I fear I am still not ready to be drawn into sterile polemics about the semantical implications of the word “mother”, or quasi-psychoanalytical interpretations of the probably murky motivations underlying my responses to either philosophical questions or unsolicited eulogies.

I am keen, however, to remove any hint of “smokiness” that may have clouded the only point I sought to establish in my previous letter. That was the artificiality of the impression given that “an ordinary Catholic seeking moral guidance” (as “George Borg” said he might or might not be) would receive very different advice from Prof. Agius and myself respectively.

The only question of those raised with me that could in reality have relevance to such a questioner, is whether there is a “person” from the very beginning of the process of fertilisation (usually called “penetration”) or rather from its end (sometimes called “syngametisation” or by another of a variety of vaguely Greek-sounding terms).

On this question, there is hardly any difference to speak of between my stated position and that of Prof. Agius; or indeed for that matter, of the chairman of the Bioethics Committee Dr Axiak, or the chairman of the parliamentary committee Mr Puli, as emerges from other letters carried in your newspaper.

Admittedly, on the other hand, I am not confident that I can give a coherent account of the various statements made at different times by persons occupying various positions in the church hierarchy relevant to the point.

Happily, this disability is not particularly damaging. The local authorities, at least, have declared that they did not intend to pronounce on scientific matters. The question at issue is indeed essentially philosophic, rather than scientific.

However, not much light on it can be obtained from Revelation, nor can it be answered except on the basis of some precise scientific commitment.

Hence, I feel safe to assume that there logically cannot be any irreducible conflict on this point between “us”, the subscriber to a very general philosophic consensus and “the Roman Church” (as “George Borg” likes to refer to it).

A further question raised was whether one can say that there is a “person”, after fertilisation, but before there are at least primordial signs of a physical organisation such as is a necessary condition for the ability to think.

Now I definitely belong to the minority of moral philosophers who today still follow St Thomas Aquinas in holding the answer to be “no”. (I quoted twinning phenomenon just as supporting evidence for this opinion).

But, because of the high respect due to any living matter, especially when organically continuous with the body of a pregnant woman (whom I unrepentantly refer to honorifically as a “mother”), my moral advice to an “ordinary Catholic” in any concrete situation is most unlikely to be any different from that which I presume Prof. Agius would give.

The third question, even more hypothetical and focused on stem-cell research, is correlatively even more unlikely to give rise to different practical advice. The improbability is greater since it seems that it may not be necessary to resort to embryo-originated stem cells at all for the desired results.

I have been consistently expressing these opinions for years now in the non-dogmatic manner that befits my profession. Alas, the palm of martyrdom is not so easily earned. At the same time I have continuously striven to persuade “ordinary Catholics” (and equally “extraordinary Catholics”, if such beasts exist) not to insist upon the moral guidance they rightly expect from the Church to be spelt out in detail rather than to consist in the enunciation of principles that it is then the responsibility of the individual concerned to work out the application of in his or her particular circumstances. I see no problem if such applications do not turn out to be uniform.

Peter Serracino Inglott

University of Malta

MSIDA