Education in Malta – Documents issued by Ministry of Education
MALTA LGBTI Action Plan 2015-2017.pdf
Gender Law
Creating children on demand
According to recent reports, there is apparently a “resolute” intention to introduce embryo freezing in Malta. However, this intention is based on error and sheer contempt for human life.
The Annual Work Report of the Embryo Protection Authority for 2014 was presented to the House of Representatives on 15th July 2015. According to this report, there were 170 treatment cycles carried out during 2014, resulting in 49 pregnancies. This resulted in a success rate of 28.82%. From a look at statistics kept by the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, the success rate in Malta is higher than that of the UK, which incidentally, permits embryo freezing. This goes to show that embryo freezing is not necessary to increase the success rate of IVF. Again, from explanations readily available on the website of Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the risks involved with embryo freezing are that not all embryos survive freezing and eventual thawing, and that occasionally, no embryos at all survive. Moreover, they also state that due to the freezing and thawing process, the chances of having a baby using a thawed embryo are lower than if a fresh embryo were to be used. These pronouncements of the British regulator directly contradict such manifestly incorrect statements that a law without embryo freezing cannot be successful.
According to certain reports, the new law being drafted increases the maximum number of eggs which can be fertilised to five, but the maximum number of fertilised eggs which can be implanted in a prospective mother was decreased to two. This guarantees that embryos will be frozen. If a couple does not wish that the embryos created by them are adopted, then a court application can be filed for a judge to decide on the matter. At this stage, one can only observe that after having made a mess of things, the law would dump all the resulting moral dilemmas onto the judiciary, turning each judge in front of whom such an application comes, into a potential gaoler or executioner.
It is also understood that the proposed new law will include the possibility of lesbian couples to make use of IVF. Since women cannot produce sperm, the only source of sperm would be sperm banking. However, this would take procreation even further away from the loving environment of a mother and a father united in marriage, and reduce women’s eggs and men’s sperm to mere commodities to be traded freely. This would truly reduce human procreation to a cold and impersonal business transaction.
Embryo freezing as well as donation of eggs and sperm would eviscerate the meaning of human procreation. The government’s declared intention to open up the possibility of IVF treatment to gay couples and single mothers is wrong on many levels. First of all, IVF treatment is meant to alleviate infertility. The proposed amendments insult infertile couples by equating their anguish at being unable to conceive to the mere wish of gay couples to “have children”. Gay couples are not suffering from infertility. Their inability to conceive is totally expected and totally natural, since nature never intended for human procreation to result from two men or two women. Secondly, the notion of single mothers is that they need additional support when bringing up children alone, due to the need to take up employment. This would fly in the face of initiatives taken to date to help single mothers find employment and bring up their children. One would be hard pressed to find any single woman who, of her own volition, would opt to procreate without even wanting to meet the other side of the biological equation.
It is wrong to approach this matter as some sort of service to create children on demand and sell to the highest bidder. Children are human beings and as such, and also in accordance with Malta’s international obligations, need the presence of a mother and a father. The proposed amendments would create orphaned children, intentionally brought into the world without a father or without a mother. The proposed amendments insult the dignity of the human being and the rights of children. The child’s right to know one’s mother and one’s father and to be raised by them would be grossly violated, if such amendments come to pass. Children are not commodities to be created on demand and sold, and were the Embryo Protection Act to be amended according to recent proposals, the embryo would not only not be protected, but harmed in all possible ways.
Ramon Bonett Sladden is a member of Life Network
We are facing a travesty of representative government
‘Politicians did not represent the populace… they were travelling for private firms. If they represented anything, it was vested interests, vulgar but not even popular.’ – G. K. Chesterton
Among his numerous interventions, Pope Francis seems to like to reflect and comment on the role of politicians, and with good reason. Politicians have a most powerful impact on the common good and the long-term consequences for the welfare of the communities and nations they are expected to serve.
In one interview he said with his customary directness and outspokenness, that a politician has three major responsibilities.
Firstly, he has to declare with utmost clarity what he intends to do once in government. He must present society with an electoral programme that is clear and well thought-out, explaining why he wants to do this or the other.
Secondly, he must be honest in presenting his position.
Thirdly, he must be independent of campaign contributors or, if unavoidable, make clear who is financing his campaign and by what amount. In short, transparency and clarity must be paramount.
One does not need to look afield to realise how pertinent the Pope’s exhortations are.
G.K. Chesterton had an even more scathing comment on the political class, when towards the end of his life in 1935, he said: “I identified political liberty, rightly or wrongly, with representative government. Then came the breach… I became quite convinced of two facts. First, that representative government had ceased to be representative. Second, that Parliament was, in fact, gravely menaced by political corruption.
“Politicians did not represent the populace, even the most noisy and vulgar of the populace. Politicians did not deserve the dignified name of demagogues. They deserved no name except perhaps the name of bagmen; they were travelling for private firms. If they represented anything, it was vested interests, vulgar but not even popular.”
Locally, the Pope’s warnings against political corruption, and Chesterton’s contempt are so visible in the inability of successive governments to safeguard our physical heritage. This is reflected by the irreversible damage inflicted on our environment by the disfiguring urban development that has ruined so much of our architectural heritage and choked off so much of our precious open spaces.
But while the public is constantly being shocked by new underhand deals and highly questionable projects that impact the physical environment, an even more sinister and unrepresentative development is going on.
For some reason best known to itself, this government seems to be hell bent on dismantling our Christian heritage under the banner of being progressive, inclusive and liberal. Without any political mandate whatsoever, the family is being redefined, gender ideology is planned to be imposed on our children, porn shops legalised, vilification of religion decriminalised and now requests for surrogacy and abortion.
We have lost all sense of shame and propriety. The fact that pornography is easily accessible should concentrate the minds of those in power to do their utmost to curtail rather than promote such an evil activity that degrades and ruins the lives of people so ruthlessly exploited in this sordid commerce. Besides, is promoting lust, promiscuity, deviancy and sexual irresponsibility in the interest of our country’s development?
One wonders how vilification of religion is a breakthrough in our emancipation. Offensiveness and hatred do not need official encouragement. If anything, there is already a marked decline of civility and good manners that once were the hallmark of our people.
Worse still, as a member of Life Network, I am particularly irked by the fact that the Embryo Protection Act, fashioned after so much consultation and deliberation to give maximum safeguards to nascent life is being scrapped after a charade of so-called consultations with civil society.
We should be infuriated that we, the people, are treated like goats and that both political parties seem totally indifferent to the traditions and beliefs that have underpinned our country for generations.
Despite the celebrations marking the 450th anniversary of the Great Siege that saved our Christian heritage, and despite popular participation in the festa season, Malta is rapidly losing its Christian identity.
People get the politicians and the governments they deserve. Pope Francis has made it crystal clear that men of good will have to enter the fray and take a stand in the public sphere.
Time will tell whether the Maltese will live up to his appeal and put a stop to this rot.
Klaus Vella Bardon
Podcast of Radio Program 27.08.2015
The best interests of the child
A quarter of a century ago, Malta ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In view of this fact, it is worth reflecting on some of the stipulations of this Convention, especially given that certain quarters are calling for the elimination of the legal protection which Maltese law affords the human person before birth. The rights set forth in the Convention aim to serve the inherent dignity of the human being. It is precisely the respect for this dignity which inspires the Convention to clearly state in its Preamble that the child needs appropriate legal protection before, as well as after birth.
To date, Maltese law performs admirably in this regard. Amongst other things, the Embryo Protection Act prohibits the freezing of embryos, experimentation with embryos, surrogacy, cloning, as well as the creation of a human embryo for any purpose other than that of implanting it in a prospective mother. It is also worth noting that harsh penalties are in place for anyone who violates these provisions. Therefore, anyone who knows that the embryonic stage is one of the early stages of the formation of the baby inside the mother’s womb, would also know that the Embryo Protection Act goes a long way towards fulfilling the principal aim of the Convention, which is that of protecting human dignity in the weakest of its possessors.
The Embryo Protection Act and the Convention go hand in hand in many other respects. In another part of its Preamble, the Convention states that the child is best brought up in a family environment. Article 7 of the Convention buttresses this with its obligation on states to ensure that the child has a right to know his parents and be cared for by them. The Embryo Protection Act affirms this in its definition of a prospective parent under Article 2 as “either of two persons of the opposite sex who are united in marriage, or who have attained the age of majority and are in a stable relationship with each other.”
In all legislation affecting children, it has always been held that the guiding principle should always be that of the best interests of the child. This principle ensures that children are always at the centre of any decision that may affect them. Therefore, one is compelled to ask whether the calls coming from some quarters also aim to safeguard the best interests of the child. To answer this, one must take stock of the immense pain which a couple suffer when they discover that one or both of them are infertile.
There is no question of balance between circumventing infertility and safeguarding the rights of the child. Although the wish to conceive and bring up children in a family environment is an extraordinarily noble wish, one must always be aware that it is the child who has the right to be cared for by parents, and not the prospective parents who have the right to a child.
Limiting the definition of prospective parents to one male and one female united in marriage or in a stable relationship is an act of respect for the dignity and well-being of the human person, since it is widely affirmed by experts and legislation alike that the family environment is the best environment for raising children. To alter the definition of prospective parents to allow same-sex couples would open the door to anonymous gamete donation and surrogacy.
The donation by women of eggs and by men of sperm would have a twofold effect. First of all, it reduces men and women to mere producers, akin to cows producing milk. Secondly, it would render the child, once born, unable to know the identity of one of his or her biological parents. This would have grave consequences for the child, who would essentially be deprived of a considerable part of his or her identity.
Surrogacy is the act of placing the fertilised egg, against payment, into another woman who would eventually give birth to the child and then hand it over to the so-called parents. This objectifies women and strips them of their dignity, as evidenced by many feminists who firmly oppose this practice. Surrogacy turns women into mere carriers and children into orphans.
It is precisely all of this which should be more than persuasive enough to dissuade our legislators from changing any part of the Embryo Protection Act. This law is a guarantor of human dignity and as such, should be left to carry out its task of safeguarding the dignity of the human embryo from conception.
Ramon Bonett Sladden
Opening the Door to Abortion
Waste not, want not. So the story goes. Any leftover food is either frozen for when hunger strikes again or thrown away in the bin if one has had enough. This is how one of the proposed amendments to the embryo protection law wants to treat human life.
Create a surplus of human embryos; use as many as you will. The human embryos within the parental project, that is the ‘wanted ones’, will be gestated lovingly, nurtured and spoilt once born; the ‘extra’ human beings will be frozen indefinitely until someone decides on their bleak future. Most will remain suspended on ice, completely forgotten, thrown away or eventually destroyed. So many lost lives, lost loves, missed siblings, daughters or sons, never given a chance.
Why would we choose this kind of IVF? Why an IVF that devalues and destroys human lives by embryo freezing when we have another option that works just as well? I have met parents who had IVF overseas, their frozen embryos always at the back of their minds, parents who did not have the option of freezing unfertilised eggs (ova). Parents who know that they are not going to claim those human embryos, brothers and sisters to the children they already have, and this causes them a lot of psychological distress.
Any changes to the embryo protection law that endangers the life of the human embryo risks opening the door to abortion
What are the real reasons behind these sinister proposed amendments? We are a country that cares about life. We treasure our children, born and unborn. The Embryo Protection Act took a long time to come into force but now we are seeing results that compare well with the rates of other countries. We are helping infertile couples who choose IVF without undue risk to nascent human embryonic lives.
How can we risk removing protection from the human embryo?
Considering that great human rights causes of our time and all times have always had the cause of life as the point of reference as well as the dignity of the human person, of every human person, any changes to the embryo protection law that endangers the life of the human embryo risks opening the door to abortion.
Protection of life from the moment of conception to natural death cannot be compromised. There is too much at stake.
The human embryo is a vulnerable human being, voiceless and defenceless. This does not mean that he or she does not have the intrinsic right to life and human dignity as a member of our species. How can we consider freezing human lives as a capricious option just because an ill-advised local women’s group makes it their crusade?
Article 8 of the Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights speaks of respect for human vulnerability and personal integrity and states that, in applying and advancing scientific knowledge, medical practice and associated technologies, human vulnerability should be taken into account. Individuals and groups of special vulnerability should be protected and the personal integrity of such individuals respected.
In the same declaration, article 16 also speaks about protecting future generations and states that due importance has to be given to the impact of life sciences on future generations, including on their genetic constitution.
Has anyone bothered to ask children born from these technologies to speak? Does anyone care? Has anyone bothered to read about the pain and insecurity inflicted on children born from anonymous sperm donation, another amendment being suggested? Look up ‘Anonymous us’ on the internet and read their stories.
How are we to speak of protecting future generations when we are creating ‘surplus’ children and freezing them?
How are we to speak of protecting future generations when we, by surrogacy, create children to be intentionally separated from their birth mother, children who will intentionally never know their biological father, children brought up without ever experiencing the complementarity of motherhood and fatherhood?
What about the rights of the child conceived to know and be raised by the biological parents whenever possible? Malta is now the only country in the EU which still holds on to a completely pro-life culture. Other countries do not even value life in utero but justify abortion.
How can such countries care about what happens to human embryos? The human embryo is not respected, therefore it is graded, discarded, frozen or used in research.
We should know better. Backed by science, we affirm life from conception to natural death. Affirming human life we should not compromise the law which protects this life in the earliest stages.
Politicians are called to bravely resist the enormous onslaught to change our prolife laws and culture. The proposed changes to the Embryo Protection Act were not listed in the electoral programme of any political party. The absolute majority of the population do not want these changes.
I call on people of good faith to unite and resist these changes. Anonymous egg and sperm donation, embryo freezing and surrogacy are highly objectionable on moral, ethical and scientific grounds. They do not serve a child’s best interest.
Let us keep all human life in Malta safe. Hands off the Embryo Protection Act.
Miriam Sciberras is chairman of Life Network Malta
Stop the forced imposition of gender ideology in EU schools
Join this petition! Presidency of the European Parliament and European Commission: Stop the forced imposition of gender ideology in EU schools : http://citizengo.org/en/26581-refus-lideologie-du-genre-dans-les-ecoles-lue?tc=gm&tcid=15462350
12-Year-Old Bravely Rejected Abortion After Rape, She Has No Regrets 23 Years Later
Lianna Rebolledo was only 12-years-old when she was brutally raped by two men near her home. At the hospital, doctors told her she was pregnant and advised her to have an abortion. However, Lianna decided to keep her baby after she asked the doctor if abortion would ease her pain and he replied ‘no.’
She said, “If abortion wasn’t going to heal anything, I didn’t see the point. I just knew that I had somebody inside my body. I never thought about who her biological father was. She was my kid. She was inside of me.”
Read more on Lifenews.com
On defective babies, defective choices by Marie Benoit
On October 1995, the Daily Mail ran a pair of articles on the same day jointly entitled “Should Melanie destroy her twins?” Columnist Polly Toynbee, said yes. No, said Dominic Lawson, then editor of The Spectator, whose wife had given birth to a Down’s syndrome child. Melanie and her husband, columnist Brian Astbury had conceived Siamese twins. The Astburys said no to abortion. “Our babies will be born out of love and into love. Everything else rests with fate and the surgeon’s skills.’“ The twins were born prematurely and joined from the breastbone to the navel. There was heartbreak of course for both children could not live as Siamese twins.
They were, operated and seemed to be doing well However, in the end the twins died.
Anyone who has seen the film The Elephant Man will never forget the moving portrayal of John Merrick, played so sensitively by John Hurt. It is the true story of a man in Victorian England who became known as the Elephant Man because of his terrible deformities.
Merrick was discovered in a circus freak show by Dr Frederick Treves, a surgeon at London Hospital. Dr Treves also a lecturer in anatomy, initially took a professional interest in Merrick’s grotesquely enlarged skull, abnormal curvature of the spine, and the elephant-like fibrous growth which covered 90 percent of his body. Treves’ professional interest soon developed into a warm and compassionate friendship with this very special individual.
Merrick had been abandoned by his mother ‘who had the face of an angel’
‘I must have been a great disappointment for her. If only I could find her so she could see me with such lovely friends as I now have. Perhaps she could love me as l am. I’ve tried so hard to be good.’ says Merrick at one point. Merrick had yet to convince others that his life was worth living. As if in response to their characterization of him as a worthless freak of nature Merrick cries out: ‘I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being!’ Merrick cannot be cured of his ailments but
Dr. Treves tells him: ‘We can care for you!’ Resigned to his fate, Merrick reassures the physician and friend: ‘l am happy every hour of the day. My life is full because I know that I am loved.’
The Elephant Man gently but resoundingly rebukes society which has come to accept the so-called eugenic abortions of deformed foetuses, and in some cases even the death of new-borns found to be handicapped.
His is the story of we so poorly misjudge the quality of human life – how we judge people by their package. His is the story of how we make such indefensible moral choices. For it’s not how we decide in individual cases whether life is ‘worth living’, but it is the very fact that we presume to make such a decision about people which strips us of our own humanity.
The argument that women must have the right to choose an abortion because they might be faced with a deformed foetus is morally bankrupt because it wrongly assumes that the handicapped are not worthy of living.
Although genetic testing has its positive side and leads to the diagnosis of diseases that cause pain disability and death, technology is rapidly becoming available to produce designer babies. There will always be parents who out of ego or some perverse view of children as a perfect product, want to pick and choose genes according to a master plan. Should society encourage that or even allow it?
The problem, of course, is the prenatal test. Abortion naturally follows as what is seen as to be a benign, humanitarian test. It is the test that women are now taking for granted.
They have the test in order to determine whether to paint the nursery pink or blue, or in the alternative, whether to kill the child, who, but for the test, would have slept in nursery. Can that make any sense at all? The natural concern of parents that a much-wanted child should be healthy has been translated into killing children who are not healthy.
When death is the foregone conclusion for those foetuses who don’t measure up, how can we possibly say that we have benefited from the test – apart from allaying anxiety of expectant parents with healthy foetuses?
Moreover the test, like everything else, are subject to human error. How many babies have been aborted following an erroneously interpreted result?
In years past, families did not discover the child’s disability until she or he was born. Nor was there disappointment accompanied by medical possibility of ending that life before birth. But now the option made available to the family are soul –wrenching.
It’s all well and good that those of us who have never been in their shoes can see a silver lining to the dark cloud of disability, but for the family the dark cloud remains.
In light of the obvious burden to the parents, we must ask ourselves we are being when we argue for abortion on the basis of the child’s suffering, if he or she is allowed to live.
Honesty would compel the parents to admit that it is their hardship that they wish to avoid. And while no one would blame them for wanting to avoid that hardship, we are entitled to ask whether the killing of an unborn child can be justified fairly on that basis.
If there are parents of handicapped children who possibly say to themselves, ‘I wish that my child had never been born, they are not alone. There are parents of dangerous criminals, drug addicts and merely insolent or disrespectful children who would join me in that chorus.
But rarely will you ever hear the disabled themselves telling us that they wish they had never been born. Family hardship simply cannot outweigh the sanctity of human life itself. What is needed is a
society that offers the family of a disabled child the financial support and round-the-clock assistance with care. Can any parental hardship justify the killing of an innocent human being?
No matter our religious beliefs, the idea of saving the weakest is fundamental to the moral order of society.
And now the anonymous Pro-Choice Malta is calling lawmakers to give women the right to choose to have an abortion even when the child is healthy. Of course abortion has been going on in our country for ages. I recall interviewing Fr. Charles Vella, then of the Cana Movement, for The Sunday Times of Malta in the early seventies about abortion in Malta. Women who want an abortion have been going abroad for ages. But if we legislate, we will open the gates of hell and make abortion easier.
It is heartening to know the the President of Malta told a delegation of Pro-Life advocates that her government would never legalise abortion and as president she would never sign such legislation.
Virtually every piece of abortion legislation throughout the Western world permits termination of a pregnancy where the life of the mother is threatened. The principle is based on the choice of the evil between two possible victims, both of whom are innocent. In such a case, the life of the mother with her already existing relationships, and possibly other children to take care of – prevails over the nascent life of the unborn. So clear is the principle that virtually no pro-life advocate would dispute it. On this point, pro-choice and pro-life advocates are in agreement.
Yet pro-choice advocates attempt to capitalise on this one obvious exception in order to justify abortion for any cause. But cases when a choice has to be made between the life of the mother or the life of the baby are a rare exception perhaps no more than one-tenth of one percent of all abortions. Even when a mother’s life is threatened, the baby can typically be delivered sufficiently early to avoid fatal consequences to either the child or the mother.
Abortion attacks the very weakest, whether they are disabled or not. Those whom Matthew’s Gospel called ‘The least of these.’ Our business is not to eliminate them for whatever reason. We have to make sure that abortion is not legalised in Malta. Abortion is murder.