Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/846769
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 9 JULY 2017 24 Opinion T he funny thing about the 'everything leads to abortion' argument is that – if it were actually true – Malta should really have introduced abortion around four decades ago. Just think of all the things that were supposed to 'lead to abortion', but somehow never did. Civil marriage. EU membership. Divorce. Civil Unions. IVF. Emergency contraception... all were resisted in their day with the same old 'slippery slope' argument; yet we clearly haven't quite slipped down that slope yet. In fact, we are no closer to having abortion clinics at every corner today, than we were when women first got the vote in 1945. If anything, we have entrenched ourselves ever deeper in our national 'pro-life' mindset. It was only in recent years that American Evangelist-style movements such as 'Gift of Life' and 'Life International' emerged, to make even a rational discussion on that subject all- but impossible. I would say the prospect of introducing abortion today is less likely than it has ever been at any point in our entire history: because it is now no longer individual institutions such as the Church or political parties that actively oppose it; there is an organised, street- level and entirely lay/apolitical 'resistance movement' that quite simply never existed before. And all along, of course, there is a marked lack of any corresponding lobby-group – in or out of the political mainstream – representing the pro-choice side of the argument. With the exception of one or two solitary voices here and there – mostly male, I can't help but note – there isn't even anyone calling for abortion to be legalised in the first place. Does that stop people from making the same old lazy argument, however? I.e., that everything they themselves personally dislike, will invariably 'lead to abortion'? Heck, no! After all, this is a political argument we are talking about here. It doesn't have to actually correspond to any existing social reality... it only has to sound good in the ears of a select target audience. Take the ongoing 'Marriage Equality' debate in Parliament, for instance. Part of the Nationalist Party's official reasoning in supporting the bill is (and I'm paraphrasing Simon Busuttil here) that it would add nothing substantive to rights already enjoyed by same-sex couples under the Civil Unions Act of 2015. So whatever impact 'gay marriage' may be expected to have on the social fabric of Malta... we should already be feeling those effects today. Then along comes Edwin Vassallo – representing the same party, please note – telling us that he will vote against the bill because it constitutes "a prelude to the culture of death". The new law, he argued in parliament, "will prove to be the foundation stone upon which other laws will be built... laws that tamper with the right to life". Hmm. OK, I've already pre- emptively addressed the major flaw in that argument. Edwin Vassallo himself admitted (almost in the same breath), that "same-sex marriage was already part of Maltese law through the Civil Unions Act". So why has this 'culture of death' not already I would say the prospect of introducing abortion today is less likely than it has ever been at any point in our entire history Raphael Vassallo 'Gay marriage leads to abortion'... but only under Labour