This article first appeared in the Sunday edition of Malta Today 

I can already see it happening and am already getting this feeling of ennui that we are going to have a repetition of the divorce debate. All reason will go out the window, insults will fly back and forth (and have already started) while wildly inaccurate, inflammatory and misleading statements will start being used and issued instead.

The topic is the Morning After Pill, which is not yet available for distribution in Malta because its importation is considered illegal. The reason for this is explained on the Health Department’s website: “Morning-after pills are high-dose hormonal birth control pills that work by stopping or delaying ova (the eggs) being released from the ovaries, inhibiting sperm to prevent fertilisation, or preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg. The ethical debate on this issue centres on whether a pregnancy begins at fertilization or at a later stage of the reproductive cycle, such as at implantation. *Any mechanism that blocks or inhibits the implantation of a fertilised ovum (is considered) an abortion, therefore forms of the morning-after pill is considered as an abortifacient. In view of its potential abortifacient mode of action, and in view of the fact that, in Malta, abortion is a criminal offence, the morning-after pill is not licensed locally and is illegal.”

The Women’s Rights Foundation are campaigning for the MAP, also known as emergency contraception, to be made legal, and have filed a judicial protest in this regard. The Foundation is contesting the fact that the MAP is illegal and demanding the right to access to various forms of contraception because, “The right of women and couples to decide on number, spacing and timing of their children has been long enshrined in a number of international documents, many of which have been signed and ratified by Maltese governments”.

You are free to debate the pros and cons of this to your heart’s content; there is a lot of scientific research out there for those who want the proper information. Basically it boils down to one’s personal beliefs of when life begins. As with the even more heated controversy surrounding abortion, those who are firmly entrenched in their own position will not budge. But for those who still have mixed feelings I believe that an intelligent debate is essential for them to be able to make up their minds. Whether that is going to happen will depend on how capable people on both sides of the fence are of keeping their cool and discussing the issue rationally.

I don’t agree when stridency replaces calm arguments or when people who are against the MAP are mocked or ridiculed for their moral beliefs – it is their right, after all. Unfortunately, as much as I would like to give all sides the benefit of the doubt, it all got off on the wrong foot with such statements as issued by the Women for Life group who claimed that, “The morning-after pill in other countries also appears to have encouraged abusive behaviour and rape by men, allowing male perpetrators to cover their crimes by forcing the morning-after pill to their female victims.”

Such patently absurd and frankly ridiculous conclusions are not doing any good at all for those who are genuinely not in favour of the MAP on moral and ethical grounds. What are they saying, that a rapist will be concerned that he has made his victim pregnant? I’m sure that it is the very last thing on his mind. And, needless to say, an unwanted pregnancy is not the only evidence of a rape, as I’m quite sure that Women for Life have heard of such a thing as DNA samples collected through rape kits. This strange argument also assumes the position that sex is only engaged in by men forcing themselves on women, when (hello) women enjoy sex purely for its own sake as well.

It is the kind of mindset which is reminiscent of the 1960s when the advert of The Pill created outrage because it claimed that women would now be free to engage in sexual intercourse with the same kind of liberty as men had for hundreds of years. “The Pill’s revolutionary breakthrough, that it allowed women to separate sex from procreation, was what conservatives feared most. The theory was that the risk of pregnancy and the stigma that went along with it prevented single women from having sex and married women from having affairs. Since women on the Pill could control their fertility, single and married women could have sex anytime, anyplace and with anyone without the risk of pregnancy.” (from the TV documentary “The Pill and the Sexual Revolution”)

From everything I have read on the subject, I see nothing wrong with the Morning After Pill. After all, many women are already practicing some form of birth control from the Pill to the coil to asking the man to use a condom – all methods used to prevent the sperm from fertilizing the egg to avoid getting pregnant and to be able to enjoy sexual activity for its own pleasures. If they weren’t doing this we would still have families of seven or more children which were the norm in my grandmother’s day. The point is that the days when the Catholic Church preached to women (and men) that the only reason to have sex is to procreate, and that the only acceptable form of birth control was the Rhythm Method, are long gone. So, as I see it, the availability of emergency contraception would be no different to already existing methods of contraception.

It may be a reality which is difficult to accept for some, but it is unrealistic to expect others to conform with your own beliefs and deny a form of contraception to them, which is, after all, purely a matter of choice. Much like the divorce debate which had people up in arms because “now everyone will start getting a divorce” (which didn’t happen) you cannot expect others not to have access to the MAP just because you are of the belief that it may potentially act as an abortifacient.

And much like you did not get a divorce simply because divorce is now available, similarly, no one will be forcing you to pop a Morning After Pill into your mouth the day after you’ve had unprotected sex, just because your chemist now stocks it.

*UDPATE: this whole sentence has since been removed from the website