Godfrey Farrugia takes reproductive rights for women to parliamentary committee

Independent MP wants health committee to discuss women’s reproductive rights and abortion decrminalisation

Independent MP Godfrey Farrugia
Independent MP Godfrey Farrugia

The independent MP Godfrey Farrugia has asked the chair of the parliamentary committee on health to place reproductive rights on the next committee agenda.

Farrugia, partner of independent MP Marlene Farrugia, is backing her call to put forward for debate a private member’s bill calling for the decrminalisation of abortion, which places criminal liability on women who seek a termination, who stand to be imprisoned for up to three years.

Farrugia, nominally a pro-life MP, wrote to committee chair and Labour MP Silvio Grixti asking that “sexual and reproductive health and rights” be placedon the agenda of the next health committee meeting.

“A holistic patient-centric health care delivery system is one the objectives of which are quality health care and accessibility in real time, backed by the necessary resources and supported by patients’ rights… I am counting on your co-operation so that the Health Committee discusses this topical issue,” Farrugia, a family medicine specialist, told Grixti.

The parliamentary committee is composed of Labour MPs Silvio Grixti and Deo Debattista, Nationalist MP Stephen Spiteri and Farrugia.

The Farrugias were never known to be pro-choice politicians: their last official party statement as Democratic Party MPs on abortion  was that the party was “pro-life” and toyed with the words “pro-choice” by claiming that women “should have a real choice against terminating an unwanted pregnancy” by proposing adoption for unwanted children.

The bill Marlene Farrugia presented in the House calls for the decriminalisation of abortion and to ensure no person or medical professional is criminalised “for the choice pertaining to their medical health and/or the provision of medical assistance. Such criminalisation is discriminatory.”

The amendment Bill calls for the striking off of Article 241(1) of the Criminal Code, which outlaws the ‘procuring of a miscarriage’, which carries a prison conviction of up to three years for women.

The Bill also demands the striking off of Article 242, which holds anyone assisting the abortion to the punishment for wilful homicide or wilful bodily harm, diminished by one to two degrees; Article 242 which holds any medical professional who administers “the means whereby the miscarriage is procured” liable to imprisonment of four years; Article 243(a), which holds anyone who causes an abortion by “unskilfulness in his art of profession” liable to a fine of up to €2,329.

The Bill asks that articles 242 and 243(a) are substituted with a 10-year imprisonment for whoever carries out a forced, non-consensual abortion for non-medical reasons “by means of violence, force, deceit, bribery, threats or coercion”.