In his opinion piece of December 13 titled ‘Women’s Rights’, Martin Scicluna goes to great pains to try and frame the argument in favour of abortion as a matter of woman’s reproductive rights, and going so far as portraying abortion as a human right, again resting his argument erroneously on an assertion made by the supposedly Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks, who, plainly speaking, should know better.
To hide what abortion really is, pro-abortionists camouflage the act of killing an unborn child by using misleading phrases like “sexual and reproductive rights”.
Giovanni Bonello, former judge of the European Court of Human Rights, refuted this argument through his contribution in a post under the online version of the same article when he asserted: “Martin Scicluna seems to take on board, without challenging it, what Muiznieks is reported to have claimed, viz, that abortion is human right.”
Human rights in Europe are not what Muiznieks says they are, but what the European Convention of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights say they are. I invite Scicluna to quote exactly where either the convention or the court have declared abortion to be a human right.
What the court said is entirely different: where the national domestic legislation of a European state allows abortion, then it is a violation by that State to hinder the effective exercise of that right. Neither the convention nor the court have ever made abortion a human right.
Scicluna presents abortion as a matter for the conscience of the woman, and trivialises the argument by stating that abortion is a matter of opinion.
Since when is killing another person a matter of opinion or conscience? When society acted in such a manner there was only one phrase that described that civilisation: barbaric.
When a woman is pregnant, science and not some morality tells us that life in the womb of a woman is fully human and distinct from the moment of fertilisation. By the time most abortions can be performed, the baby already has a beating heart, identifiable brain waves etc. As a human being, like all of us, the unborn child (which is the first stage of development) has the unalienable right to life and deserves the full protection under the law.
If killing has become a matter of conscience and opinion, then we can stop prosecuting the killers of Daphne Caruana Galizia because I am sure the killers will claim that in their opinion they did the right thing and it does not go against their conscience. Thank God that in our justice system these are not allowable arguments for acquittal.
The fact that many governments in the world have legalised the killing of the unborn does not make it any less wrong.
The ancient Romans (called civilisation) forced gladiators to fight to death, and threw slaves and Christians to the lions for entertainment. This was an allowable, lawful practice, promoted by the State but it was still wrong and barbaric.
Hitler exterminated Jews, ethnic Poles, other Slavic groups, Soviet citizens and prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, black people, political opponents, the Roma and the “incurably sick”, to cleanse Germany and keep pure the Arian race.
He was then the law but what he did was still barbaric and something we still remind ourselves of every year by commemorating the victims of the Holocaust.
This year Iceland is boasting that it has eradicated Down syndrome not through some cure but through abortion, the killing of unborn children diagnosed as potentially with Down syndrome.
What makes Icelandic policymakers any different from the concept of eugenics practised by Nazi Germany to maintain the so-called purity of the Arian race. The fact that it is the government of Iceland is promoting this practice does not make Iceland any less barbaric then the Romans and Nazi Germany.
The world today is no less barbaric when millions, upon millions of unborn children are exterminated every year, in the name of reproductive rights. The National Right to Life Committee in the US reports that since 1973, following the Roe vs Wade decision, 59,115,995 human beings have been killed through abortion in the US alone, six times the number of people Hitler exterminated in gas chambers.
If Scicluna wants to make us believe that these were killed because the mothers were raped, the child endangered the life of the mother, were severely infirm and the other extremes used to create sympathy for the pro-abortion argument, then I ask Scicluna not to treat us as fools.
It is a fact that the world remains a barbaric globe. We have become cold-blooded to the horrific conditions of the Syrian innocent caught in an endless conflict trapped in political chess game, the hunger and deprivations of people in Africa and the drowning of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, the abandoned homeless in the streets of Europe, the US and in the so-cold advanced societies and the biggest plague the murder of millions of unborn children all over the world.
Humanity is barbaric, there is no other word, lost in its egoism, self-centeredness, where money, comfort and “rights” seem to be the only creed.
Contrary to Muiznieks’s opinion, Malta does not have restrictive regimes when it comes to abortion. Malta defends life, every human being, from a child’s inception to an individual’s natural death. Our country protects the life of Scicluna and the child that is yet unborn.
I wonder what Scicluna would say if people start to argue that when a person reaches the age of 80 the family members or the State should have the right to put such elderly life to death because as an elderly he is less human, he is less independent, and has become a financial burden. When we play with life these bizarre arguments become reality.
Tonio Fenech is a former Nationalist Party minister.