Abortion consensus ruined

Tonight's edition of Xarabank discussed abortion , a subject that triggers strong and passionate reactions in Maltese society. There was a national consensus in Malta about the abortion issue until a couple of weeks ago when the Government decided to push a proposal that extends the illegality of abortion to a Constitutional ban. The proposal is intended to bind future generations but, in practice, abortion tourism remains a common reality - Maltese women travel to Italy or the UK to perform abortions just like Irish women - where abortion is also banned by the constitution- travel to England. Women I know, who are prepared to consider abortion as a personal option, tell me that if one day abortion becomes legal in Malta they would still prefer to go abroad away from the gossip of judgemental neighbours. Toni Sant recently blogged about the subject:

It started a couple of weeks ago when I blogged about a proposal by the Malta government to entrench something that's already illegal by criminal law into constitutional law. Since the subject of the constitutional hack-job happened to be abortion, follow-up comments on my blog about this topic degenerated into a debate between those who are pro-life vs those who are pro-choice. Meanwhile, our grubby politicians continue to make a medieval spectacle of themselves. Thankfully, other bloggers picked up on the actual bone contention and understood that the main argument was (and should be) "don't mess with the constitution!" An excellent blog entry on this topic comes from cartoonist Mikiel Galea, who is also a worthy writer of social commentary. Another eloquent entry comes from Antoine Cassar, even if it's only related to all this in a tangential way. If you can't read Maltese, or don't give much credence to blogs anyway, there's an article in The Malta Independent by Raphael Vassallo that's also most poignant.

Malta sandwiched between EU and USA - Wired Temples