A bit of displacement activity can be wonderful. You need to start work on a boring job, and decide that it is the perfect moment to clean out your desk-drawers instead. And while you’re cleaning them out, you find all kinds of interesting papers, and so you begin reading them. Ah, too late to start the boring job, so we’ll do it tomorrow instead.

The consequences of doing that kind of thing are not particularly serious in the private context, but in the public sphere, they’re more than a little stupid and dangerous. For example, while the consequences of there being no divorce, and hence no possibility of remarriage, become ever more tangled and complicated, we sit about discussing ways and means of ‘regularising the position’ of cohabiting couples. What can I say? There’s only ever been one way of regularising the position of cohabiting couples, and wherever you go, it’s called marriage.

Where there is divorce, there is no need to regularise the position of people who live together without being married, because they can do that themselves – by getting married. If you can marry but don’t do so, then it’s because you don’t want to have your position regularised, so it doesn’t make sense for governments to intervene, and hence, they don’t. The existence of something called ‘a common-law marriage’ in Britain is a complete myth. Those who live together there, even if it is for 50 years, have absolutely no rights over each other and still less over each other’s property. The law takes the approach governed by common sense: that when there is a vehicle for the regularisation of unions – marriage – there is absolutely no need to create another one.

The tentative discussions about the need to regularise the position of cohabiting couples are just so much displacement activity. It is being done to kid ourselves that we are doing something about untangling the mess, and that we are aware how, with the passing of more years and the break-up of even more marriages, and the formation of more non-marital unions, the legal tangles are going to get even messier. But like clearing out your desk-drawers when there is a difficult or boring report to write; it is easier to chat on about regularising cohabitation than to face the tedious fact that cohabitation can only be legally regularised through something called marriage. For that, divorce is necessary. If you regularise the cohabitation of two people who are married to somebody else, what you get is bigamy.

This displacement activity is happening because it is a lot easier to pretend that you are thinking hard about how to regularise cohabitation without making it precisely the same thing as marriage (an impossibility) than it is to tackle the tedious task of setting in train the process of divorce legislation.

You will notice that I didn’t say “the process of a discussion on divorce”, because what is there to discuss? When the rest of the world, and I mean the rest except for the Philippines, has divorce, it’s not going to be Malta to find a divine “third way” that solves all the problems without hurting or upsetting anyone or earning black marks from God.

But back to that displacement activity: I’m seeing it elsewhere, in the driven panic to use the Constitution to ensure that our descendants will never be able to have an abortion at home, though fortunately there can never be anything done to stop Maltese women from having abortions next door in Sicily. I say “fortunately” not because I’m keen on abortion, but because it would be a serious violation of human rights to keep pregnant women prisoners within the borders of Malta, on the grounds that they might have an abortion if they leave. It would be an equally serious violation to check them on their return to see whether they are still pregnant, and it would be grave abuse to investigate them to see whether the abortion was spontaneous (otherwise called a miscarriage) or induced. I hate anything that smacks of the persecution of women by men; there is too long and too tragic a history to this kind of behaviour, and it disgusts me.

While the Justice Minister, the former-police-inspector-turned-shadow-minister-for-justice, and the “chief executive officer” of the Gift of Life Movement run about with their mad petition to have one of their whims slotted into the Constitution, what’s happening to real, live babies as opposed to fictional ones that have yet to be born 50 years hence? More and more of them are being born every year to girls under 18 and to single women aged between 18 and 24. The health minister said in parliament that last year 504 such babies were born. Yes, that’s right: 504 real, live babies born to girls who should be at school, girls who have just left school, and unmarried women who are so very young that it’s obvious the babies were unplanned, and probable that there isn’t going to be a man around long enough to help do the raising, or the bill-paying.

This isn’t an argument for abortion; not at all. I think it’s a very positive sign that they all decided to keep their babies, even though their lives are going to be thrown off course and their own parents’ lives will go through complete chaos and upheaval. It’s certainly a lot better than what used to happen in the past in holy Malta: pregnant girls sent to Gozo, London or Switzerland, and babies dumped in orphanages or handed over to a childless couple for adoption.

It is, however, an argument for all those who are faffing around with their petition to screw their heads back onto their necks and stop all this displacement activity. What’s more important, for heaven’s sake? Wasting time and effort on the putative grandchildren of today’s kindergarten pupils, or getting our act together to stop this enormous flood of babies being born to girls who aren’t in the best position to care for them, and who should have better things to do with their lives at that age. And aren’t we even going to bother to find out why so many schoolgirls are very young unmarried women are getting pregnant – I assume by accident?

How easy it is to talk about looking after the babies of the future while there’s a growing crisis with the babies of the present. Last year, 812 babies were born to single mothers (504 of them to children and very young women, as we have seen). Some of those 300 or so older ones aren’t really single, just cheating on social welfare. But others really are dependent on social welfare, and that’s hardly the best environment for a child to grow up in. The figures are already something to worry about, but here’s the thing: the situation is getting worse. The health minister also told parliament that the number of babies born to girls and single women rises every year. There were 429 in 2000. Six years later, there were 812.

Yet here we are: panicking ourselves into a frenzy – or rather, allowing ourselves to be panicked by a bunch of middle-aged men with a bee in their bonnets about abortion – and being bossed into working at once on the “solution” to a “problem” that doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, the problem that does exist in the here and now is brushed aside with a footnote in the daily newspaper, and ignored by all so far except this columnist, who happened to notice the footnote. There they go, cleaning out their desk-drawers when there’s work to be done, wasting time on petitions and Constitutional amendments while last year alone, 500 babies ended up in the laps of single girls who should have been at school, at university, or just growing up.