I suppose there is one thing for which we can all be grateful, now that Tonio Borg has forced onto the national agenda a long overdue debate about abortion.
With all this talk of sperm cells, ova, embryos and zygotes (which, by the way, I first took to be an alien species from Dr Who), I now have a much clearer picture in my mind of how human life actually comes about. For instance: I no longer believe that babies “arrive by ship”, as Prof. Oliver Friggieri once informed me. For that matter, I now know that they are not horticultural by-products of the common cabbage; neither are they purchased via mail order catalogue from Kids ‘R Us.
Most important of all, however, I am now absolutely certain that there is no truth whatsoever in the old myth that babies are delivered to your home by a stork. Which, when you stop to think about it, is probably just as well.
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Having said that, there is considerably more for which Dr Borg deserves our undying ingratitude. Foremost, the way he has insisted on presenting as a “national proposal” the agenda of a handful of extremists, resulting in the entire country being plunged into what can only be described as foetus frenzy of increasingly alarming proportions.
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Last week’s episode of Xarabank, for instance, could almost have been directed by Dario Argento in a particularly macabre mood. First, we had Fr Colin Apap brutally silenced by an untypically aggressive Claudette Pace... despite the fact that Fr Colin was about the only one on that programme to actually stick to the topic at hand (i.e., the constitutional amendment), as opposed to the broader abortion debate favoured by most of the audience.
But if this display of intolerance wasn’t enough to frighten the willies out of the sane and the reasonable, it simply paled into insignificance compared to what happened next. I refer to a moment when a certain Dr Buttigieg, gynaecologist, produced from his jacket pocket a dead baby in a jar, and then waved it about for all the world as if it were one of the Pardoner’s holy relics, and Xarabank the mediaeval equivalent of E-Bay.
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I beg your pardon? No, I’m not joking at all. A dead baby in a jar. And it gets worse, too. For not only does Dr Buttigieg evidently walk around with pickled human foetuses in his pocket (how would he explain that in a roadblock, I wonder?)... but apparently, he has kept the wretched thing in his possession for 25 whole years, ever since he fished it out of the garbage in a foreign hospital somewhere.
But if you ask me, the truly scary thing in all this is not that this person takes an unmistakably perverse pleasure in shocking his audiences with a dead baby. Rather, it is the simple fact that a week has since gone by, and there has so far been no noticeable reaction to Dr Buttigieg’s grossly unethical act last Friday.
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Is it possible that nobody finds anything objectionable in a ploy like that? In a country where even a simple swear-word can get you instantly banned from State television, it seems a gynaecologist can nonchalantly trot out a dead body to use as a cheap publicity stunt... and nobody even raises an eyebrow. I mean, honestly: isn’t there a law against that kind of thing? Something in our Criminal Code which prevents the blatant exploitation of human corpses for purely propaganda purposes?
And if there isn’t any law (for, considering the quality of the people passing laws through Parliament these days, there probably isn’t...) what about PBS’s code of conduct? And, for that matter, the Broadcasting Authority? Didn’t it just recently issue a set of guidelines for the filming of dead bodies for news purposes? Well, can anyone explain why the filming of a dead body after an accident is such a big no-no... but then, it’s perfectly OK to show dramatic close-ups of a decomposing foetus (which, let’s not forget, is a “human individual” by the pro-
lifers’ own argument) swimming in a murky combination of surgical spirit and bits of its own umbilical cord?
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Besides, the freak-show fetishism exhibited by Dr Buttigieg last week raises all sorts of other questions, too. What makes him so certain that this foetus of his was, in fact, the result of an abortion? How does he know it wasn’t a miscarriage? Did he perform an autopsy to find out? And while he was at it, did he ever attempt to run a genetic test, so that he could trace the mother and return the corpse to its family?
More to the point, considering the now decidedly grotesque turn this debate has taken: what exactly does Dr Buttigieg do with his dead baby when he’s not busy waving it about on national television? Does he sleep with it under his pillow? Does he keep it on a shelf, along with a collection of assorted bottled body-parts? And what else does he have in this collection, I wonder? Shrunken mummified heads, all tied together on a string? Or maybe a row of shiny little test-tubes, each containing the amputated clitoris of some unfortunate victim of female circumcision... you know, that dreadful and utterly abominable practice which is still widespread in large parts of Africa, without apparently upsetting any of our super-fervent Roman Catholics?
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It’s a pity that Mel Brooks wasn’t on the show’s panel last Friday. It would have reminded him of his own comedy classic Young Frankenstein: in particular, the scene where Marty Feldman steals a human brain labelled “A. B. Normal”. With, I suppose, one significant difference. For while Young Frankenstein was funny, Dr Buttigieg’s circus act on Xarabank was nothing short of sick.
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It was not the only sick thing about that episode of Xarabank, either. You can call me a wimp all you like... but personally, I was also disturbed by the interview aired on that same programme. The one with a woman who had an abortion, and therefore was probably the only one on the show who actually had an inkling of what she was talking about... and who was naturally ignored as a result.
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To be honest, what disturbed me in particular was not the fact that she chose to terminate her pregnancy at six months in a clinic in Barcelona. Nor that she was assisted in this respect by her private gynaecologist. No. What I found tremendously disquieting was the fact that this woman found out she was pregnant during a check-up at St Luke’s... whereupon she was immediately approached by certain individuals (she didn’t specify if they were hospital staff or not), who offered to “get rid of the problem”... for Lm150.
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Those of you who watched the programme will remember the rest: that the woman in question turned down the offer, after finding out that the operation would be carried out in circumstances likened to a “butcher’s shop” (her analogy, not mine). You might also remember how this assertion was made right in front of Justice Minister Tonio Borg himself... you know, the same man who claims to be so appalled by abortion that he is ready to impose his own views on all future generations, for ever and ever, Amen.
Well, do you also remember his reaction? Do you recall how he responded to the incredible revelation that our State hospital is apparently home to a thriving underground abortion racket?
Zilch. Not a whimper of surprise. Not a clamour of protestation. Not even so much as an imperceptible dropping of the lower jaw. No, the same minister who embarked upon a witch-hunt to identify and expose Malta’s pro-choice population, appeared utterly unfazed at the discovery that it is so easy, cheap and potentially life-threatening to terminate one’s pregnancy at St Luke’s. And I have to say, I find this utterly astonishing.
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What kind of a country are we living in, when an act of vandalism on a government billboard can elicit a furious demand for public inquiry (from the Prime Minister in person, no less)... but the existence of a wholesale baby-butchering black market, quite possibly involving hospital staff and using hospital equipment, doesn’t even warrant a expression of surprise?
Instead, Tonio Borg had the temerity to write a shockingly conceited article in last Wednesday’s The Times called “Who’s out of tune, now?” (sic)... in which he made the following, incredible statement: “I, for one do not think (abortion) is a crime commonly committed in Malta.”
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Oh, really, Dr Borg? So how do you explain Harry Vassallo’s claim last Friday that “an informal survey among doctors showed 230 cases per year of post-abortion treatment”? And while I’m in the process of asking questions (an entirely pointless exercise, by the way, seeing as you never answer any of them): why is it that it had to be the leader of the Green Party to investigate the incidence of illegal abortion in this country, and not the Justice Minister who has made the entire cause his own, and whose business is to do precisely that, anyway?
Actually, don’t bother, I already know the answer. For the same reason that it had to be the Opposition leader, Alfred Sant, to ask you to finally investigate our national history of prosecuting abortionists before passing judgment on your “national proposal”. For the same reason that it always has to be someone else to prompt you into action, otherwise you’d probably never do anything at all.
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Ah yes, Alfred Sant... I almost forgot. Kind of changes the entire landscape, doesn’t it, now that the Opposition leader has so casually dismissed Dr Borg’s deadline, and plunged the entire debate into an ocean of uncertainty. In fact, I wonder if any of the implications of his article last Wednesday have even begun to sink past the layer of permafrost surrounding the Nationalist Party’s “inner core strategy group”... or wherever it is they discuss things these days.
For if they have actually starting discussing things, then perhaps the Nationalists might start asking themselves the same question that many of their own supporters are now asking: why is it that the previously unreliable and erratic Malta Labour Party suddenly appears every inch the more serious and credible alternative... whereas the Nationalist Party itself is increasingly emerging as an overzealous, high-pitched, hysterical mass of self-righteous posturing and pure, unadulterated paranoia?
I’ll leave you to think about it, while I take this opportunity to make a long overdue observation.
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Once, around two years ago, I wrote an article in great anger after Dr Sant’s post-referendum performance. I distinctly remember writing that after his behaviour on 10 May, 2003, Alfred Sant deserved to be dumped onto the scrap heap of history... or words to that effect, anyway.
Well, looking back at that incident with the luxury of hindsight, I now realise that it was not exactly a fair comment to make. Dr Sant’s behaviour was truly execrable that day, no question about that... but then, I have since come to diagnose an unmistakable symptom of the great incurable disease called “Maltese politics”. Now that I can recognise it, I have suddenly started to see it everywhere, and it’s getting worse which each passing year.
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The symptom is quite simply this: that extremism breeds extremists. We are witnessing this right now, with the emergence of a new and decidedly macabre breed of foetus fetishists as a direct result of our government’s apparent obsession with abortion. And we also saw it two years ago, when the European Union issue was likewise used exclusively to mobilise a nation to vote for a particular party... as well as to drive the Opposition of the time to extreme (and, quite frankly, dangerous) measures.
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The upshot of all this? I suppose it’s that I am still glad that things didn’t go entirely Alfred Sant’s way at the last election. But at the same time, I’m also glad he wasn’t dumped unceremoniously on any rubbish heap – in fact, I’d like to retract that statement if I can – for two, equally weighty reasons. One: because otherwise, nobody in parliament would today be making any sense whatsoever in this utterly senseless debate. Two, because otherwise, he might have been discovered in the garbage by a certain Dr Buttigieg... and no matter what you think of a man politically, no one (but no one) deserves to be preserved in vinegar, and then kept on a shelf alongside a dead baby in a jar.