The Prime Minister cannot be giving his Minister of the Interior enough to do. Tonio Borg seems to be very taken up with some personal initiatives, like writing to The Times to defend the honour of the pro-Italian internati during World War II, in a debate that should never have been resuscitated. Nor does he seem to have listened to advice and let go of his crusade to get the anti-abortion laws entrenched in the Constitution. He was to be seen at Bay Street recently, participating in yet another attention-getting exercise organised by Gift of Life, declaiming against the potential abortion of potential foetuses by potential mothers who may not themselves have been born yet. Meanwhile, Ira Losco carolled in the background. As my friend, who works with children in care and who is constantly kept awake at night by what she sees and hears, said: “It’s a pity they bother more about the sperm that will meet the egg in future generations, than they do about the many hundreds of real live children being looked after right now by priests and nuns. Well, of course they do. It is a lot easier to throw your ministerial weight around campaigning for foetuses that may be conceived 10, 20 or 200 years down the line, than it is to give a future to the many hundreds of unwanted children languishing in institutions now.

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The Minister of the Interior considers as his business the foetuses yet to be conceived by our descendants, while the children who have been born unwanted already are deemed by the government to which he belongs to be the business of priests, nuns and the institutions of the Catholic Church. The Maltese government is the only one in Europe to leave the care of unwanted or abandoned children entirely in the hands of religious orders, as late as the 21st century, with not even the slightest sign of debate about shouldering responsibility. There are boasts about the welfare state and the huge amounts spent on social benefits, while the very weakest members of society – the babies and children whose parents have abandoned them – are dependent on the charity of priests and nuns, and on the generosity of ordinary people. Nothing has changed since Victorian times. The government appears to believe that its responsibility towards these children begins and ends with a pittance per head paid to the children’s homes. Meanwhile, the Minister of the Interior is deeply concerned with the results of sperm that will meet the egg a hundred years from now. Talk about skewed priorities.

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The Prime Minister should give his minister a gentle tap on the shoulder and a polite demand to stop behaving as though he is in thrall to Paul Vincenti of the ‘abortion in the Constitution’ brigade which goes under the name of Gift of Life. There are more serious matters to be getting on with instead of these pointless, candy-floss obsessions that serve no purpose except to cause division among the people. Nothing can stop Maltese women from having abortions. All they have to do is buy a cheap flight to Catania, no passport required, and come back again the next day. If they go on the weekend, they don’t even have to miss a day’s work. Entrenching the anti-abortion law into the Constitution will not stop this. So what are Tonio Borg and Paul Vincenti aiming at, exactly? I’ll tell you what: they want to make sure that no abortion happens here legally, even if they can’t stop Maltese girls and women getting it elsewhere and hence, they won’t be saving any babies – because the most important thing is that Malta looks more holy than the Vatican.

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Paul Vincenti, Gift of Life’s ‘chief executive officer’, shamelessly paraded his toddler daughter before the cameras at the anti-abortion march. He is the latest in a series of public parents who seem unable to restrain themselves from shoving their junior offspring into our faces, almost to the point of using them as a publicity tool. Mr Vincenti does not have the right to use his infant as a mascot for his cause, because she is far too young to know what her father is talking about and campaigning for. It will be many years before she is able to form an opinion about abortion, and even longer before she is able to form an opinion of her own, one that is not dominated by her father’s views. Mr Vincenti seems to believe that the little daughter with whom he is justifiably thrilled is the incentive he needs to campaign harder. Really, the fact that he has a daughter should have served the opposite purpose of getting him to shut up about abortion. We can never predict what our children will do when they grow up, particularly if they wish to rebel against us, or even just because they think differently to the way we do, which is understandable given that they are separate individuals and not extensions of ourselves. I don’t blame Mr Vincenti for not knowing this, because I didn’t know it either, when I was a new parent, and would sound off about all sorts of things which I went on to regret. Though he and I are the same age, his eldest child is an infant and mine is a grown man, and so we have a different perspective on things. I would suggest to him that, now he has a daughter, he should stop going on about abortion, because you really never know how things turn out in life.

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It is not a coincidence that when there is a campaign of this nature, it is fronted by pompous and patronising middle-aged men, as though we were in the Middle East. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the Minister of the Interior, one such middle-aged man who never was and never will be pregnant, much less pregnant and desperate, thinks nothing of seizing control of this effort to ban abortion in Malta for the rest of time. The men elbow their way into the public arena and squeeze the women out, even when the discussion is about a woman’s reproductive system. In many matters, we have more in common with the Islamic culture of the Middle East than we do with the Christian or post-Christian culture of the west. And I’m not talking America here – that’s a special case, what with all its backward bible-bashing flat-earthers, who think dinosaurs were a hoax and that there was no evolution.

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There’s a marked absence of mature women in this debate (the Commissioner for Children doesn’t count) though there are a few girls who have little or no experience of life. Many women start out with an uncompromising stance against abortion, but as the years go by and experience rolls over them, they realise that there are plenty of questions about abortion to which even moral philosophers don’t have the answers, still less Paul Vincenti and Tonio Borg, two people who come across as having their thoughts cast in concrete.

If we deal only with the premise that abortion is wrong because it means the taking of life, then the debate is an easy one. Yet Mr Vincenti and Dr Borg cannot be so simplistic, because they are not dealing with simpletons – or with only a few, at any rate. Ask a woman if she is against abortion, and if she says ‘yes’, then ask her to choose between two situations: aborting an early-stage foetus, or having that foetus develop into a baby who will be born to a short and brutal life of gross abuse, possibly being killed by his mother at the age of nine. Those who adhere to moral absolutes, in which abortion is always wrong, full-stop, will stick to the rules and say No Abortion. Others will struggle with the dilemma, and others still will have no hesitation in deciding that it is much better for the child not to be born at all, particularly if they have children of their own and know that a child suffers far more than a four-week-old foetus.

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It is very easy to disapprove of women who abort a foetus when they could very well raise a child. It is not so easy to disapprove of a woman who has an abortion when she is in dire straits. This is why women tend to become less censorious and rigid in their thinking about abortion as they grow older, adopting the attitude that it’s not for them but they can’t speak for others. We learn as we go along; we encounter suffering that we never thought possible. We become more humane, more understanding. We are beset by questions as to what is more reprehensible: popping the abortifacient morning-after pill 24 hours after having sex, or not popping it and then abandoning the resulting child or worse, keeping him but subjecting him to a childhood of emotional rejection and other forms of abuse? Though I dislike abortion and would never have had one myself (but then, I was never desperate, so I can’t really say what I would or wouldn’t have done, and nobody else can say, either), there are some situations so terrible that I cannot but conclude that it would have been much better for the children not to have been born at all.

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Fatuous arguments – like what if Beethoven’s mother had aborted him? – only wash with people who get their philosophy from Hallmark cards. They have no place in a discussion like this. Equally, what if Beethoven’s father had worn a condom, or Beethoven’s mother had carried too many sacks of flour and miscarried, and what if she had refused to have sex with her husband that night the musical genius was conceived? Heaven alone knows how many remarkable human beings have failed to see the light of day because of contraception, miscarriage, or sheer failure of the sperm to meet the egg because sex was not on the agenda that particular minute – but nobody is telling us to have unprotected sex at every available opportunity, to raise the chances of giving birth to another Leonardo or Beethoven.

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The ‘my age is X+9’ campaign is nauseating, besides being arithmetically and factually incorrect. The point at which I will be 41 plus nine months is when my 42nd birthday is three months ahead. It wasn’t on my 41st birthday, reckoning in the nine months I spent in my mother’s womb. The reason our birthday is called a birthday is because it marks the date of our birth, and not the date of our conception. That latter date is a private matter, usually known – if at all – to our mothers and their gynaecologists, and that’s how it should stay. If Gift of Life are going to start talking about Conception Days, then they had better hand out the sick-bags.

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The Minister of the Interior claims that 88 per cent of the people interviewed in ‘a scientific study’ disagree with abortion and believe that the ban should be entrenched in the Constitution. Where is this scientific study? And in Dr Borg’s political book, does a covert scientific study, commissioned by God-knows-who, stand in for a national referendum on something so important? More to the point, how was the question phrased? I disagree with abortion, for instance, but I appreciate the fact that the issue is riddled with moral dilemmas to which there are no clear-cut answers. Despite disagreeing with abortion, I do not think the ban should be entrenched in the Constitution, precisely because there are no ready answers. We have no right to be dogmatic with future generations on the basis of the insufficient information we have at present. Besides, I thoroughly loathe anything that smacks of fascism, and this exercise really does.

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Mr Vincenti says he is raising money to set up a ‘pregnancy crisis centre’. Perhaps he doesn’t know, but there is already a very good one for pregnant teenagers, run by a highly experienced woman, and there is very little that he can contribute here. He says that he will also provide a counselling service for women who have had abortions. This shows how far removed he is from the realities of life. I can’t see any of the women I know who have had abortions running to Gift of Life for succour. They are all busy getting on with their lives. Now Gift of Life is planning a ‘three-day live-in retreat’ for women who are suffering post-abortion syndrome. Have they taken leave of their senses? When they are campaigning so hard telling everyone that abortion is an unmitigated evil, what woman is going to show up for their group therapy, exposing herself to them and her fellow participants as an evil witch who aborted her child?

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The Minister of the Interior said during the Gift of Life rally that those who do not defend the rights of the unborn child are ‘conveniently already born themselves’. What fatuous reasoning. Those who aren’t born don’t know they aren’t born. This reminds me of the scene in Woody Allen’s film, Hannah and Her Sisters, in which Allen asks his father why he isn’t frightened of dying. “Why should I be?” his father says. “When I’m dead, I’m dead. I won’t know about it.” Now the Minister of the Interior is claiming that his proposed entrenchment in the Constitution should not be considered as a government proposal, but as his ‘private member’s bill’. I reserve judgement on that one.