I suppose that’s an unfortunate choice of heading, given that the fuss is all about wombs. The ancient Greeks thought that hysteria occurred more frequently in women than in men, and that it was linked to the uterus, or hustera. Hence their word husterikos, meaning ‘of the womb’, and from that we have the English hysteria, hysterical, hysteric and, of course, hysterectomy.

Hysterectomies were not the problem at Castille Place a couple of evenings ago, though the number of women standing around with placards that read ‘Hands off my womb’ might have led you to think otherwise: that perhaps there was a Doctor Evil about, strapping women down and ripping out their wombs with his bloody claws, while the neighbours shrieked for help and the police and the ambulance failed to arrive.

Why would anybody at an anti-abortion demo carry a placard demanding that nobody touches her womb? Nobody wants to touch her womb. This is like a demonstrator at an anti-divorce rally waving a placard that says ‘Hands off my marriage’. It’s nonsensical, but I have longed ceased to expect anything remotely resembling logic or rational thinking from the Gift of Life Movement and anything or anybody connected with it. It is an organisation based almost entirely on irrational thinking and overwrought emotion, what the Greeks might have described as husterikos – though those Greeks might have had trouble getting their heads round the fact that the hysterical behaviour in question is almost wholly on the part of middle-aged men.

There are other hysterical groups in Malta; it sometimes seems the country is full of them – Imperium Europa, Josie Muscat’s party, the ANR, even the Labour Party has deteriorated into one – though of course the similarity is only in the overriding hysteria. Imagine an anti-drugs group which makes emotional rhetoric-ridden speeches that achieve precisely nothing, which constantly makes appeals to extreme emotion, pulling stunts to get coverage in the news, and which is led by people who come across as obsessed and fixated in a creepy if not scary way. Now imagine Caritas. There you have the difference between a hysterical group and a non-hysterical group. The one spends its time trying to get attention and throwing hysterical fits in public. The other is largely invisible while buckling down and doing things that have to be done.

* * *

‘Hands off my womb’ might be a great slogan for a demonstration against forced mass hysterectomy, but as a rallying-cry in the fight to save unborn babies from their mothers, it bombs. We were supposed to be thinking about suctioned foetuses and evil abortionists, but with their look-at-me placards those protestors made sure that all we could think about, possibly with a shudder, were the wombs lurking darkly beneath their sensible skirts and trousers.

Whoever thought that one up must have been thinking with his hustera. If only, in the great British tradition of counter-protest, somebody had appeared on the fringes of that candle-carrying crowd with another placard that said: “Stuff your womb.” Offal is back on fashionable tables, and stuffed womb is a great delicacy. My own reaction is rather more circumspect, and squeamish: that the wombs of all the protesting women don’t even bear thinking about. Wombs in women are like the prostate gland in men; you just don’t want to know, still less put your hands on one.

* * *

In 1981, people across free Europe were asked to place a lit candle in a street-side window of their home, in support of Poland’s struggling Solidarnosc. Even in Malta, which was far from free, we did so – or at least, those who were against the government did, but those who supported the government didn’t. In those days, Malta’s socialists stuck with the communists, and they were damned if they were going to root for Walenska and the end of communism in Europe. It’s good to remember that now, what with all those leopards busy painting over their spots.

Ever since that day, you can’t have a protest which is even remotely connected with ‘morals’ or with the higher good, without instructing the crowd to bring candles along, so turning your demonstration into Christmas Eve in Sweden. I look at these groups of candle-bearing, earnest-faced citizens from Boston to Bucharest via Malta, and I wonder what’s taking Father Christmas and his sleigh so long. At least we were spared the middle-aged-person-trying-to-be-cool-at-a-rock-concert cliché of a cigarette-lighter flame held head-high while its owner sways and dreams of Woodstock or Martin Luther King.

The trouble is that people have so few opportunities to stand up and be counted nowadays that they’re inventing them out of thin air, waving candles about outside the Castille Hotel while Emy Bezzina and Rebecca Gomperts talk inside, because they’re decades too late for Ban the Bomb and Bring Our Boys Back From Vietnam, or even British Go Home and Save Our Schools From Dr Zero.

Solidarnosc gave us the protestor’s candle. Dead Diana gave us garish bouquets wrapped in hideous cellophane and cuddly toys left at any public spot connected with a dramatic and newsworthy death, along with cards that the dead one is supposed to be able to read from the world beyond (“Gary, you were beautiful. I will always remember you.”). I suppose it is only a matter of time before the Gift of Life Movement sequesters another roundabout for one of its bad-art effigies, this time a giant version of the little plastic uterine inhabitant that it likes to dish out with abandon, perhaps because the things can be bought so cheaply over the Internet. Then we will be encouraged to heap it with garish dahlias in crackling cellophane, in memory of the thousands of Maltese babies that have been aborted in Rome, Catania and London.

* * *

Yes, thousands. You read me right. Maltese women have been going to those three cities to have an abortion, and probably other cities too, for as long as I can remember – and because abortion was legalised in England while I was in kindergarten, almost certainly before that. In generations before mine, girls were whisked off to Gozo by their parents, and the more privileged ones to London or Switzerland, to drop their illegitimate sprogs, which were left behind. That was done to keep face. Also to keep face, in my generation girls were whisked off to London by their parents to have abortions, in a fug of rumours and whispers. Young women took themselves off for the same purpose; rather than being taken by their parents, they hid it from them. They didn’t do it to keep face. They did it because they didn’t want to be saddled with a baby. A little bit of shopping at Jean Machine and Clockhouse and next month your period was back. Girls with less money went to Catania.

Have things changed? I would say yes – there must be very many more abortions now than there were then. Unmarried girls and women routinely have sex now and they didn’t then. They still have a mental block about the contraceptive pill, and their boyfriends still have a mental block about condoms. If there were unwanted pregnancies then, then imagine how many more there must be now. Back then few girls and women had the money and independence to travel. They earned little and were expected to get their father’s permission before going anywhere, after giving a detailed explanation. Travel was impossibly expensive. Tight foreign exchange controls made it difficult to get the sterling or lire together to pay the clinic bill. Now all you have to do is put your plastic cards and your ID in your handbag and hop on the next Lm60 flight or Flyaway Tour.

Women here have abortions all the time. There’s probably one standing next to you on the bus or in the supermarket queue, sitting near you in the office, or throwing clothes into your washing-machine. I’m not condoning this. I’m just describing it. Even though this is the world capital of equivocation, facts must be faced, and the truth can’t be shoved beneath the carpet. All countries with a low birth rate also have high levels of abortion, and Malta cannot possibly be an exception.

It is a logical fallacy to claim that because there is no abortion in Malta, Maltese women do not have abortions. They don’t have to hike across the Sahara to get to an abortion clinic. Maltese women are much closer to abortion clinics than millions of women are who live in the remoter villages of Europe – and mark my words, they make the most of this. Maybe it’s time we all grew up and faced the truth that’s staring at us in the face.