Before rising for the summer recess – after less than two months of sittings and earlier than usually happens – Parliament approved amendments to the IVF law, which sees the introduction of genetic testing.

Doctors will now be allowed to perform genetic tests on IVF embryos before they are planted in the womb. The testing will look for rare genetic conditions and any embryo found to be carrying one will be frozen.

In its election campaign, the Labour Party promised to see to this in its first 100 days in office. It managed by a whisker, but not without the usual controversy.

For one thing, the amendments sparked outrage in various quarters. They were labelled as discriminatory against persons with disabilities. We are essentially choosing which embryos are worthy of being born or not, was how the Life Network Foundation described it in its resistance to the Bill. Government defended itself by saying that the law intended to provide more opportunities to couples to have children.

In the end, even the Opposition, which had sent confusing signals at the initial stages, ended up voting in favour of the law, with the exception of three of its MPs – former leader Adrian Delia, Ivan Bartolo and Alex Borg. Another PN MP, Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, later said that he would also have voted against the Bill, but he was positive to Covid-19 on the day and could not attend the sitting.

In the light of all that happened, there are several matters which ought to be considered.

The first is whether MPs should be given a free vote in matters of conscience. In this case, as in many other similar occasions, both the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party did not.

All Labour MPs chose to follow the whip, which meant that the government was seen to be a united front when the vote was taken. Whether all of them really agree with the provisions is something that we will never know. There were possibly some Labour MPs who, in their conscience, have reservations, but they chose to ignore their inner thoughts to go with the flow so as not to create a division in the party.

As for the PN, the vote taken on Wednesday showed that three MPs chose to listen to their conscience rather than obey the orders given by the party. Earlier there had been reports that the number of dissenting PN MPs was going to be higher than that. It could be that, in the end, there were MPs who voted against their conscience, just to be seen as toeing the party line. Again, we will never know.

The second point is whether it is ideal for a party to have a former leader still in Parliament in spite of being removed from the top post.

History tells us that the presence of a former chief is not easy to control. The older generations will remember how Dom Mintoff’s shadow loomed large over his successor Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and how Mintoff later was a protagonist in the way Alfred Sant was forced to call an election less than two years after taking office as PM.

On the PN side, more recently, we had Simon Busuttil not on the same wavelength with Delia and was deemed to be part of the group that ultimately led to Delia’s ousting. Now it is Delia’s turn to be an MP under a new leader – the one who beat him – and so the situation is far from being ideal for the PN. The fact that Delia was one of the three “rebels” who voted against the party’s wishes certainly makes more headlines than if he (Delia) had not been part of the dissenting group.

The third point is that, once again, government came across as one, united front while the PN has exposed itself as still being fragmented.

With hindsight, maybe the PN should have played the game differently. It should have gone for a free vote, sending the message that the party was allowing its MPs to vote freely on a matter of conscience, something that the PL, in government, could not do.

In doing this, the PN would have sold the idea that it is a party that endorses different opinions, a party where ideas are exchanged but nobody is afraid to be different from the leader. The PN should have insisted that conversely Labour is a closed party where everybody does what the leader says and nobody questions him, even if this meant going against one’s own beliefs.

That position would have been closer to the new image that the PN wants to create as it seeks to bridge the gap. The law would have passed anyway, but the PN would have emerged stronger.

As things happened, Labour takes all the credit while the PN continues to appear as being too fragmented.