How are the mighty fallen. Last week, Gift of Life published the names of politicians, both in and out of parliament, who have signed its petition aimed at granting full human and civil rights to the fertilised ovum. I must say the list makes disheartening reading for anyone who’s given the matter any serious thought.

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For instance: among the 30 signatory MPs are Mr Clyde Puli and Dr Michael Axiak, who co-authored the Bioethics Commission report intended to regulate in vitro fertilisation (IVF). In that report, which has since been committed to indefinite limbo by the President of the Republic, the Bioethics Consultative Committee unanimously concluded that the human person begins at the point of pro-nuclear syngamy, which occurs between 20 and 24 hours after fertilisation. Oddly enough, however, two of the report’s authors have now signed a petition claiming that the human person actually comes into existence at the precise moment of conception, which Gift of Life has time and again stressed occurs at the point when the sperm cell first penetrates the ovum. Are we to understand, then, that Dr Axiak and Mr Puli now disagree with their own previous conclusions?

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But the real anomaly is something else. For if this amendment does go through, not only would the Bioethics Commission report itself to be de facto obsolete, but IVF technology could, and most likely will, be argued into a state of illegality. After all, the wording of the amendment urges government to take all possible measures to protect human life from its earliest stages. I fail to see how standing by while a “fully-fledged human being” is created in a laboratory, and then frozen and stored for future use, can possibly constitute “taking all possible measures” to protect it. Even then, this “fully-fledged human being” will be put through a process in which it stands only a one in five chance of actual survival. How can it possibly be legal to subject a “fully-fledged human being” to such cruel and inhuman treatment?

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The answer, as any genetic scientist would immediately inform you, is that we are not dealing with a “fully-fledged human being” at all, but rather with a single human cell which as yet possesses no trace of personhood, and will not do so for another 12 days at least. And this brings us to the crux of the matter. Which makes more sense of the following two options: To base a country’s laws on scientific knowledge? Or to be swept away by a tsunami of misplaced emotion, and come up with laws based on a hotchpotch of fanciful notions and vague religious intuitions instead?

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Evidently, the latter. And for a simple reason, too: because in modern democracies, laws are not passed by experts, but by politicians who, in their overwhelming majority, tend to pander to a largely inexpert electorate. This is why it was Mark Antony’s emotive arguments, and not Brutus’ dispassionate reasoning, that won the day at Caesar’s funeral, plunging Rome into a long and violent civil war. This is also why, in the local context, it will not be the genetic scientists who prevail on the subject of the origins of human life. No, siree. It will be an army of wild-eyed obsessive fanatics, armed not with reasoned arguments, but with petty gimmicks and trite catch-phrases, and who appear incapable of even listening to a single sentence, let alone following the train of a complex scientific or legal argument to its logical conclusion.

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And herein lies the rub. I have no doubt that the 30 MPs who signed Gift of Life’s petition did so without any ulterior motive in mind (other than maybe a nice pat on the back by Pope Benedict). But did any of them stop to think through the possible implications? More to the point, did any of them pause to consider what uses this Constitutional amendment may be put to in future, by people whose motives are less than honest, or even stable? I think not. IVF is not the only thing that could conceivably be contested in the Constitutional Court, should this amendment go through. Admittedly, I am more concerned with the political implications of entrenchment: how the Constitution is shamelessly being used as a weapon to browbeat dissidents into submission, and to pre-emptively illegalise a specific opinion in a way that is patently anti-democratic. I recently tried to say as much on TV, admittedly without as much coherence as I would have liked. But after the programme, I received a number of SMSs pointing out entirely different dimensions to the issue, some of which had never occurred to me before. I quote from a few of them:

“Gift of Life will probably try and have the coil banned because technically it is abortion! The pill may also be banned...”;

“Gift Of Life could request that, in order to protect life from conception, the State should require the mandatory registration of all pregnancies since the State cannot protect what it does not register - This is crazy!”;

“The 1991 abortion law enacted in Poland banned both the pill and coil, defining them as early forms of abortion. The same is set to happen here?”

And finally, stark and simple: “Dio ci salvi.”

(Oh, and there were also one or two recommending various uses to which I could have put Paul Vincenti’s forceps, but I thought I’d leave those to your imagination.)

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It seems, then, that some members of the public have started to put their thinking caps on when dealing with this immensely complex issue. I’m afraid the same cannot be said for their representatives in Parliament. Nor for the aspiring so-called “moderates” among us - you know, the ones who keep telling us that their presence is needed in parliament precisely to deliver us from all this unbridled extremism in the first place.

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In the end, perhaps the most unkindest cut of all is that Gift of Life’s petition has also been signed by Alternattiva Demokratika chairman Harry Vassallo, hitherto about the only political personality to consistently oppose such absurdity.

Two interpretations immediately spring to mind. The first is that Harry Vassallo, much like Tonio Borg and Senator Joseph MacCarthy before him, actually believes that the purpose of a Constitution is to provide government with the opportunity to re-mould the entire country in its own image and likeness, to the exclusion of all other views. Extending the same argument, Dr Vassallo must also believe that Constitutions should be peppered with individual subjective opinions, despite a deep-rooted legal tradition (that evidently never quite made it to Malta) that there can be no place for such beliefs in what is after all a legal document intended to unite all citizens under a single banner.

And he must believe all this quite strongly too, to actually attach his name in writing to a statement that is tantamount to all the above implications, and more.

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The second interpretation is in many ways infinitely worse: that Harry Vassallo does not believe the above, but signed the petition anyway, because... um... I don’t know - perhaps because it would make him look good in the eyes of the electorate. But if this is indeed the case, can anyone explain what difference remains between Harry Vassallo’s position, and that of the more immediately secular PN and MLP signatories such as John Dalli or Evarist Bartolo? And besides, wasn’t this precisely the reason why Harry Vassallo has always stressed the need for a third party in parliament - because the existing two have long compromised all their original principles, and are now virtually indistinguishable from each other?

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There is admittedly a third interpretation, which to be honest I find far more likely. The simple truth of the matter is that bullying, as a political strategy, works. You start out fighting the good fight, sure you do. And you use all the right weapons, too: you appeal to reason and common sense; you point out the hypocrisy and the dishonesty; you sidestep all the fallacies that characterise the government’s line of reasoning. But over time, the constant attacks on your personal integrity, the ruthless battle-axe tactics of well-placed media strategists, the lies, the filth and the shameless smear-tactics (from people who call themselves “Christian” Democrats, by the way); all of these things eventually wear you down and tire you out, until in the end you simply lack the strength to fight any more.

It is roughly at this point that you throw in the towel and sign the petition – little realising that in so doing, not only have you unaccountably lost the war after winning every battle, but you have also finally blurred the last vestiges of difference between yourself and the very people you fought against for so long.

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The ultimate irony is that, what with Harry Vassallo’s capitulation, the original political objective behind the proposed Constitutional amendment has successfully been achieved: AD is now a conservative clone of the PN. And guess what? Now that there is no further advantage to be gained by exploiting Gift of Life’s obsessive ideas, my guess is that the government will probably abandon the whole Constitutional amendment business once and for all - just as it did with the liberals, after riding on their vote to win the last election. Where will that leave Harry Vassallo and Alternattiva Demokratika, I wonder? As I was saying before I interrupted myself: how are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle...