Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1248303
3 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 17 MAY 2020 Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications The virus and the unborn IN his article 'Science should guide all our health policies... including abortion' (5 May) Raphael Vassallo used almost 1,600 words trying to convince Health Minister Chris Fearne to go "scientific" and introduce legislation to permit abor- tion in Malta. He said: "Our total abor- tion ban is no less dangerous or unhinged (or even idiotic, for that matter) than Donald Trump's notorious recommen- dation to 'drink bleach' as an antidote to COVID-19." Vassallo rightly praised Fearne and the Maltese medical profession for using scientific means to deal so successfully with the COVID-19 pandemic. Vassallo was acknowledging that these were fight- ing all along against something all of us can't see, yet know that it is there, still... the virus. But he didn't acknowledge the scien- tific fact that when he is promoting abor- tion he is suggesting the deliberate killing of a very little human being who can be seen, unlike the pandemic virus, from the very beginning of his or her life in the mother's womb. This is what convinced prominent American gynaecologist Bernard Na- thanson, many years ago, after perform- ing thousands of abortions, to turn from pro-choice to pro-life. Nathanson, the co-founder of the National Association and Reproductive Rights Action League, describes his progression from a doctor who performed 75,000 abortions during his career to a leading pro-life advocate, mainly due to increasing science and technology. "As a result of this technology – look- ing at this baby, examining it, investigat- ing it, watching its metabolic functions, watching it urinate, swallow, move and sleep, watching it dream, which you could see by its rapid eye movements via ultrasounds, treating it, operating on it – I finally came to the conviction that this was my patient. This was a person! I was a physician, pledged to save my patients' lives, not to destroy them. So I changed my mind on the subject of abortion. There was nothing religious about it." Vassallo should give greater consider- ation to Nathanson's declaration regard- ing his change of views from a pro-choice to a pro-life perspective "mainly due to increasing science and technology". Vassallo acknowledges the existence of something he can't see – the corona- virus – but refuses to acknowledge the existence of very early human life in a woman's womb which, today, can be seen, felt, and talked to as an active hu- man being. Abortion has only one meaning. The deliberate killing of early human life in a woman's womb, even until the very moment of birth. Yet Vassallo makes not one single mention of the existence of the unborn child in his/her mother's womb. As if he was just writing only about a wart, or a cancerous growth, in the woman's body. How ironic. While the whole world is fighting to save human lives, after the coronavirus has so far claimed the lives of nearly 280,000 people all over the world, Vassallo is fighting for quality death, for abortions of unborn children. Some months ago Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, was literally and pompously celebrating death, with the introduction of a new law in New York which permitted abortion, the savage killing of unborn babies, even nine months old babies, until the very mo- ment of birth. His slogan was "Reproduc- tive Justice – No time to wait." Again how ironic that today Governor Cuomo is stubbornly fighting for human lives, against the coronavirus which hit his New York so devastatingly, killing, so far, 20,000 of his constituents. Almost a quarter of the total US deaths. Cuomo's New York seems to have been identified as the epicentre, in the world, of the whole pandemic. Since 1973, when abortion in the US was permitted, about 63 million unborn children were deliberately killed through abortion. So far in the US, 78,000 people have died because of the coronavirus, more than a quarter of the whole num- ber of deaths in the world. Tony Mifsud Malta Unborn Child Platform