Daniel Micallef, the outgoing deputy Leader of the Labour Party, gave a speech just before his term expired, which needs answering. He claimed that abortion and also euthanasia's entry into our state law books is as inevitable as death. They will surely come in and therefore he intimated not in so many words that the Labour Party should be at the forefront of this change and that there should be a civil debate on the issue. That there should always be a civil debate on the issue is important, but that it is taken as a given that abortion and euthanasia will make it onto our statute books, is really up to us. There is such a thing as creating a political issue, when the majority of people do not really want it in our laws as a pretext for progressive thought and action. The pretext for abortion is usually that women have certain rights, and that amongst these rights is that of controlling their own lives and decisions when it comes to reproductive health.

Now of course women have rights just like men and intersex individuals have, and I would not be one to deny this, but there are fundamental human rights which belong to everyone and which are enshrined in written and unwritten codes and which promote human dignity. It is always a maxim that one's rights end where another human being's rights begin.  One of the most fundamental of these is the right to life, a right which becomes absolute when dealing with innocent human beings. An absolute right cannot be overridden when clashing with other perceived or actual rights. Now we know through the empirical science of embryology that human life starts at fertilisation, and therefore needs to be respected as absolute from that time.

Even if one uses the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau Ponty with its leaning to a motor response to what we observe on Ultrasound before birth and the movements and heart sounds in the womb, and deriving the communal We from the I-Thou of Gabriel Marcel's existentialist transcendence, the response should be one of an inter-relational response where one ought to protect the human life that is at its most vulnerable. If humans and the state do not protect life at its most vulnerable stage, then who is going to do it? The same can be said of euthanasia at the other extreme of life, where in countries where it has been accepted, control has been lost of the supposed overseeing bodies, and it has even now been extended to children and young adults. If one wants to avoid euthanasia, build strong palliative medicine structures, family structures and strong psychological care structures.

Medicine currently has its ethical laws to deal with clinically difficult cases, such as double effect and disproportional treatment, when treatment becomes effectively useless. It also may ethically apply the principle of proportionality where a larger number of lives are to be lost rather than a smaller number. If a mother has an ovarian cancer and the pregnancy is still early, too early before the 21 weeks when the baby may be viably delivered, and waiting that long would be detrimental to the life of the mother and the baby resulting in the death of both, then proportional reason dictates that we should save at least one rather than lose both! The baby may be delivered prematurely. There is such an ethical principle as proportion, the lesser of two evils, when one is faced with a premoral, ontic bodily evil. This is a similar case to the conjoint Siamese twins case we had a few years back. Better to save one than lose both!

The Pope referred to this point recently when referring to the American Elections in November. He said when faced with a situation where both candidates are against life, then one may use his conscience to choose the lesser of two evils. The Pope considers that not respecting immigrants and other social and health rights is as bad as abortion with respect to promoting a culture of life! One is then free to decide who to vote for and let me make it clear that personally, given the political alternatives of a Trump presidency and his past political record, I would have no qualms to vote for Harris! Political choice is never a single-issue matter!

The lesser of two evils is not a principle that may be used always in objective ethics. It is not a given in Catholic ethics for all circumstances. In Catholicism, given the biblical traits throughout old and new testaments, it is not allowed to do something bad to achieve something good as consequentialism would promote. Consequentialism dictates that the end justifies the means. St. Paul says this clearly in his letter to the Romans. If I were a mayor of a city, and terrorists asked me to sacrifice three innocent people or else they would throw a bomb and kill a thousand, I am not obliged to cooperate with evil intention and succumb to such a threat. Here there is a premoral evil intention by others, and I am not free to cooperate with this evil intention. In this case, the lesser of two evils scenario, cannot be ethically or morally invoked. However, in situations where premoral evil does exist such as in ontic ones (bodily health), that is such as in issues pertaining to the body and others where disease presents itself and in the case of natural disasters, and other issues where political choices over policies which I have no control over and where someone is going to win or lose anyway, have to be taken, then one may choose the lesser of two evils! If there are two buildings on fire, one with a family of five and the other with a single person inside and there is only one fireman, then one can accept that reason dictates, that the single fireman devotes his actions to save the family if he cannot do both at once! This is ethically and morally acceptable.

The point is that one either works to build a culture of life, or one works to build a culture of death. The choice is ours individually or politically. If we work to promote individual and state choices to destroy life rather than save it, it is through our own egoistic moral choices, we reap what we sow, a culture of death, and this is definitely not a premoral choice!