Archive for July 22nd, 2008

For many pregnancy is a joy. It is a climatic point within almost any stable and lasting relationship. It represents a continuation of the self, the ultimate union of the partners and the prospect of forming a new branch of the family. For such individuals the news is not only welcome but cause for celebration, neatly fitting in with their imagined prerequisites for their ‘happily ever after’.

However there exist others for whom the news or prospect of pregnancy is not a joy but a fear or a nightmare scenario come to life. For these the prospect of missing a period cycle is a heart-stopping moment, a harbinger of foreboding times ahead and an end even more cataclysmal than the prospect of being seriously gored in an accident. Of course the latter category of persons tend to be young or at the height of their careers, dancing upon the knife’s edge in the game of presumed love.

For such individuals a pregnancy could spell disaster. The loss of one’s job, career and livelihood for the working woman, being abandoned by a deserting boyfriend to face a mountain of responsibility on her own, and I am not even going to get into the psychological anguish in the scenario of the impregnation having been involuntary. For all of these scenarios and more, the pregnancy is akin to a single card within a house of cards suddenly collapsing and bringing the rest down with it.

In the Maltese Islands one of the more prominent support groups goes by the identifier of Gift of Life with Paul Vincenti a lead spokesperson for the group. They strive to socially and psychologically support single mothers, rape victims and other persons who have been less than joyous about having fallen pregnant. Their priority has been the protection and preservation of all new forms of life from conception.

Prominent on the choice front, on the other hand, has been Dr. Emmy Bezzina whose stance from the outset has been the permitting of would-be mothers the choice to abort a pregnancy in order to release themselves of the shackles of circumstance and to regain control of their lives. Of liberal persuasion, he has steadfastly argued in favour of the sanctity of choice for the would-be mother in situations where there exists a conflict of interest.

While these two individuals may regard each other as opponents and perhaps also a threat to their own outlook, it is interesting to note that both individuals genuinely feel that they maintain the moral high-ground over the other, that their rival is unable to or unwilling to understand their own respective viewpoints, and that their opponent’s respective outlooks are in fact a recipe for disaster. However neither individual possesses a monopoly on common sense and it is to be expected that their on-going struggle will be superseded by revelations that neither individual may fully concur with. Both individuals’ contributions are necessary but for as long as they work to each others’ exclusion, life after pregnancy will continue to seem like a grim scenario to the unexpectant.