When an ophthalmologist who is also a candidate for the Opposition party criticises the state of the equipment he must use at the state general hospitals where he works, we are left wondering who is speaking. Is it the ophthalmologist, or is it the Labour candidate?

Let’s be a little more precise here. If Franco Mercieca were not a Labour Party candidate, would he be issuing press statements about the state of his equipment, even if it were absolutely terrible? The answer to that is no. He would just get on with it, and make his complains known internally, if at all. This is because his aim, as a doctor, would be to sort things out in the best interests of his patients, and not to raise hell for the minister of health as a way of telling us just how bad his political rivals are at running the hospital they built.

Mercieca has described the sterilisation equipment at Gozo General Hospital as “archaic” and “unsafe”, but instead of taking these complaints to the hospital administrator, as a surgeon ordinarily would, he has taken them to the press. This is because he hopes to be elected to Parliament next year and be made minister of health. So there he is, helping the rest of his political party make as much trouble for the current incumbent as they possibly can.

I don’t like the situation and I’m uncomfortable with it. Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think that surgeons have enough to be getting on with without getting involved in partisan politics as well. But if they really can’t shake off their political calling, then I still think they should maintain at least a semblance of dignity and professionalism, and if they have concerns about the equipment they’re using, they should take those concerns through and to the proper channels, in writing so that it is recorded, and not stand up on a soapbox and create a cheap kerfuffle to earn a few more votes.

The Gozo General Hospital is not even the responsibility of the Minister of Health. It falls within the portfolio of the Gozo ministry. This is absolutely peculiar. Hospitals are hospitals and the state healthcare system is one. The Gozo General Hospital should be, quite obviously, in the ministry of health portfolio to make for more seamless and efficient administration. May common sense prevail, but I’m not holding my breath.

Unequal pigs

People whose homes lie next to a mushroom farm near Rabat have complained quite loudly that life for them is now unbearable because of the dreadful smell of the compost and manure in which the mushrooms are grown. We can guess which one item is never on their shopping-list and which pizza they never go for.

They have called on the authorities to oblige the farm-owners to do something about the situation – they don’t want to have the farm actually shut down, they say – because they just can’t take it anymore. But I have a much better idea. Why don’t they take maximum advantage of the precedent which our courts of law have set by awarding former prime minister Dom Mintoff the sum of one million euros in compensation for life at his Delimara hideaway having been rendered intolerable by the power station there? And he got to keep the house, too.

Quibbling about IVF

There has been the expected opposition from the Bishop of Gozo to the conception of children through IVF. He is well within his rights to speak out against it, though the Catholic Church does not share his view in general. The crucial thing is that the bishop’s views do not upset or disturb the proper preparation of IVF legislation. It is these very preparations that have prompted the bishop to speak.

IVF has been taking place in Malta for almost three decades with no regulation whatsoever. It is a complete free-for-all, with operators making their own rules and self-policing. Of course, the main stumbling block with this legislation – and one of the reasons it remains on the backburner – is that it is impossible to have proper IVF practice without legal abortion or the freezing of embryos. Right now, all the eggs fertilised in the process are implanted in the mother, causing some to be aborted naturally (what we call a miscarriage) while others lead to multiple births. These multiple births are often then inflicted on the Special Care Baby Unit at the general hospital, which is generally not informed of the upcoming births by private IVF practitioners, and is taken by surprise. And that’s to say nothing of all those parents coping with twins that are not a genetic fluke like ‘biological’ twins are.

All the fertilised eggs are implanted because they cannot be discarded (this would be classified as ‘abortion’) or frozen, which hovers in a limbo somewhere in between death and life. Now that it has been tentatively agreed that freezing embryos is sort of acceptable because it is not actually killing them, the next problem arises: is it okay to freeze them until they ‘go off’, because obviously, the mother is not going to come back for all of them and possibly not even for one more. Or is that abortion by killing through freezing? And if you clear out the freezer, isn’t that abortion too? So you can’t win. Now they’ve decided that a good solution might be the adoption of embryos by other women, but you can expect the talks to grind to a stalemate round about there, as the ethical concerns of adopting embryos are dissected minutely.

This is just like the days when MPs wouldn’t even countenance divorce legislation and so the government devised all manner of complicated cohabitation bills and ideas to allow a sort of bigamy in which we could have spouses and concubines – you know, just so we wouldn’t have to have divorce legislation but could still put a subsequent relationship on a legal footing. That wheel was very square. The same square wheel is inevitable with IVF legislation which does not allow fertilised eggs to be discarded because it is classified as criminal abortion. Ah, the difficulties of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

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