Although at Christmas Malta normally celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, this Christmas will be a different Christmas for me and for all persons of good will. We are constrained to celebrate it under the darkness of the culture of death.

Government has opted to celebrate this Christmas not by celebrating life, as all previous Labour and Nationalist governments have done so far. From next year onwards, we will be deprived of the joy that Christmas brings with it to Maltese families, with offspring born via natural means or through in vitro fertilisation or with adopted or fostered children.

Instead, government will regale us as a Christmas present with the most extreme abortion law that any country in the world has ever dreamt of – one based on foetuscide in addition to embryocide. It will be the most cruel and inhumane law that humanity has ever conceived.

All -cides are by their very nature to be abhorred, be they homicides, uxoricides, matricides, femicides, infanticides, genocides, and all the rest. However, our government is proposing to decriminalise foetuscide and embryocide to make it to the Guinness Book of Records being a government that prides itself with enshrining the culture of death into Maltese Law. For whatever the government MPs declare in the House of Representatives, the Bill pending in the House of Representatives is one that does not respect life but that debases it. This measure will soon be taken when it is known that the Maltese population is on the decline and a vast majority of our youngsters are proactively looking for new pastures abroad.

According to government’s spin, the Criminal Code punishes doctors who, when saving the life of a pregnant woman, a child in utero perishes. This is incorrect because first there is no provision in the Criminal Code that expressly criminalises such conduct; second state practice does not support such a ludicrous statement; third the general principles of criminal law are total antithetical to this statement; and fourth there is court judgment which had interpreted the Criminal Code as the government is stating.

Government also states that the Bill does not introduce abortion and that by keeping the two provisions of the Criminal Code referred to in the Bill that punish abortion, government is not decriminalising foetuscide and embryocide. Although it is correct to state that these two provisions will be retained in the Criminal Code, the exception that the Bill proposes to introduce is so wide that it will inevitably require the courts of criminal justice to allow all forms of foetuscide and embrocide to take place, legally, up till the ninth month of pregnancy. As the exception will become the rule, abortion is introduced in its worst possible imaginable form into the Criminal Code whilst bringing to naught the two provisions outlawing abortion. The Criminal Code’s abortion provisions will thus be easily circumvented.

In addition, the Bill does not vest the decision of aborting a child in embryo in a team of qualified obstetricians and principled ethicists. It does not provide any form of guidance as to how the decision should be reached and on the basis of which ethical principles. Instead, it leaves it to the pregnant woman or the parents of the minor pregnant child to decide. The aborting obstetric child-killer has no say in the matter if a pregnant woman’s or the parents of a pregnant minor child’s general practitioner certifies that the pregnant woman or pregnant child suffers from a serious risk to her health. There are no measures to regulate how a general practitioner will act provided that s/he issues a certificate that his/her patient’s health is in serious risk. No supervisory process is adopted or authority established to review the general practitioner’s decision, contrary to all abortion laws abroad 

The Bill, therefore, creates by far more uncertainties than government perceives to be in the current law. It contributes to creating more confusion through loosely drafted provisions that are totally unreasonable, incompatible with rules of statutory drafting, messy, and go beyond all forms of decency.

That is why the Bill should be defeated. MPs should exercise their freedom of conscience and vote against it. A vote for this bill as currently drafted is a vote for the culture of death.

Kevin Aquilina is Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Malta