Labour’s super-majority obsession ahead of 2024 shuts the door on women’s health and lives
They want to retain their big catch-all majorities just like some child amassing their boy-scout badges. This one’s for lily-livered, electoral maths
It would be a miscalculation to consider Malta’s pro-choice movement, an organic network of feminist and human rights activists, possessing the same momentum that was captured by the bolt-out-of-the-blue divorce movement of 2011.
That divorce bill had pure, political chess power inbuilt within it: a one-seat majority for the ruling party, which lacked cohesion and was stultified by years of inertia, and a cause that enjoyed popular understanding, because Maltese families had been changing for the past two decades.
Labour’s craven backtracking on its amendments to Malta’s immoral abortion ban this week, which was intended at freeing doctors from criminal liability when carrying out a termination that put a mother’s health in danger (they have now introduced a three-doctor conference when a woman’s life is on the brink...) is the end of a 10-year, state-backed push on civil liberties and rights.
The party, by caving in to the anti-choice brigade of religious and social conservatives, the parliamentary Opposition, the Maltese Catholic Church, and establishmentarian doctors, factored in its infantile obsession with voting super-majorities: it did not want a conservative backlash at the European elections of 2024, the likely moment when Labour Party conservatives would have decided to cancel their vote, or vote for the usual far-right bogeyman. They want to retain their big catch-all majorities just like some child amassing their boy-scout badges. This one’s for lily-livered, electoral maths.
And although abortion (we’re not even talking about full abortion rights) carries a different political conversation to divorce, the sputtering government engine we see today is a familiar noise from the days when the air hung heavy with a thick blanket of hypocrisy.
When in 2011, rebel MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando filed a private members’ bill to legislate divorce, he could expose the conservative inertia of PM Lawrence Gonzi. Gonzi decided to take the country to a referendum. The PN government then was already associated with outdated censorship laws and an antipathy to trans rights. But Labour’s civil rights renaissance started right there, allying itself with the secularists that backed a normal divorce law. Then, Gonzi’s stubborn refusal to vote against the divorce law in the House – as demanded by the referendum result – became a historical hara-kiri, a satisfying conclusion for the theatre of the absurd.
And here is the Gonzi link to the Abela administration: it was Gonzi who first proposed a referendum on divorce, to then vote against the will of the majority in the post-referendum parliamentary vote, in one fell swoop alienating an entire segment of the population from his party. Hypocrisy in full view.
Now we have Robert Abela, and Chris Fearne of course, who up until a few months ago were braving the currents of Maltese conservatism to “save women from the doorstep of death” with the Prudente Bill, putting out a ‘compromise’ bill that guarantees a status quo for women. They literally slammed the door shut on pro choice activists because they were probably too polite about the whole affair...
Labour has already beat the retreat on the Equality Bill due to the conservative tub-thumpers. Its own police force, which protected so many corrupt elements by not even prosecuting them, prefers wasting the courts’ time by prosecuting comedians and satirists for offending an evangelist preacher. Now it has shamefully thrown women’s health to those baying hounds of integralism who have gnashed their teeth at everything from same-sex adoptions, to marriage equality, to IVF rights and PGF testing... just to keep the boat afloat in a sea of votes.
“The most feminist government in history…”