Abortion’s backdoor: Don’t let them fool you | Mariana Debono

Mariana Debono is a philosophy PhD candidate, poet and writer

The government is trying to introduce abortion into Malta without telling us. They don’t want to call it abortion. They don’t want open debate. They want to sneak it in quietly, by changing the law bit by bit, hoping we won’t notice.

This time, it’s a proposal to protect doctors who don’t report when a woman has taken an abortion pill. In other words, if a woman shows up at hospital after taking pills to end her pregnancy, doctors won’t be expected to say anything.

They want silence. They want complicity. They want abortion without calling it abortion. Let’s not be fooled.

The current law protects life. And that matters. Because life is there from the very beginning. Science is crystal clear on this—life begins at conception. That’s not a matter of opinion, religion, or politics. It’s basic biology. So let’s not pretend we don’t know what we’re talking about here. When a woman takes the abortion pill, it ends the life of a human being; her unborn child.

And that protection includes truth. When someone ends the life of another, especially the most vulnerable, we can’t stay silent and pretend nothing happened.

But this proposed amendment does exactly that. It gives doctors the possibility to, not speak, not report and just look away.

This isn’t about compassion. This is about changing what’s right and wrong… quietly, through the back door.

Doctors are there to heal, not to hide. They’re trusted with life, not silence. And the law should support truth, not deception.

Let me be clear. Just because abortion is wrong doesn’t mean we should treat women who go through it harshly. If a woman takes the abortion pill, it’s often out of fear, pressure, loneliness, or despair. She needs help, not punishment. She deserves care, not judgement. We should offer her real support—physical, psychological, and emotional. Every woman should be treated with dignity. Always.

But we don’t help women by lying to them. And we don’t fix pain by covering up the truth.

If a baby dies because of an abortion pill, and some are absolved from saying so; is that justice?

What kind of country do we become when we start treating the ending of life as a private matter, not a public concern?

Let’s be honest. If the government wants to legalise abortion, it should have the courage to face the people. Not push it through under the radar.

But more than that; if abortion is wrong, we must say it clearly. Not with anger. But with conviction. Because the law is there to protect what is right. Not to excuse what is wrong. Silence is not neutral. It’s permission. And we cannot give permission to the killing of the most voiceless among us.

Every time we look away, a human being disappears and the world pretends it hasn’t lost anything. But we have lost something. We’ve lost someone.