Opinion: Three Reasons Why A Woman Might Need To Have An Abortion In Malta

If you’ve been in Malta over the past few days, you wouldn’t have been able to avoid hearing some sort of discourse over abortion.

The debate has accelerated rapidly over the last few weeks or so over a legal amendment that would allow abortion when the mother’s life or health is in danger.

Whether or not should abortion should be legalised in Malta in every situation is a completely separate debate that everyone is entitled to have their own opinion on.

However, given the possibility that abortion in a particular instance may be legalised, there’s something else that needs to be considered. It may be important to consider other situations where a woman may choose to get an abortion.

1. Currently, health reasons are the ones being proposed but perhaps it would be better to clarify just what these reasons could be.

These could include severe pregnancy complications or having life-saving treatment like chemotherapy which can’t be administered to pregnant women.

It could be due to high risk of miscarriage or stillbirth, in which case it would be safer to have an abortion. It could even be due to a serious or fatal foetal abnormality which leads to pregnancy being non-viable.

However, the legal amendment doesn’t clarify the reasons, leaving it up to doctors to decide.

2. Apart from health reasons, there are also a number of economic and social factors which might lead a woman to consider getting an abortion.

This could be for example if a woman isn’t financially stable enough to support a child, perhaps because she is too young, still studying or even just starting full-time work.

A woman may also be unable to provide for another child if she’s a single mother or already has children.

3. Lastly, it would be worth considering the instance in which a woman becomes pregnant without choosing to.

She may have been coerced or forced into sex which led to pregnancy or she may have been raped. These are factors which are largely out of the woman’s hands.

The following thought experiment may help, imagine if a loved one was feeling the effects of any of these aforementioned factors. Would you blame them for at least considering having an abortion?

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