Abortion law changes to allow termination if mother’s health, life at risk – Robert Abela

Malta’s strict anti-abortion law will change to offer doctors and women protection if pregnancy termination is needed to protect the woman’s health and life, Robert Abela said.

Government will be presenting legal amendments in parliament within a couple of weeks to amend Europe’s most draconian anti-abortion law, the Prime Minister said in an interview with The Sunday Times of Malta.

However, Abela insists the proposed changes are not decriminalising abortion and his government does not have a mandate to make abortion legal.

Abela said Malta could no longer turn a blind eye to the fact that hundreds of women every year were performing abortions while fearing prosecution if they sought support.

“We discovered that there’s a long-standing practice at Mater Dei that goes back decades. In cases where the mother’s life is at risk, clinicians decide among themselves to terminate. But there are questions about the legality of that,” Abela said.

He added that the health department has proposed a legal amendment that states if doctors decide to terminate a pregnancy because medical complications are putting the “mother’s health or life at risk”, they will not be liable to criminal prosecution. “Of course, the mother will also be protected from prosecution,” he said.

The amendments have been approved by Cabinet and were also discussed by the Labour Party parliamentary group and will be tabled in parliament within the next two weeks.

Abela said a mature discussion on abortion was needed and this had to be led by civil society. He said the voices of women stigmatised because they underwent an abortion should also be heard.

The changes were spurred by the case earlier this year of American tourist Andrea Prudente that hit the international media spotlight.

Prudente was refused an abortion by Maltese doctors after she started miscarrying despite being told the pregnancy was not viable any longer. This put her at risk of developing sepsis, a potentially deadly blood infection.

Eventually, she was flown out of Malta to Spain where her pregnancy was terminated.

Immediately after the Prudente case, Health Minister Chris Fearne had asked the health authorities to propose changes to the law so that doctors will not be hindered in delivering the best possible care to their patients in such circumstances.

Prudente subsequently opened a constitutional case against the State in which she is arguing that lack of access to abortion led to her health being endangered and this amounted to a breach of her fundamental human rights. The case is ongoing.

Abela surmised in the interview that Prudente would likely lose the case in Malta but stood a good chance of winning it if she went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. The legal amendments being proposed, he added, were intended to avoid such circumstances from happening again.

READ ALSO: Andrea Prudente | ‘Malta draws you in, only to place you in a position of near death and peril’