The government continues with its drive to have the prohibition of abortion entrenched in our Constitution. An advertisement in yesterday’s newspapers called on “all those associations, groups and individuals who would like to support the government’s proposal... are kindly requested to write a letter addressed to the Ministry for Justice and Home Affairs”.

This is all very odd. Public consultation by democratic governments involves a call for opinions in general – for, against, missing the point completely, and sitting on the fence – and not just for letters of support for the proposed measure. Calling for messages of support and seeking endorsement is what lobby groups do, when they wish to petition the government.

But what does the government plan to do with the letters and emails that it receives, supporting its strange proposal? Petition itself? Put a glove puppet on either hand and get the two to negotiate?

The Justice and Home Affairs Ministry is not a pro-life lobby group. It is a governmental arm. It has no business campaigning in this way, or making such proposals. The criminal code prohibits abortion, and that’s that. If a group of pro-life people with nothing better to do with their time wants to come along and propose to the government that Malta should entrench the prohibition into the Constitution, then fine – whatever makes them happy.

Aren’t there people who bungee-jump off bridges and parachute off the Eiffel Tower, and others who build cathedrals out of match-sticks? When it comes to keeping ourselves amused and occupied, I take the view of each to his own and never mind the difference, as long as these pastimes are legal.

I may think they’re tilting at windmills, fighting a battle that was won in Malta years ago, but if they enjoy it, so what? But it’s not up to the government to join these people in their campaign, and set itself up as part of the lobby – this time to lobby the people because it can’t very well lobby itself. Doesn’t the government realise that, in this particular case, it has reversed the natural order of things? It is the people who should lobby the government, and not the other way round.

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The Justice and Home Affairs Ministry, which is so busy working on convincing us that the ban on abortion should be entrenched in the Constitution, appears not to realise that it has other, more important fish to fry.

The Justice and Home Affairs Ministry is responsible for the army, the courts, the police and all matters of crime-control. I think we are generally agreed that there are far more pressing matters in the minister’s portfolio than the entrenchment of a ‘no abortion’ clause in the Constitution.

Yet it has seen fit to waste much time and energy, so many civil service man-hours, on this untoward exercise, when there are so many real, driving problems to be getting on with. It seems like an exercise in classic displacement activity.

It’s easier to concentrate efforts in such a useless direction than to tackle the truly important and highly complicated problems that are clamouring for attention. Instead of faffing around with abortion and the Constitution, the Justice and Home Affairs Ministry should apply itself with similar zeal to the crisis in the camps for those who have been washed up on our shores, to the escalating drug problem, to crime reduction, to the chaos in our law courts, to the considerable difficulties faced by the army and the police.

To put at the top of the ‘to do’ list – at least it seems that way to us – shoving abortion into the Constitution when there is already a perfectly good law against it, looks like a matter of twisted priorities.

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The Justice and Home Affairs Minister would be more in keeping with the spirit of the times and the feelings of electors if he were to announce a campaign to clamp down on drug dealers, and an information campaign on the drug laws. Perhaps he doesn’t realise this, but illegal drugs are now so widely available, and sold so overtly, that many teenagers don’t even realise that some of them are illegal – most particularly, marijuana – and laugh in their parents’ faces when told that giving some to a friend as though it were a piece of chocolate or a bottle of beer constitutes trafficking under the law.

They do not differentiate in terms of consequences and seriousness between the illegality of being sold marijuana (and that’s just the least of it) and the illegality of being sold alcohol or cigarettes at 15.

Scare campaigns about the health dangers of illegal drugs are largely counter-productive. We know this to be a fact, and it is no different than with the scare campaigns about the dangers of cigarettes.

At 14 or 15, you think that nothing can hurt you and that you’re immortal and invulnerable.

When it comes to fear of the courts and prison, it’s a different matter. These kids have the health consequences drummed into them, but nobody tells them about the legal consequences. Yet they cannot be expected to know the drug laws by osmosis. They have to have the facts spelled out to them.

What is needed now – and this is very clear to me, even if it is not clear to those with the powers to organise such things – is a billboard campaign in entertainment centres, spelling out the criminal consequences of even something as everyday to them as giving some marijuana to a friend.

If you don’t believe me, get hold of the nearest 14-year-old and ask him or her for the definition of trafficking.

The chances are that you’ll be told that it’s selling large quantities of hard drugs for huge amounts of money. Perhaps you don’t even know the facts yourself; maybe even you think that giving illegal drugs to a friend, without money changing hands, is not trafficking.

While thousands of parents – at least those who are not oblivious – battle on an on-going basis with these very real problems, they watch in something akin to disbelief as the Home Affairs Ministry pirouettes itself into tangles about abortion and the Constitution, something that is completely cut off from the reality of our lives.

We don’t want abortions, and those who do can easily buy a cheap plane ticket and get one, as they have been doing since the procedure was legalised in Britain and Italy.

There is no queue of pro-abortion campaigners or petitioners behind the ministry’s door, so why the fuss?