Mrs Bland’s abortion views are the least of it

This was my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

Gift of Life’s Paul Vincenti has demanded that Dom Mintoff’s daughter make herself clear about what she thinks of abortion and whether it should be legal. This was after she gave an interview to The Sunday Times in which she said that abortion is “a big debate” and that she thinks there should be a “good discussion” about it

It’s a toss-up between two very annoying people and I’m not quite sure which one of them irritates me most. Dom Mintoff’s daughter, I would say, because she’s aiming to become a legislator and have a say in running our lives. Paul Vincenti, conversely, tries to do things the traditional woman’s way – by putting pressure on others and kicking up a hell of a stink when cooing manipulation fails to deliver the required results.

Exactly what does Paul Vincenti aim to do here, anyway – get Mrs Bland to lie about her views on abortion? It should be quite obvious what somebody with her life experience thinks about abortion, and it’s not going to be what Paul Vincenti, with his life experience, thinks.

She can’t spell it out because she wants to become a legislator via an anti-abortion party and the votes of anti-abortion electors. And if she says that she agrees with Mr Vincenti, we’ll know she’s lying. But who cares anyway, other than Mr Vincenti and his league of pests? It’s not as though abortion is going to be the reason we won’t be voting for Mrs Bland. Aside from the fact that she’s been living away from Malta for the last 50 years and the only Maltese thing about her is her father (the other reason we won’t be voting for her), in all her public outings she sounds like a spacehead.

And the sort of people who will vote for her anyway, because she’s it-tifla ta’ Mintoff and for no other reason, are unlikely to be deterred by her views – whatever they might be – on abortion.

Paul Vincenti’s arguments are just as nerve-wracking as those of the anti-divorce movement. Nobody is actually in favour of abortion, just as nobody is in favour of divorce. Both are ugly, negative things even if the results can be liberating. What people are for is not abortion itself but proper legislation.

Current legislation is yet another exercise in burying our heads in the sand about the obvious: that Maltese women are getting their abortions anyway, but only if they can afford it.

Joseph Muscat was asked by reporters what he thinks of Mrs Bland’s non-answer on abortion. After all, she is his handpicked star candidate. His response is that he sees “the possibility of an abortion debate” as a grand “opportunity to convince more people to take a pro-life stance”.

Do we really need more people to take a pro-life stance in Malta? Everybody is pro-life until they want an abortion for themselves or their daughter (or pregnant girlfriend when they don’t want a baby). I imagine that these girls and women catching flights to London, Rome and Catania to end their pregnancies are pro-life too. Most people are.

Let’s face it, the verbal opposite of pro-life is pro-death, and how many people are, unless they are in a tiny minority which includes, say, Fred West and Pol Pot?

Then there’s indifference. I have the oddest feeling that this is how rather a lot of people actually feel about the subject, but say they’re ‘pro-life’ because they think it’s expected of them and more particularly because they’re not pro-death or a big fan of sucking foetuses out of wombs (obviously – who is?). But really, they just don’t care.

They wouldn’t give a damn, beyond a few minutes of gossip, if they found out that the next-door neighbour had had an abortion. But you can bet that they’d look rather differently at the next-door neighbour if they found out she had throttled her toddler and spent 15 years in prison for doing it.

That’s called having a sense of proportion and a sound perspective on things – even if Paul Vincenti thinks the two are equal and would like us to think so too.

As for Mrs Bland – well, she’s certainly turning out to be yet another albatross round Dr Muscat’s rather sturdy neck.