Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1294561
IT is quite obvious by now that there is a con- certed effort by conserva- tive forces in our country against the Equality Act – a law that if passed una- mended will ensure every citizen in our country is treated with dignity and respect regardless of their personal characteristics. Those who oppose the Act know that they can- not stop it from being enacted in some form, so they have resorted to pushing forward amend- ments that will render the Act almost useless and unenforceable. The conscientious ob- jection clause aims to do just that. If introduced into the Act, it will allow professionals to object to offer any service to any person, without justifica- tion. The proposed clause refers to all professionals, not just doctors, and has no safeguards to ensure that people do not come to harm when they are shown the door. The proposed clause does not compel the professional to give any informa- tion or to refer, and it also does not exclude emergency care from being withheld. This is clearly unsafe, and on this basis alone the amend- ment should be rejected. The conscientious ob- jection clause is not about refusing to do abortion or euthanasia – these are currently illegal and there will be plenty of time to discuss how these services can be provisioned if Bills to le- galise them are presented in the future. Rather, this clause is about safeguarding the "conscience rights" of those who wish to dis- criminate – in other words it aims to legalise withholding services to minorities in our country. Who will suffer the most if the conscientious ob- jection clause is accept- ed? The answer is those people who the Equality Act aims to protect the most – LGBTI people and women. If conscientious objec- tion is legitimised in law, it will be harder than ever before for these members of society to access ser- vices, ironically through a law that was meant to have the opposite effect. Women will find it more difficult to access contra- ception, couples will find it more difficult to access IVF, and LGBTI people will find it more difficult to access LGBTI-specific healthcare. Make no mistake, the main proponents of this clause know very well what the ef- fects will be. This clause is a ver- itable Trojan horse that aims to torpedo the Equality Act's aim of safeguarding minorities' access to services. ill the government give in to pressure and com- promise on equality, or will it stand on the right side of history with the most marginalised in our society and reject the conscientious objection clause? 11 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 OCTOBER 2020 Chris Barbara Dr Christopher Barbara MD, MRCPsych is a member of Doctors for Choice Malta OPINION Conscientious objection does not belong in the Equality Act me to remind you that the PN's electability issues began to surface almost immediately afterwards… paving the way to the present scenario, in which the National- ist Party cannot possibly hope to replicate that same dynamic, for the simple reason that neither of those two driving forces is still in place today. Yet that is precisely what Ber- nard Grech now seems to be banking on. His inability to draw up a political policy-platform of his own – which should all along be the starting point for any ca- reer in politics – merely confirms that he simply expects to win elec- tions by default… on the strength, as it were, of his opponents' weak- nesses. But – and here's the second rea- son, coming right up – not even Eddie Fenech Adami himself did that, back in the glory years. All those electoral victories I alluded to – 1981, 1992, 1998, 2004 – were not achieved simply on the basis of Labour's failures. On the contrary, Eddie Fenech Adami won those elections precisely because he did what Grech has so far failed to do, and imbued the Nationalist Party – and, it must be said, the country as a whole – with a much-needed sense of political direction. I've already mentioned the ob- vious example – EU membership – but even that pales into insig- nificance, when compared to the truly revolutionary changes he in- stilled within the party when first taking over in 1977. To put it another way: Eddie Fenech Adami would hardly have secured a wafer-thin nation- al majority in 1981, if he did not also succeed in repositioning the entire PN on the political spec- trum: moving away from the more overtly right-wing policies of the Borg Olivier era, and reinventing the Nationalist Party as a social- ly-conscious, Christian Demo- crat, "workers' movement" (thus entrenching himself deeply into Mintoff's 'home territory', as it were). Likewise, he would hardly have succeeded in so thoroughly over- hauling Malta's entire econom- ic model in the late 1980s/early 1990s – re-opening markets, end- ing the reign of 'sole agencies', introducing VAT, and all the rest of it – if he wasn't also driven (for better or worse) by a clearly-de- fined political ideology… which he even took the trouble to spell out for us, in the form of a slogan that still reverberates throughout Maltese politics to this day: 'Xog- hol, Gustizzja, Libertà'… Where is the equivalent of any of that, in Bernard Grech's cur- rent bid to take over the leader- ship of the same party? And if – in the course of two whole months' worth of campaigning – he was unable to impart even the vaguest semblance of a political identity, or direction, to the party he in- tends to lead… how on earth can he also expect to 'restore the PN to its past glory'? Well, I guess we'll all find out soon enough…