Watch: PL President Calls Out Pro-Life Doctors Who ‘Recommended Abortions Overseas’
Labour President Ramona Attard claimed that some doctors who signed a petition against Malta’s new abortion law had actually recommended their patients get an abortion overseas.
“With regards to the petition, I hope the people signing it understand that they’re associating themselves with people who mocked a woman who lost her pregnancy,” Attard told a political rally today, referring to a recent parliamentary speech by Opposition Leader Bernard Grech.
“We speak to people. Could it be that among the signatories of the petition are people who, in the silence of their medical clinics, recommended mothers to terminate their pregnancies overseas?”
“Perhaps they issued this advice to help the mother out or for reasons only they themselves know, even though it was illegal. If people in that list had recommended abortions overseas, the least they could have done was to not be dishonest with themselves, even for the sake of their own professional credibility with their patients.”
Attard also hit out at Archbishop Charles Scicluna and bishops Joseph Galea Curmi and Anton Teuma, who urged MPs to oppose the bill on the grounds that it will allow doctors to terminate pregnancies if they believe the mother’s health, but not necessarily her life, is at risk.
“While the Church does a lot of good to society, I was shocked at their arguments,” she said. “According to them, a pregnancy can be terminated if the mother is about to die but not if her health is in serious danger.”
Attard, who has previously opened up about a miscarriage she suffered seven years ago, referred to the traumatic incident again today when calling out Grech for the manner in which he mocked US tourists Andrea Prudente.
“When you’re passing through such a traumatic experience, the last thing you need is to hear a person who occupies a constitutional role mocking people in your situation, like Bernard Grech did with Andrea Prudente,” she warned.
“Does Bernard Grech know what losing a pregnancy means? Does he know what it’s like for your body to keep producing milk for a new life that you know will never come to be? Does he know what it’s like to feel dead inside when you lose a pregnancy but have to walk around as though you’re still pregnant?”
Does he know the trauma that people like me passed through when we were forced to give birth to a dead foetus, an experience you don’t know whether you can ever fully psychologically recover from?”
“I expect politicians to help women passing through these traumas, not mock them.”
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