It’s been some years now since I last saw a hoopoe in the garden. Last week, while watering the honeysuckle, I found a kestrel, but I couldn’t admire it because it had its head blasted off. We are alerted to the rare presence of birds in the sky by sounds that my grandparents would have found familiar from the Second World War. Three large birds of prey appeared over Easter weekend and were met with what appeared to be anti-aircraft artillery fire. They were so far up in air that no rifle could have reached them, but still the shooters tried their best. You could feel their excitement in the rattle of shots that broke through the silence of the valley.

A kaccatur I know regularly complains to me that there is nothing left to shoot. What am I supposed to say in response to this? He’s not someone with whom I can get cross, so I kid him that too many years of too much wanton hunting has come to its natural conclusion: there are few birds left. He pretends to be unable to understand what I mean, and behaves as though birds are an infinite resource with no possibility of extinction. I could say that this proves the theory that the love for bird-shooting is rooted in ignorance, but it isn’t. Even those who know how difficult it is for birds to breed in these circumstances, and those who can do the maths, insist on spending their early mornings and evenings trawling through the fields carrying a gun on their shoulder in search of that elusive something.

“Don’t worry too much about bird-shooting,” somebody recently told me. “It will die a natural death because there are not enough birds and shooters are giving up.” I put this statement under the microscope and tried to understand its logic. So fine, we will have no shooting, but then we will have no birds, either. At this time of the year in the valley outside our home, 30 years ago, kestrels, bee-eaters, hoopoes, bitterns and harriers were a fairly frequent sight. It’s not because I was here then that I know this. I wasn’t. It was a kaccatur who told me, but his regret was for reasons very different to mine. He sees it merely as the decline of supply. I see it as yet another sad deterioration in our environment.

It is only the shooting of turtle-doves and quail that is permitted in Malta, but anyone who lives in the country, or who takes walks there, will come across the corpses of all kinds of birds. The more beautiful they are, the more angry one feels. This is not hypocrisy, as some accuse, on the grounds that we do not feel the same way about a chicken or a sparrow. It is because of their beauty and rarity that these birds are treasured and protected by law, and not because they have souls. It is their loveliness that makes their destruction all the more incomprehensible. I can’t even begin to understand those who react to grace with the urge to destroy it. It’s like putting a knife through an 18th century masterpiece, or throwing paint at Michelangelo’s David.

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Our MPs are now getting bogged down in a discussion about the morning-after pill. My goodness, don’t they have anything better to do? The morning-after pill is one that you swallow within 24 hours of having sex without contraception, to ensure that you don’t get pregnant. It’s banned in Malta because of the way that it works, by preventing implantation, which some people think of as a form of abortion. These are the same people who have moral difficulties with the intra-uterine coil, which works in a similar fashion, but the IUD is not banned here and was for many years supplied and fitted on the national health service.

But that’s not the point. The point is: what are our male MPs doing, discussing this in parliament? Here we have yet another situation, in which something which affects the lives of women is discussed over our heads by men, as though we are children. The general gist of the discussion is: should they be allowed to buy the morning-after pill in Malta? Those who travel, of course, can buy supplies of it elsewhere, and even sell them on the black market here. I have no doubt this is happening, but with luck the Vice Squad has more sense than to raid people’s homes for supplies of the morning-after pill, and is sticking to ecstasy instead.

The not-so-little matter of the morning-after pill is not one for our MPs to decide. They don’t know enough, and they are seriously prejudiced. Also, with very few exceptions, they are not women, and quite frankly, it’s none of their business.

Something like this should be decided on the basis of a report drawn up by a group of competent persons, and not on the merits or otherwise of a quarrel in parliament between MPs on opposite sides of the house. Any discussion about the morning-after pill should depart from the point of the lesser evil. How much better it is to pop a pill within hours of the act (it could be rape, it could be drunkenness, it could be a burst condom) than to be forced to give birth to an unwanted child, or worse, to have a hideous abortion some months into term.

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It is really not worth compromising your life or even ruining it on the basis of rules that seem to have been set down arbitrarily by the Catholic Church. The Church can equally arbitrarily lift those rules, and what then? All the discomfort of those generations of people will have been for nothing. Look at all those millions of people who fasted through 40 days of Lent.

And look, too, at all the fuss over condoms and HIV. A married man with HIV, who might have contracted this disease not because he played around but because he was given contaminated blood (this has happened with haemophiliacs) has two choices in the eyes of the rigid Church. He has sex with his wife, without wearing a condom, and infects her (inhallu f’idejn il-Mulej), or he doesn’t have sex with his wife at all, and undermines the very essence of marriage. This is called chastity, and it is imposed on the two people in the marriage, not just on the one with HIV.

Each one of these two options is a lesser evil, in the eyes of the Church, than having sex with a condom. For years the Church has ignored the worldwide cry that this is crazy, and now finally, Pope Benedict has decided to take the first step towards doing something about it. He has asked senior theologians and scientists to prepare a document discussing the use of condoms as a means of preventing the transmission of HIV.

In the past, the pope stuck to the notion that abstinence is the only answer, but the matter has divided the Catholic Church’s most senior clerics, some of who appear to live in the real world. No wonder so many people are ignoring the rules and following their own conscience. Many of these rules have become fully incompatible with life in today’s world, and worse, they have undertones of cruelty and heartlessness. One senses that there is indifference to the suffering in the lives of ordinary people. I wouldn’t advise any woman to have sex with a man with HIV, whether she is married to him or not, and whether he is wearing a condom or not. Those things can burst and it’s like playing Russian roulette. But if she wants to take the risk, then surely it is up to her, and not for others to decide on her behalf?