Make it Labour, not PL

I wonder whether the acronym PL is going to achieve the recognition level of MLP. It still looks silly in newspaper reports and saying Pee-Ell seems self-consciously careful, so people continue to say Emm-Ell-Pee. Why PL, anyway? The Labour Party’s missed a good branding opportunity. It should have done away with the acronym altogether and gone for Labour. Just because the Nationalist Party uses an acronym it doesn’t mean the Labour Party has to use one too. Just because the Labour Party used to use an acronym, it doesn’t mean it has to go on doing so.

In any case, these acronyms should be strictly for use by the Maltese-language media, if they wish to avoid giving the party’s name in full. PL and PN stand for Partit Laburista and Partit Nazzjonalista, so they have no place in English-language reporting, where strictly speaking the acronyms should be LP and NP. But this is yet another example of how difficult we find it to switch from colloquial Maltese to colloquial English. Fluent English demands that we dispense with the acronyms and refer to the parties, in the curtailed form, as Labour and the Nationalists. In the British media, it’s Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems, not the LP, the CP and the LDP. But this is a lazy nation which refers to anyone with two surnames by his or her initials, because apparently it’s far too much trouble to write their name in full. Anthony Zammit stays Anthony Zammit, but Anthony Zammit Pace becomes AZP, as though he’s an organisation in need of an acronym, rather than a person.

This one’s not foreign, but there’s a problem still

The news that Nicholas Sammut, 27, who worked on the Large Hadron Collider project with CERN, has been appointed executive chairman of the Malta Council of Science and Technology, has met with the usual depressing response (last seen with the Renzo Piano ‘who needs a foreign architect’ announcement).

My own reaction was one of astonishment at the altruism of somebody on the cusp of a stellar career, who takes the decision to leave the European Organisation for Nuclear Research to take up the poisoned chalice of a state appointment in backbiting Malta. But Mr Sammut is bright with excitement. He says he is honoured and that the Malta Council for Science and Technology can be very good for Malta. He will maintain his involvement in the Large Hadron Collider experiment and through that, he says, he will make sure that Maltese citizens become involved in CERN-related research and development.

The response from those who have made it their business to make their views known on line has been roughly this. That’s he’s not old enough to run the MCST: ah, but he’s old enough to work on the Large Hadron Collider experiment. That Maltese people are only taken notice of in Malta when they achieve recognition elsewhere: oh, but there wasn’t any Large Hadron Collider experiment or European Organisation for Nuclear Research on this island the last time I looked. And then, the flipside of this overweening inverted inferiority complex – if he accepted the job in Malta then he can’t have been doing anything much at CERN; perhaps he was just taking notes or making the tea.

Why do people here react like this, with such small-minded jealousy and resentment? Instead of admiring other people’s success and achievements, they seek reasons to belittle them and run them down, or to reassure themselves that it could have been them, if only they had been born rich/with contacts/into a networked family/with privileges or if they had been in the right place at the right time and with the right padrun. Nicholas Sammut had none of these things, and still he made it.

Skewed survey results

Malta has just topped two of the rankings in the European Perinatal Health Report, but strangely, nobody has bothered to question the findings or to put them into the context of abortion legislation. The result of this shortcoming is that the Maltese have come out looking like a strange bunch whose teenagers are among those having the most babies in Europe while women of the proper child-bearing age are having the fewest babies in Europe. We also come across as a sack-load of inbred throwbacks who are mating with relatives and producing the highest number of babies in Europe who die as a result of congenital abnormalities. So we’re not having babies, but when we do have some, their mothers are teenagers or they’re abnormal, or both.

Nobody’s waved a little flag and said: “Hey, abortion is a crime in Malta, so maybe the situation here is the same as it is everywhere else in Europe, except that teenagers who fall pregnant aren’t necessarily whisked off for an abortion and those who are carrying an abnormal foetus don’t find out until the baby is born, because tests for abnormalities are not carried out in Malta on the grounds that you can’t have an abortion, so why bother. For all we know, there are just as many congenitally abnormal foetuses in the rest of Europe, but they don’t get to be born. The clue lies in the fact that Malta holds first place in this congenital abnormality ranking with – you guessed it (and no, it’s not Poland), Ireland.

This isn’t an argument for or against abortion. This is an argument for more honest surveying. You can’t compare the teenage birth rate in Malta, where there is no abortion, with the teenage birth rate in other member states, where there is abortion, and then say that Malta has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe, ranking seventh alongside, what a surprise, Poland. But then there’s Britain, with abortion and one of the highest rates of teenage births. So cultural attitudes have to be taken into account, too.

For a start, what we are talking about here is not teenage pregnancy, but births to teenage mothers. The two are different. It is only when you rule out abortion that you can equate the two. Everywhere that abortion is legal, the two must be kept separate, for the simple reason that many teenage pregnancies end in abortion, not birth.

In the case of infant deaths due to congenital abnormality, the report does make passing mention of the possibility that this “could be” because abortion is illegal in Ireland and Malta. But even this is far from accurate. Though abortion is illegal here and in Ireland, both countries are exporting their problem to Britain, where Irish and Maltese women go for abortions in droves. In other words, it is not necessarily the fact that abortion is illegal, as such, that accounts for the reason why these foetuses are not aborted. There could be cultural or religious reasons but, and this is a very big but, the reason could be that the parents do not find out about the abnormality until the baby is born, when they are given an almighty shock.

Many parents of children with congenital abnormalities in Malta found out the truth after birth, because doctors could not or would not perform tests on the grounds that screening for abnormalities is pointless (or wrong) because abortion is illegal. It never seemed to occur to anyone that those about to become parents of a child with Down’s Syndrome or spina bifida would need to know about it well in advance so as to prepare for the experience emotionally, practically and financially, rather than being hit by a truck when they were expecting something quite different. Perhaps things have changed now; I don’t know. But certainly, those people who had babies up to a few years ago were presented with the harsh reality at birth, sometimes causing one or both parents to reject the child initially, as it was too much to deal with.

The Malta Congenital Anomalies Registry, which collects the numbers, says that 3.4 per cent of all babies born in Malta between 2001 and 2003 were congenitally abnormal.

The same survey has more interesting statistics: that Malta has the highest rate of induced labour and the third highest rate of elective caesareans which take place even before the woman goes into labour. We have the highest rate of triplets and quadruplets (the result of a combination of IVF and no abortion) but strangely, the seventh-lowest rate of twin births. But then an obstetrician who was questioned about this said that the numbers in Malta are too small to make comparisons with populations that are so much larger.

Whatever – it is surveys like these that really get us thinking about Malta’s contemporary mores.