A most unfortunate proposal made by the government, which deeply prejudices the rights of women of reproductive age, has been backed most unexpectedly by a member of the Movement of Progressives. Worse still, she is a woman.

I would have expected this kind of retrograde thinking from the deputy prime minister, Tonio Borg, and from the chairman of parliament’s Social Affairs Committee, Edwin Vassallo. But I did not expect it from a young woman MP on the Opposition benches. Justyne Caruana has clearly not thought the matter through, for she is being disloyal to her own gender.

I cannot say that the stance of these three people is due to an insufficiency of thinking skills. It might be the case with Edwin Vassallo and Justyne Caruana, but it can’t be so with Tonio Borg, who prides himself on his familiarity with human rights law and constitutional law.

And yet he sees nothing intrinsically wrong with a proposal that would allow any man to stop any woman from leaving the country if he claims that she is carrying his child and that when she is overseas she might abort it.

This proposal is beyond shocking. Its proponents seek to brush aside the profound human rights issues involved by fixating instead on the (actual or potential) foetus. They imagine that if they get us going about the need to save at all costs a foetus from abortion, then we will ignore the residual horrors implied in keeping a woman captive until she gives birth.

Let’s leave aside the issues of European Union membership and of freedom of movement. Let’s leave aside, too, the human rights issues at stake. And let’s concentrate on the practicalities of doing this.

There are two facts which have to be determined before a woman is prevented from leaving the country until she gives birth – because obviously, a simple allegation by a man leaves the way right open for abuse, in the same way that the domestic violence laws are now repeatedly abused by people making false or vindictive reports against their spouses. The police, apparently, receive many hundreds of these false or vindictive reports every year, but are still obliged to take the ‘accused’ to court, or so they say, because the law does not allow for discretion even if there is clearly no case, no medical certificate, no testimony, and no evidence, log-jamming the Family Court and creating a great deal of inconvenience for all involved. But that’s another scandalous situation, to be discussed at some other stage.

These two facts are, first, that the woman is indeed pregnant, and second, that the child has been fathered by her accuser. So let’s say a man goes to the police and says that Miss or Mrs X is planning to leave the country, that she is pregnant with his child, and that she ‘might’ have an abortion while gone. So what happens next? Do the police arrest her and force her to urinate on a pregnancy tester (will a policewoman be obliged to hold it in the appropriate place?) so as to determine whether she really is pregnant?

Let’s say they do so, by circumventing any number of privacy laws, human rights provisions, and so on. They then have to determine that the foetus has been fathered by the piece of work who reported her. This means forcibly subjecting the foetus (and inevitably, the mother) to an invasive and risky procedure to extract a DNA sample, followed by the taking, under duress, of a DNA sample from the woman. Presumably, her accuser will put his money where his mouth is and volunteer his own DNA sample. Then all three DNA samples will have to be tested and matched, and somebody will have to pay for all this.

I don’t know if your mind is working in concert with mine, but if it is, it will be bumping along right now over all the horrifying human rights violations wrapped up in what, to the simpler or more conservative minds in our society, looks like a wonderful way of safeguarding foetuses from abortion.

There has been a parallel proposal to this one, and it is equally disturbing. This is for the issuing of care orders for foetuses – except, of course, the proposers don’t call them foetuses but ‘unborn children’. An equation is made between a care order for a child (no such thing as a ‘born child’) and a care order for a foetus. Yet this equation is clearly false.

A child under a care order is removed from its parent and literally, ‘taken into care’. A foetus cannot be separated from its mother – not unless the proposers of this fatuous suggestion wish to do the very thing they campaign against, and abort it. So a care order for a foetus is effectively a policing order for a pregnant woman. This would bring us close to cultural norms from which we usually distance ourselves most forcefully, and to which we like to believe we are so superior.

That adults are free to destroy themselves or to refuse treatment for ailments or addictions is one of our cherished civil liberties. Treatment can be forced by the courts on a child against the parents’ wishes – because parents cannot refuse medical treatment on a child’s behalf – but medical treatment can never be forced on anybody who is over the age of 18. Once we have reached that age, we are free to let ourselves rot, to refuse medical care, to kill ourselves with drink, cigarettes and even illegal drugs, without having treatment forced upon us.

This new proposal harks back to the days when women, and especially pregnant women, had the legal status of minors – for it seeks to make it legal to force treatment for drug, drink or tobacco addiction on pregnant women. I think we all know by now that no such treatment can work unless it is voluntary. You can’t force an alcoholic to stop drinking or a chain-smoker to stop smoking. It has to be their decision.

But wait – there is a way to stop them, isn’t there? It runs along the same lines as preventing pregnant women from leaving the country in case they have an abortion. To stop them smoking, drinking or taking drugs, what you do is this: you lock them up in a room with barred windows and a steel-clad door, with just a mattress on the floor so that they can’t kill themselves with pieces of furniture when they get withdrawal symptoms, and no clothes on either so that they can’t do any creative damage with those.

If the whole thing were not so very appalling, it would be ridiculous. Progressive? The whole country appears to be suffering from a really bad case of arrested development, with politicians on both sides of the House competing for the title of Mullah of the Year, while fools cheer on the sidelines. Scratch that Mullah of the Year. Much of this thinking would not go amiss in provincial China. They’re a bit confused there, too, about human rights and the status of women. Become pregnant and hey presto! You’re a child yourself – a born one, of course.

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