Dr Mary Darmanin

Please allow me to correct some misconceptions Clyde Puli, chairperson, Standing Committee for Social Affairs, may have formed following the very poor report your paper gave of the talk “Feminists Perspectives on Biotechnology and IVF”, I gave to the Malta Confederation of Women’s Organisations on 26 October.

It is regrettable that, given the report of my talk was so superficial as to be obviously incomplete and even incorrect, Mr Puli still thought fit to answer “me’’. It is a pity that Mr Puli, who recognised that there was “no detailed account” in the report, did not recognise that I, as well as many others (no doubt himself included), have been the victims of very poor media reporting on this issue.

Had he phoned me or even spoken to the editor, he would know how disconcerted I was to find that nothing of the content of my presentation was reported at all, while certain comments that followed in discussion were misreported or reported so out of context as to make them seem completely senseless.

The report would seem to want to make me appear to be completely unprepared, stupid and negative with regard to all the points suggested in the final recommendations of the Social Affairs Committee. I am not surprised that Mr Puli could not make sense of what I was supposed to have said, since I could not either!

I would therefore be grateful if Mr Puli would be so kind as to reserve his judgement on what I really think and suggest, to when he can read my work in toto.

I can assure him, however, that before I made my presentation to MCWO, I had read all the documents submitted by the Social Affairs Committee as well as all the documents submitted to it. I can also assure him that when I suggested it might be wiser at this stage to reconsider some of the recommendations of his Committee, this would be accompanied by the proviso that in the interim there would be stringent regulation, or even of suspension (given the gravity of what is happening to some women, and especially to babies in multiple births, at the moment) of most assisted reproduction until such time as an optimal, consensual and lasting position can be reached.

It does seem strange, given his own doubts about the quality of this media report, that Mr Puli is so willing to jump to all sorts of conclusions about me! He suggests that I do not want to protect life from the moment of conception, that I do not want any legal regulation of assisted reproduction, that I am not sympathetic to the plight of infertile people, and all sorts of other things, which are far from the case.

Because I do want to protect life, because I do want good legal and other regulation, because I am at the same time sympathetic to the plight of infertile people, as well as, I might add, concerned about the wider social implications of recent work in bio-technology and assisted reproduction internationally, and the serious lack of regulation in Malta, I do not feel that the recommendations as they now stand, based on the debate as it has evolved so far, are adequate for achieving any lasting progress on any of these points.

I would prefer us to go on discussing this, with better structures for discussion than simply a Social Affairs Committee; better knowledge, such as epidemiological data on infertility; better representation from more, and more relevant, experts such as paediatricians, child psychologists and so on, and other ways of doing this better.

This should include respect in the way those participating in the debate are treated, time to make complete and not partial or rushed representation, and without acrimony between contributing parties.

At a minimum, any Committee, which has the type of role that the Standing Committee on Social Affairs has had, should not behave like the Nuremberg Trial court vis-à-vis people it has itself invited to speak

I also want to make it clear that since I was talking about feminists perspectives in the plural, and there is great heterogeneity in these, I myself do not agree with a number of the positions I presented to the audience at MCWO. In academic life, professionals do also discuss positions with which they are not sympathetic. Since the presentation was not about me, but about international feminist perspectives, I tried to reserve comment regarding my own position and reservations about bio-technology and assisted reproduction till the end of the talk.

I framed my own position in relation to international developments as well as to the current debates in Malta, but even here I myself do not have a rigid or fixed position on every single issue raised in the debate. This is because I consider that I, and I hope Mr Puli too, am still learning about the question (which is constantly shifting) from theology, ethics, law, sociology, psychology and other disciplines as well as from real human beings who present their cases to us.

This does not mean that in the face of ever changing knowledges we should become paralysed and unable to agree on some basic, consensually agreed, and lasting, good practices.

But that we can only do this in a freer (in the sense of, away from the confrontational style of some committees or media) exchange and with sharing of our different knowledges, with better knowledge, and with more time and serenity.

Mr Puli might be surprised to learn that I agreed to give the talk to the MCWO thinking that only MCWO members and special guests would attend. I would not have spoken had I known that this was a public forum or that the press was invited. The reason for this is that Maltese women, both as individuals and in their organisations, have been singularly absent from this debate, which has been largely informed by male perspectives, be it in science and medicine, in ethics, in law and theology.

In the press, and sometimes in committees, individual women have been pilloried. In the Committee, it appears, organisations and individuals were asked to respond mainly to questions put, rather than given the liberty to inform the debate by raising ways of thinking that were relevant to them, or to submit additional material which they considered relevant.

I thought the MCWO meeting would give Maltese women the chance to consider how other women internationally had variously thought about these issues, and then to serenely discuss their individual and shared concerns, simply as one step on the way to some common understanding of what is a stake with any option taken.

For many women, the debate has not started, since we have not had the opportunity to meet and develop our perspectives away from the circuses or coliseums of the Social Affairs Committee and the press.

Thinking about such serious matters takes a long time. Many women have been, in their lifetime, historically excluded from the discourses of malestream ethics, law, theology, science and other subjects, as well as the feminist perspectives in each discipline, that would help them arrive at a more informed position on these issues.

My paper was just one, of what I hope will be many ways of redressing this balance and beginning a woman-friendly discussion as part of the wider social debate.

Given our local history of very poor discussion in the public sphere, I would think that having gone so slow for so many years, we do not need a bulldozer now, when we are trying to get it right.