Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1490058
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 JANUARY 2023 OPINION 10 Raphael Vassallo OPINION Bill 28 is not just about Andrea Prudente IN 1958, philosopher Bertrand Russell famously wrote: "nobody can prove that there is not, be- tween the Earth and Mars, a china teapot revolving in an el- liptical orbit; but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice." The analogy has gone down in history as 'Russell's teapot'; and it was originally part of a much broader argument regarding the existence, or otherwise, of God… though it could just as easily be applied to, say, the 'Loch Ness Monster'; or 'Bigfoot'; or 'In- telligent Life on Malta (I mean, Mars!)'… or anything, really, whose existence happens to be in dispute. But back to the tea-pot itself. On the surface, Russell's argu- ment is that it is simply impos- sible to ever prove – with 100% percent certainty – the non-ex- istence of anything: no matter how unlikely, or implausible, that 'anything' might be. But there is an important ca- veat: Russell also argues that one's inability to ever disprove the existence of a 'china tea-pot, revolving in an elliptical orbit around the Sun', cannot ever be used as a justification of one's belief in the existence of said tea-pot, to begin with. (In his own words: "if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion can- not be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of hu- man reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.") And this is significant, because it implies two things. One, that questions of belief should not hinge merely on possibilities… but should also take statistical probabilities into account. And two, that the realm of possibil- ity is, in itself, somewhat 'rel- ative' in nature: in the sense that, what may have appeared utterly impossible to Bertrand Russell, back in 1958 – a 'tea- pot in space', no less: at a time when space travel itself was still in its early infancy – must today be considered at least a vague- ly possible (though not exactly plausible) scenario. Think about it for a second: NASA has been sending un- manned missions to Mars (and beyond) since the early 1970s, at least. How 'impossible' would it really be, then, for a disgruntled (or even, just bored) employee to have once actually smuggled a 'china teapot' onto one of those 50+ spacecraft, over the past five decades… and then pro- grammed things, so as to blast it off into orbit at a point exact- ly half-way between Earth and Mars? (You know: just to get a kick out of proving Bertrand Russel's 'unprovable' assertion, once and for all?) Heck, I'd certainly do it, if I had a job loading stuff onto NASA rockets (as well as a spare tea- pot I wanted to get rid of)… but I digress. Where was I? Oh, yes: statistical probabilities. So, just to conclude this in- terplanetary parenthesis about 'Russell's teapot': the fact that it is now technologically possible – in theory, at least – for such an eventuality to materialise, does not change the core dynamic of Russell's analogy in the slightest. Because the same caveat still remains in place: it's not the pos- sibility alone that counts, but al- so the probability. (And let's face it: by any stretch of the imagina- tion, it is highly – but HIGHLY – improbable that there really is a goddamn 'china tea-pot', just floating around in space some- where … Still: by now, you might well be wondering what any of this has to do with Bill 28 – that's the amendment to decriminal- ise potentially life-saving abor- tions, by the way – and, even more so, with Andrea Prudente: the woman who was denied the same treatment in Malta, after having suffered from "preterm premature rupture of mem- branes" (PPROM) 15 weeks into her pregnancy. And I can't really blame you, either; because – from the very outset – part of what has un- dermined this whole 'abortion discussion', is precisely the fact that most people seem incapable of separating those two issues, in the first place. They seem to think that Bill 28 is somehow inextricably linked with the Andrea Prudente case: to the extent that some now even argue that there is no need to change the law at all… be- cause – according to recent tes- timony by Mater Dei health of- ficials – neither Prudente's own life, nor even (possibly) that of her unborn child, was ever nec- essarily 'in danger'. And, well, both those argu- ments happen to be right up there with Russell's imaginary tea-pot… if nothing else, be- cause they occupy a space that simply doesn't exist at all, within the context of a discussion about Bill 28. OK, let's start with the more overtly 'teapot-like' of those two claims: I.e., that there may actu- ally have been a chance of saving Andrea prudente's unborn child, after all. This can be traced di- rectly to the following claims on the witness stand: a) "Developments in the field over the past two decades or so meant that today there was a 79.2% survival rate of the unborn baby when the mother's waters ruptured before 20 weeks preg- nancy"; and b) "If she remained in hospi- tal there was a chance, not a big one, that the baby would have survived." Now: at the risk of re-starting this article, all over again: there is also 'a chance' – not a very big one – that Russell's teapot may actually exist, after all; and therefore, what matters more is the statistical probability. Applied to this scenario: that translates directly into a ques- tion of how 'big' that chance ac- tually was. Was it really as high as 79.2%, for instance? Well… not accord- ing to the same witnesses them- selves, it seems (let's face it: you wouldn't exactly describe a sur- vival chance of almost 80%, as 'not very big': would you now?) And not according to Doctors For Choice, either: who fished out the original study upon which that claim was based, and discovered that: the '79.2%' ac- tually refers to cases "when the mother's waters ruptured be- fore 20 weeks pregnancy"; and that the same study also found that "all fetuses or neonates from pregnancies that suffered PPROM earlier than 19 weeks, DIED BEFORE DISCHARGE." [my emphasis] Effectively, that sets the sur- vival rate of unborn children – whose mothers are unfortunate enough to suffer ruptured mem- branes before 19 weeks of preg- nancy – at pretty much exactly 'ZERO'. (And as I mentioned just a few lines further up: An- drea Prudente's actually suffered her PPROM at just 15 weeks…) Naturally, I'll leave it to you to calculate the foetus's precise survival chances, in that scenar- io (but I think we can all safely agree that the answer's going to be a whole lot less than '79.2%'…) All the same, however: that only brings me to the other reason Jay Weeldreyer and Andrea Prudente at Mater Dei Hospital