Ladies and gentlemen, a word of advice. If any of you were planning on “leaving your children in the freezer” at any time in the near future, I humbly suggest you think again. It seems that our glorious Parliament is now considering a law which will protect Maltese children from being thus frozen... unless, of course, the parents concerned have a “valid reason” for wishing to congeal their offspring. You have been warned.
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I suppose you all think I’m joking, don’t you? Of course not. (Joking? Moi?) But in case any of you still think so, here is the actual quote, attributed to the Social Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, as reported in yesterday’s The Times (page 6): “Therefore, it should be considered a crime when parents opt to leave their children in the freezer without valid reason...”
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The Social Affairs Committee, by the way, is chaired by a certain Clyde Puli, a Nationalist MP who comes from Qormi. This, incidentally, is in itself a hugely important piece of information. Exactly why remains rather unclear... but considering the monotonous regularity with which he keeps reminding us about it – in Parliament (“coming as I do from the town of Qormi”)... during public meetings (“unaccustomed as I am to not instantly informing everybody that I come from Qormi...”), and on his regular television appearances on Smash TV (“And finally, I’d like to thank all my fellow Qriema...”)... well, I suppose there has to be some kind of important reason...
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But back to the business of keeping children in freezers. This, I am sorry to have to say, is just one facet of the myriad levels of absurdity to which this nation has descended, largely on account of its morbid and utterly misplaced obsession with all things foetal.
Of course, no one is really talking about placing “children” in the deep freeze. (Although, having glanced at an online list of members of the Social Affairs Committee, there is a small part of me which honestly wouldn’t be surprised). No, indeed: what the Social Affairs Committee evidently thought it was talking about was the practice of freezing human embryos... you know, fecundated, single-celled organisms, normally produced as a result of a close encounter between a single sperm cell and a single human ovum, and which happen to possess their own unique, individual human genetic code, etc.
And even then, the discussion is limited only to those human embryos which are created outside the womb as part of the process of in vitro fertilisation... and which, according to the recommendations of the same committee chaired by Mr Puli (did I already tell you he comes from Qormi?), may be frozen for posterity as long as there are valid reasons to do so.
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Herein lies the great rub. For you see, after all this fuss about the “rights of the unborn child”, and all this talk about “Constitutional entrenchment”... more to the point, after all those Nationalist backbenchers and councillors have been seen falling over each other in the mad (and, to be perfectly honest, utterly undignified) scramble to publicly declare how very “pro-life” they all are... it has now become “politically incorrect” to refer to a single, fertilised human egg-cell as anything less than a fully fledged human being in its own right... complete with its own character, dignity, personality, etc.
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And far be it from me (who am but dust and ashes, with a little human DNA thrown in for good measure) to define the precise origins of human life... still less the exact instant wherein a single human cell is endowed with those qualities and idiosyncrasies which transform him or her into a “human person”. After all, that is a feat which seems to have eluded even our greatest minds, as Rev. Prof. Peter Serracino Inglott himself so recently admitted.
Having said that, in my perfect ignorance of such profound foetal matters, there is one thing about which I am absolutely positive. In the English language – in any language, come to think of it – the words “human embryo” and “child” are NOT interchangeable. Not by the remotest stretch of the imagination. No, not even if you had to tie your imagination to the rack, and get Mike Tyson to do the stretching.
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The reasons are many and various, but for the purposes of this article, the most ridiculous should suffice. If a fertilised human egg suddenly had to be described, for purely political motives, as a “child”... then why not the other way around? This way, according to the new “Clyde Puli” definition of human life, our children – ack, sorry, our “embryonic human beings” – should be taught at school that “fecundated human eggs should be seen but not heard”. That the “embryo is father to the adult human person”. And that if you “spare the rod”, you will “spoil the fertilised human zygote.” Etc, etc., etc.
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Besides, according to this unique way of looking at the universe, many of the age-old philosophical conundrums which baffled our ancestors, suddenly appear so very, very simple to understand.
Take, for instance, that classic old brain-teaser: “Which came first – the chicken or the egg?” Umm, let’s see now... what is an egg, anyway, if not an external, fertilised ovum containing a single chicken embryo? And if we suddenly accept the fact that there is no distinction between the unborn and born specimens of the same creature... then, by referring to the unborn creature simply as an “egg”, wouldn’t you also be depriving it of its quintessential “chickenness”? And couldn’t that conceivably be used as an excuse to devalue the life of the unborn chicken, and thereby open the door to the ethical acceptance of its eventual termination? So how would the Social Affairs Committee reword the question, I wonder... “which came first: the chicken... or the chicken?”
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Having said that, I somehow doubt the Social Affairs Committee would recommend that the act of “leaving one’s chicken in the freezer without a valid reason” be made into a crime. But then again, I have learnt from personal experience that it is always unwise to count your “fertilised gallus domesticus embryos” before they actually hatch...
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And so, my fellow adult human zygotes, we come to the second great philosophical conundrum of today’s column. Never mind chickens and eggs. And never mind putting your children in the deep freeze, either. I refer to the ultimate unanswerable question, applicable to all countries everywhere (but to Malta more than most, I fear), which can be summarised as follows:
Why is it that serious decisions – such as, for instance, the formulation of a legal framework within which a sensitive and delicate issue like assisted procreation can be regulated – are always left to the people most likely to totally screw them up?
I.e., not the experts in the field, nor the persons who are professionally involved in the actual mechanics of the affair... but politicians, in a country where such creatures are genetically incapable of severing the umbilical cord which attaches them to the political parties which spawned them in the first place, and which they continue to serve with such utterly obsequious abandon.
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Anyway, in case you were wondering what prompted this final observation, I invite you all to consider the following “conclusions” of the Social Affairs Committee report:
On assisted procreation:
“...such technology should be used either only for as long as [sic] the eventual birth was to a heterosexual married couple or to a heterosexual couple which [sic] is in a stable relationship.”
What an extraordinary coincidence, that the conclusions of the committee happen to perfectly mirror the views of the Catholic Church, as well as the government to which it is surgically attached, on the thorny subject of gay rights. And while I’m at it... who, pray tell, is to judge whether one’s “heterosexual relationship” is “stable” enough to qualify for assisted procreation? Mr Clyde Puli? Or will we have yet another quango set up specifically for this purpose? (I can see it all now: the “Stable Heterosexual Relationships Authority”...)
On abortion:
“While the premeditated destruction of the embryo in the womb is already considered a criminal act by Maltese law, Parliament should accede to the proposal that the law regarding abortion be entrenched in the Maltese Constitution...”
Gee, what a surprise. I’m sure Dr Tonio Borg must have been dumbfounded to hear that a parliamentary committee appointed by his own government, and chaired by a junior member of his own party, would suddenly and unexpectedly come out in favour of his own personal proposal (without, naturally, giving any reasons...)