It is extraordinary, isn’t it?
When you think of all the ethical problems that beset this country that so much time has been spent on trying to come to some form of consensus on the regulation or otherwise of IVF.
It has been in use for over 12 years here with no stories of abuse at all, particularly from the medical establishment concerned. There are very many happy families who have been helped by this, and lesser or even more technical procedures like ICSI, and yet, in keeping with the fundamentalism that has crept in, we have reared our very Catholic heads to say we must regulate.
Sonia Camilleri, the Commissioner for Children, seems happy with some of the so-called regulations being proposed. She talked of how some of these proposed regulations would avert traumas for children with unknown or additional mums or dads. Now, it’s fine to stick up for the rights of children and as the Commissioner for Children, she should always remind us of the child’s perspective (and, incidentally though I don’t agree with her on this does not mean I think she’s wrong on everything).
What I find worrying though is that I think it is not the child who comes first in her view, but the Catholic view of what’s important. Does she have similar misgivings about adoptions from abroad? Of children who are perhaps torn away from their natural cultures to be brought up in Malta? Does she know that although most parents who adopt are living saints, adopted kids suffer, proportionately at least, the highest rates of abuse?
Similarly with the divorce debate in Malta. This is only one of two countries worldwide that prohibits divorce, I believe. Yet of course we have one of the, if not the highest, rate of annulments.
What does Sonia Camilleri, the Commissioner for Children, think is less stressful for kids? To experience their parents separating and perhaps remarrying, or to experience the non-marriage, or annulment of their parents’ marriage? Annulment says the marriage didn’t exist, so what does that say to children? What can be more hurtful to children than to realise that their parents’ marriage has been deemed non-existent?
We think we are somehow morally superior to the rest to the world because we don’t allow divorce. Yet we don’t even question the sanity of our annulment situation, and what it does to the children who experience it. Would Sonia Camilleri as Commissioner for Children consider studying the effect of so many annulments on so many of our children, and make recommendations to the Church and the government which result from this study? I doubt it...
There probably has been such a huge moral debate about IVF to take attention away from far more pressing moral problems like the no-divorce-and-annulments-a-plenty-situation.
And of course with over 65 per cent against divorce and women over represented in that 65 per cent, few who stand a chance of being in government are going to push this agenda. Yet there is now a whole generation of 20 something, 30 something and 40 something young men and women who are condemned to a life of serial monogamy or serial infidelity with various partners. Since most cannot remarry anyway, there is no incentive to try and settle again if a marriage didn’t work. The situation is encouraging more immorality, not less.
Yet people only change their minds when they experience life not going to plan. And then ordinary people have to suffer the stranglehold of Catholic doctrine whether they are practising Catholics or not.
It is an extraordinary situation. Even if you marry civilly in Malta you cannot divorce in Malta. What an injustice. No wonder we have such smokescreens like IVF to contend with.
Those who are suffering will not forget, their mums their dads and their children will not forget the moral hypocrisy that we are choked by...