and somebody else is born instead. If we trouble ourselves too much about the potential of human life, rather than its reality, we’ll end up chasing around after sperm. A bit of that bodily fluid contains the potential for millions of human lives. That’s the next logical step. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, because we’re halfway there already, with some people – most notably in the Vatican – arguing that anything which prevents conception during sex is wrong because it defeats the potential to create life. Anything that prevents the implantation of a fertilized egg is also wrong, because it halts the potential of life to develop. That way madness lies.

Now here’s an even more interesting question. Where would we have been if our parents had never met? The answer is simple. There would be no “we” to give a damn.

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I bet the new hospital was designed by men. You’d be surprised just how many things are, which is why they are so often impractical for women, like restaurant chairs with arc-shaped backs, so that you can’t hang your handbag on them, and have nowhere else to put it except the floor. Whoever it was who put a foyer for waiting relatives between the labour ward and the delivery room in the maternity zone can’t possibly have been a woman, still less a woman who has given birth. It might possibly have been one of those men from the Gift of Life Movement – you know the ones, who think of women primarily as giant casseroles in which babies are cooked for nine months. When you’re writhing about in unbelievable agony, pain even worse than the last throes of somebody dying of cancer and let no natural-birth lunatic tell you otherwise, the very last thing you need is to be rushed in a wheelchair through a waiting-room full of other people’s relatives, or even your own.

And while we’re on the subject of wheelchairs, can the Department of Health buy for theirs the kind of net-bags that are used on the back of babies’ prams and pushchairs? That’s another example of poor design that’s inconsiderate to men, women and children. People being wheeled into the operating theatre – procedure dictates that you’re not allowed to walk, even if you’re perfectly capable of doing so – are made to carry their large X-ray pack and other documents on their laps or across their chests, like a piece of labelled merchandise being wheeled into the stockroom. This is because the orderly can’t push the chair and carry the X-rays at the same time, and the wheelchairs are not equipped, as every baby’s pushchair on the planet is, with a bag at the back.

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Has the Cana Movement taken leave of its senses? I saw a newspaper report the other day about its national conference, called “For a Healthier Marriage”. One of the people it invited to address this conference – Dr Charles Attard – is the president of National Action, the far-right political party headed by Josie Muscat. I haven’t a clue what he does for a living, or if he was invited in his personal or professional capacity. But I don’t think so, because he was listed in the reports as “Dr Charles Attard, President of Azzjoni Nazzjonali”.

I know that National Action is making marriage and the family one of its main political platforms, but this is for all the wrong reasons associated with far-right movements throughout 20th-century history. It’s the same reason they’d rather see women stay at home and raise 100 children than go to work and raise two or three. That’s why the far right and the Vatican had so much in common in the first half of the 20th century. They thought they shared a common goal, and only found out too late that though the goal was common, the means and the reasons were completely different.

I’m going to assume here that the organisers of that Cana Movement national conference are simply naïve, thinking that National Action is just an ordinary political party with the best interests of the family at heart. Just because National Action thinks it is an ordinary political party, it doesn’t mean that it really is one. Some days ago, there was a news report saying that EU surveys have found that the Maltese read the least in the EU. Less than half of us have read a book in the last year: one book, that is, not a variety of books. No wonder we’re incapable of seeing things for what they really are, or assessing situations properly and within a wider context.

If the Cana Movement organisers are not naïve, then I’m just going to have to assume something else: that they think it perfectly acceptable, and perhaps even desirable, to be associated with a fledgling political party which preaches negative messages about women, blacks, and those who have been plucked from the sea – oh, and which is against women marrying “foreigners” and diluting “our Maltese culture”.

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The Leader of the Opposition said at a “political conference” in Lija that when he is prime minister, “those who don’t agree with something that the government does will be allowed to voice their opinion.” Gosh. Thanks ever so, Fred. Allow us to voice our opinion, you say? Words fail me.

Where has he been living since Malta joined the free world? We no longer live in those dark, dark days when he was president of the Labour Party and nobody could say or write what they thought because of his repressive party and the government it formed. I imagine he expects wild gratitude and celebration in the streets because he has given us permission to criticise him when he rules Malta. That puts my mind at rest. I won’t be locked up and whipped. Now I’ll vote for him, for sure.

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At the same “political conference”, he told us that as prime minister he would ensure that there is zero tolerance on corruption. Well, that’s a laugh. Zero tolerance on corruption, did he say? It’s never too late to begin, but this is testing my patience to the limit. It’s a pity he didn’t have zero tolerance on corruption when he stuck with the Labour Party right through the worst of its excesses. I’m not saying he committed any excesses himself. I’m just saying that anybody with a real zero-tolerance-to-corruption mentality would have packed his bags and left in a hurry.

If I want a prime minister with zero tolerance for corruption, there is no way in hell that I am going to choose one who was president of the Labour Party in the early 1980s. Zero tolerance for corruption! Let’s not laugh too loud, shall we?