Watch: ‘This Isn’t Abortion, It’s Pregnancy Termination’, Doctor And MP Says Of Malta’s New Laws
As Malta prepares to update its stringent abortion laws, PL MP and doctor Malcolm Paul Agius Galea insisted that the legal changes shouldn’t be interpreted as a first step towards the legalisation of abortion.
“It is default practice in the medical world to terminate pregnancies when the mother’s life is in danger,” Agius Galea said on ONE TV’s Paperscan yesterday.
“The crucial point is that we’re not terminating the pregnancy because we consciously want to terminate it. Abortion is when you enter a woman’s uterus to consciously and deliberately terminate a pregnancy.”
During an interview with Times of Malta yesterday, Prime Minister Robert Abela confirmed that the government will update the law to clarify that doctors are allowed to terminate pregnancies if they believe the mother’s life is at risk.
Although this is already common practice at Mater Dei Hospital, Abela pointed out that there are questions surrounding the legality of it all and whether doctors can technically be prosecuted for terminating unviable pregnancies.
Agius Galea said he was shocked when he learned about these legal loopholes during PL parliamentary group meetings.
“I realised that doctors have long been practicing something that wasn’t legally covered,” he said. “If someone decides to take legal action against you, you will be accused of committing murder. Doctors fight so much to save lives so can you imagine the tragedy of being accused of murder? We aren’t legally blind on this issue and must ensure these doctors are legally covered.”
Andrea Prudente and her partner
This update to the law was triggered by the case of Andrea Prudente, an American tourist who was 16 weeks pregnant when she suffered a miscarriage while on holiday in Malta.
Although her pregnancy was deemed to be unviable, she was denied an abortion and was eventually airlifted to Spain, where she terminated her pregnancy.
Prudente has since filed a constitutional challenge against the Maltese authorities, arguing that the clauses of the Maltese Criminal Law which prohibited her from getting an abortion go against the European Convention on Human Rights.
Cover photo: Left: Andrea Prudente, Right: PL MP Malcolm Paul Agius Galea
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