Malta4Life, a pro-life organisation has launched its campaign to collect signatures calling for an abrogative referendum, to scrap the legal amendments introduced earlier this year to Malta's abortion law.

The referendum would call for 'the old abortion laws to be reinstated'. It is collecting signatures by hand.

Malta4Life is made up of: Partit Abba, Partit Abba Youths, Partit Popolari, Ġenerazzjoni Malta, Pro Malta Christiana, Abortion in Malta? Not in my name!, Parent's and Children's Rights Movement, Parents and Teachers against Gender Indoctrination of our Children, Fr. Patrick Pullicino.

ABBA party leader Ivan Grech Mintoff said: ""We agree that an intervention should take place only to save the mother's life. But that is what used to happen already," he said. "We want a referendum so that the law goes back to saving the lives of women and children, and there are no loopholes to introduce abortion." 

Earlier this year, Parliament had unanimously voted in favour of the bill that introduced exceptions to Malta's abortion law. The amendments allow doctors to terminate a pregnancy when a woman's life is at immediate risk or her health is in "grave jeopardy which may lead to death." The amendments also define the "period of viability" as the point in a pregnancy at which the foetus is capable of living outside the uterus according to current medical practices, meaning that if the foetus is viable, a pregnancy termination cannot take place.

The changes meant that it will not be considered criminal when in the case of a pregnant woman suffering from a medical complication which may put her life at immediate risk, the medical intervention is done when in the reasonable opinion of  the  medical  practitioner  carrying  out  the  intervention  the foetus has not reached the period of viability. And in the case of a medical intervention carried out due to a medical complication which places the health of a pregnant woman in grave jeopardy which may lead to death, there are a number of conditions, including that it must be the  reasonable  opinion  of  a medical team the foetus has not reached the period of viability  and  cannot  be  delivered  according  to  the standards of the medical profession.