There are a great many things I admire about America, but religious fundamentalism is not one of them. I think it is supremely ironic that a country founded by people seeking religious freedom and fleeing religious intolerance in Europe should end up coping with the burgeoning canker of Christian fundamentalism, and the attempts of those Christian fundamentalists at bullying and coercing others into behaving as they do, whether they want to or not.
One of the most irritating aspects of the Gift of Life Movement in Malta is its utter dependency on American public affairs methods for ramming its message down our collective throat. Its leader Paul Vincenti is a US-trained salesman, and it shows in his relentless, oh-so-American sales spiel whenever he gets onto the subject of abortion, which appears to be all the time nowadays.
As if that were not enough, now he has drafted in the American pro-life organisation Priests for Life, and has had one of their number, a priest called Denis Wilde, flown over to badger and berate us, while wearing the obligatory hokey smile.
So all right, it’s Easter Sunday and maybe this sounds a little bit uncharitable – but why exactly is this happening? Why do the world’s moral police pick on tiny Malta as a sort of stomping-ground where they can put into practice their theories of how an ideal society should be run? I suppose I have the answer to that one: because we’re tiny we can be bullied, and because our democracy is so very brand-new, we put up with being dictated to by a variegated series of bossy-boots and men in the guise of boarding-school matrons.
Worse still, the newspapers report the shenanigans of these bossy-boots as though they are valid. If I were to call a press conference to say that on no account should Parliament do Paul Vincenti’s bidding, then nobody would turn up and I would get no coverage. But when this Denis Wilde from Priests for Life in the USA called in the media to say that Malta should stick its stance on abortion into the Constitution, reporters dutifully went along and reported what he said at face value, without once stopping to ask themselves: “Hang on a minute, who is this guy and why are we here?”
Imagine if a Maltese priest were to fly to Washington, call a press conference, and tell Americans what to do with their Constitution – he would probably end up with a baseball bat being surgically removed from somewhere sensitive. Or more likely still, he would be completely ignored. But it appears that everybody and his dog feel entitled to fly over and tell us what to do with our lives. Patronising? You bet. Well, let’s put it this way, if a bunch of men in their 40s and 50s think nothing of patronising this country’s entire population of women, then they are going to think nothing of flying in an American priest to patronise the entire country.
“You should put your fortresses up to avoid the invasion,” the imported priest said. The only invasion we need to avoid right now is the invasion of American Christian fundamentalists. “Right now it looks like abortion will never be legalised in Malta. But a court decision could change everything,” he said, referring to Roe vs. Wade in his home country. Court decisions can change the law, but the Constitution is much harder to change, he said.
And that’s precisely why lots of us think it shouldn’t be tampered with when it comes to abortion. If future generations decide they want to legislate for abortion in Malta, that’s their pigeon and not ours, from our tombs.
Paul Vincenti’s American priest said that a constitutional amendment is “imperative” to prevent the European Commission from “pressurising” Malta into legalising abortion. Clearly, Vincenti hasn’t told him that Malta’s accession agreement guards against this.
Then came the inevitable sophistry. When talking about the number of abortions performed in the United States, Denis Wilde spoke about “babies” and “deaths”. But when asked about abortion in cases where the pregnancy prejudiced the woman’s life, it was no longer “babies” and ‘deaths”, but “removing the problematic organ which might contain the embryo”. The Catholic Church, he said, “does not look at this as abortion because the doctors are not willingly aborting the baby but rather trying to save the mother’s life.”
This is absolute hogwash, of course. And worse still, it is illogical hogwash. Anyone who can think straight can see that if the evil of abortion lies in its definition as an ending of human life, then it is always evil whatever the circumstances. To argue that it is murder when you’re not saving the mother’s life but not murder when you’re saving the mother’s life is just so much sophistry, designed to blind fools and save you from exposure to the argument that if it’s all right to kill embryos to save the mother then it’s all right to kill embryos, full stop. After all, we don’t kill children for their organs when their mother’s life depends on an organ transplant that she can’t get elsewhere, do we? That’s because the murder of a child is unequivocally murder and unequivocally against the laws of the land and the laws of God, whatever the circumstances or the risks to the mother’s life. If the Catholic Church wishes to be consistent, and not be made fun of for its sophistry, then it should apply the use of logic to its arguments.
Oh, but look, Pope John Paul II has done so already, and been ignored or overlooked by his flock, including Denis Wilde from America. I wasn’t a huge fan of the late pope’s conservative views on women and so on, but the man had a mind like a steel trap. He thought clearly and logically, and this is what he had to say about abortion to save a woman’s life: that it was not consistent with the Catholic Church’s view of abortion as intrinsically wrong. Whether we agree with his stance on abortion or not is by the by. The point is that, unlike many of his priests and followers, he was consistent. Abortion is wrong, full stop. It can’t be made acceptable by using it to save a woman’s life.
The late pope dealt with the issue of abortion at length in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae in 1995. “Procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out,” he wrote, “of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.” He did not add any get-out clauses saying, “But it’s OK if you do it to save the woman’s life.”
On the contrary, he was quite clear that because the Catholic Church considers abortion to be murder, then it is no less murder when carried out to save another. This should of course be obvious to even the most elegant sophists – we don’t kill people to use their organs to save other people, for instance – even if they do tend to cast the embryo in the role of aggressor, comparing it to somebody who is holding a woman hostage and is then shot by the police (ridiculous, I know, but that’s the example they use).
Denis Wilde rounded off his hectoring lecture with that old, old chestnut used only by blinkered men and by women who have scant or no experience of childbirth: that abortion has serious repercussions for women, including “sleeping disorders, eating disorders, compulsive crying, rage, anger, depression, suicidal tendencies, shame, guilt and estrangement from children”. I imagine you’re thinking what I’m thinking: that this sounds like a description of women who’ve given birth, and not of women who’ve had an abortion. But we’re not going to ban birth, are we?
Unfortunately, it’s yet another example of poor logic and inconsistent argumentation used by the fundamentalists: if abortion is banned because it is murder, then it is banned because it is murder, and not because women become a little hormonal and unstable afterwards, just as they do after having a baby.
No wait, there’s more. Wilde couldn’t leave his media-call without mentioning contraception. Apparently, it increases the number of abortions. No, I couldn’t follow the reasoning either. To my untrained mind, if there are 50 abortions in a society where contraception is extensively used, there are going to be 500 if no contraception is used. Maybe he’s one of those who believe that in the absence of contraception, people don’t have much sex. That’s true. But even with the little sex they had and in a much smaller population, Malta’s children’s homes were teeming with thousands of unwanted children right up until the 1960s and more widespread use of smuggled condoms. Abortion and contraception are found together because they are the hallmarks of a developed society. On the other hand, no abortion, no contraception and thousands of abandoned children are the hallmarks of a backward society. Clearly, Wilde hasn’t heard of Ceaucescu’s Romanian experiment: a total ban on contraception and abortion that resulted in tens of thousands of children living in sewers, dumped on the streets or abused in severely sub-standard orphanages.
I’ll round off with Denis Wilde’s final bit of inane advice to the gawping Maltese public: “The most effective of all birth control is natural family planning. It also helps the couple’s relationship. Those couples who use contraception are more prone to divorce.” Ding-dong, folks. So that’s what the problem has been all along. Ban condoms and the contraceptive pill, and we’ll all live happily ever after.
Daphne Caruana
Galizia’s blog is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com