Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1485769
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 NOVEMBER 2022 OPINION 10 Raphael Vassallo OPINION You can't 'protect women's lives', without also protecting their 'physical and mental health' IT'S a funny old world we live in, really. This week, for in- stance, Malta reacted to news of yet another femicide – the third of 2022; and around the 17th in the past decade – with all the usual platitudes and clichés that we've come to expect, over the years. 'Society has failed Bernice Cassar!'; 'This is a wake-up call!'; 'We need decisive action to protect women, NOW!'… Hmm. Ok, tell you what. For the purposes of this article, I'll overlook the most obvious problem staring us in the face: i.e, that if Bernice Cassar was the umpteenth victim of femi- cide in Malta… then her mur- der was also the umpteenth 'wake-up call', for precisely the same sort of 'action' that every- one is once again (for the ump- teenth time) demanding. Honestly, though: I thought I had a problem with constant- ly 'hitting the snooze button', every time my alarm clock goes off. But to hit the snooze but- ton, 17 times in a row… and STILL never quite 'wake up', by the end of it all… I don't know. Sounds more like 'dead' than 'asleep', to me… But I've decided to ignore all that for now: even because I simply don't have any expla- nation (still less, any solution) for why no amount of 'women getting murdered' ever seems to be enough, to shake this country out of its deep, deep slumber. So instead, I'll follow some friendly advice I was given re- cently; and try to look for a 'pos- itive' aspect in all this. What do all those above reactions have in common, anyway? (Apart, of course, from their sheer point- lessness, in a country that just never seems to learn from its past mistakes?) Well, if nothing else… they suggest that most people here DO actually attach some kind of 'value' to women's lives. They DO agree that wom- en deserve to be 'protected', in circumstances where their lives are in danger; and – even more specifically – they DO expect that the authorities take certain steps, to actually pro- vide the sort of protection that is needed. (In fact, a sizeable crowd is protesting about this in front of the Police Depot, even as I write…) So far, so 'positive'. But then… like I said earlier: it's a funny old world, really. So when the government recently tabled a legal amendment that would: "allow the termination of preg- nancies if the MOTHER'S LIFE OR HEALTH ARE AT SERI- OUS RISK" [my emphasis]… well, what do you know? The same people who are calling for 'decisive action to protect women's lives, NOW', sud- denly seem to attach a whole lot less value, to the lives of all the women they are supposedly trying to 'protect'. These include the National- ist Party – which, unsurpris- ingly enough, is opposing the above amendment in Parlia- ment (even though it has only just stated, in its reaction to Bernice Cassar's murder, that: "the party is committed to keep fighting until every woman in Malta is protected…") – but, in its own words, the PN has "aligned itself with the position adopted by more than 80 aca- demics earlier this week, which asked for a tighter exception limited to when a woman's life is in danger." So to find any form of expla- nation, for the astonishing con- tradiction inherent in that po- sition – i.e., that the PN wants to both 'protect women', and 'not protect women', at one and the same time – we have to turn to the original statement penned by "the former Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Malta, Mgr Prof. Emmanuel Agius; professor of obstetrics Charles Savona Ven- tura, and former Dean of the Faculty of Laws, Prof. Kevin Aquilina." These three academics argued that the amendment, as pro- posed, "opens the door for le- gal abortion" because the pro- posed law does not only speak of instances where the woman is at risk of dying, but also adds the words "or her health [is] in grave jeopardy". They said this would also "open the door for doctors to carry out terminations if they deemed a pregnancy endangers the mother's mental health." In their own words: "The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations de- clared that the word 'health' also means mental health. Therefore, with the Govern- ment's amendment, a pregnan- cy can be terminated, not just in cases where the woman's life is at risk, but also in cases of Much as I hate to say this, in a country where both abortion and suicide are equally 'taboo' – the condition of pregnancy, in and of itself, entails an inherent risk of depression: both before, and after childbirth