Rights of the unborn child

Shortly before our celebration of the birth of Jesus, Pierre Mallia claimed in this paper that abortions are carried out by doctors in Malta in special circumstances.

I would argue that he has made a number of serious errors of judgement. In the first instance, an unintended, even if unavoidable, miscarriage consequent to urgent and necessary medical treatment is not in any way equivalent to a wilful abortive procedure. If it were, it would be illegal in Malta.

Secondly, the acceptance of an unavoidable secondary consequence of a primary action is not logically equivalent to the acceptance of such a consequence purposely intended as the primary action. The fact that five-ten per cent of patients may die during open heart surgery to cure heart disease does not mean that we should accept intentional homicide or termination of life.

Thirdly, he argues that the human value of a foetus is linked to the number of cells and/or the level of development of the brain. This argument is not only wrong, it is also exceedingly dangerous. Practically, one could easily extrapolate the argument to devalue people with profound brain damage, or to allow the termination of, or experimentation on, human foetuses on the basis of an arbitrary number of cells or stages of development.

His fourth error was to consider, from an ethical perspective, the rights of the pregnant woman superior to the rights of the child to be born, simply by considering the child to be non-human at an early stage of development. Incredibly, he also considers the rights of the father during pregnancy to be non-existent, or else completely ignores them in his argument.

Although he clarified that he was speaking in his personal capacity, for some reason a plaque illustrating his title as President of the Malta College of Family Doctors (which he is currently not) was reproduced in a photo accompanying the article. It will be a long time before I thrust aside the mental image of a photo of this plaque, issued by the College of which I am a member, juxtaposed with a price list for abortions in the UK at different stages of development, including after 19 weeks (four months) when a baby is so well-developed that he or she can feel, taste, see, smell and hear. Jean Karl Soler Rabat