No comparison can be drawn between divorce and abortion, as the two subjects are inherently different in nature, Deborah Schembri told The Malta Independent.

Speaking as a civil rights campaigner and as the former chair of the divorce movement, Schembri said that abortion – unlike divorce – is confronted by competing human rights, making the debate a much more delicate one.

Asked for her reaction to the launch of the first ever pro-choice and pro-abortion coalition, called Voice for Choice, the former Labour MP said that while everyone has every right to set up a coalition to fight for rights that they feel should be implemented, she did not share the same values as the new coalition and was not in favour of abortion.

She also pin-pointed that the said coalition’s name – ‘Voice for Choice’ – was a misnomer since the human being that was being aborted was not being given a choice at all.

Asked whether the fact that Maltese women can legally seek abortions outside of Malta, as said by former Judge of the European Court of Human Rights Giovanni Bonello when speaking to this newspaper, should affect the discussion on the topic in Malta, Schembri said that she did not think that it should.

Schembri said that she was against abortion even in cases such as incest and rape.  She noted however that she agrees with the procedure that doctors use today which follows what is called the Doctrine of Double Effect.

Under this doctrine, she explained, if a woman needed a medical procedure without which she risked losing her life which procedure could not be delayed and which had to be used as a last resort, then that procedure could proceed even if it meant that the life of her child would be terminated in the process, since the intention in such a case would not be to kill the fetus but to save the life of the mother.  In cases like this, the killing of the child would neither be intended nor desired, although it would be foreseen, she said.

“In such cases, I don’t consider it – and I don’t think anyone should consider it – an abortion (as in ‘a criminal act of pre-natally ending the life of a human being’) as for a crime to be committed there needs to be both the action and the intention, and in this intention is lacking”, she said.

She noted that anyone who was to speak about her about this subject was certainly going to bring up the point that she had campaigned for divorce by using the argument that it was legal to go abroad and get it done, but added that civil rights such as divorce and the ‘right’ to abort are two completely different things.

 “The right of divorce is a right which, if taken up, does not affect another human being’s fundamental rights – there are no competing human rights involved”, she said.

“However when speaking about abortion, the people conveniently forget that there are the rights of the fetus, a human being in its own right, at stake besides the right of the mother”, she noted. 

Any discussion about competing rights is a complicated one at best, however, without the right to life no other right is ever capable of being sought, she said. It is thus fundamental that a human being is nurtured till birth as a subject of the right to life, before any other right enters the discussion, short of the self-preservation of the mother’s life, she added.

Schembri added that when people such as those within Voice for Choice speak about the right of the woman to abort, they are completely forgetting that there is a human being with the right to live involved in the matter as well; a human being who, if the woman does take up this “so-called right to abort”, will be totally deprived of life and any ‘choice’ which it brings with it.

“It is giving one human being a choice whilst removing it from another, equally deserving human being, and I don’t think that that it makes logical sense”, she said.

Schembri also specified that she holds that the two are “equally deserving” since these are specifically “human” rights and that one is considered to be a human being from conception.  She noted that arguments with regards to personhood did not come into the matter; “the definition of personhood has changed with time – there was a time when slaves were not considered as persons; when women were not considered persons – but nonetheless they were always human beings; irrespective of personhood, a fetus is a human being and as such the subject of human rights”.

“I feel like I can never agree with abortion as I think that it is the killing of a human being, albeit one that is inside the womb”, she said before adding that just like she cannot agree with infanticide – the killing of a baby after birth – neither can she agree with the killing of one at an earlier stage of its life.

Deborah Schembri served as a parliamentary secretary in the government during the last legislature, but did not hold onto her seat during the 2017 elections. Schembri was also the chairperson of the Iva Movement which, back in 2011, was at the forefront of the push to pass legislation which introduced divorce in Malta.  Divorce was introduced after Malta voted in favour of it during a referendum during that same year.

Last year she spoke against matters such as embryo freezing, embryo adoption and surrogacy.  She has also been a prominent speaker in favour of various women’s rights and before becoming Parliamentary Secretary, she used to chair the Malta Bioethics Consultative Committee.