How Delia blew it - Ranier Fsadni

Last week, six Nationalist MPs abstained from voting on a parliamentary motion championed by their own leader, Adrian Delia. If you think the story is essentially about discrimination against lesbian couples and about PN disunity, you only have Delia to thank. He took on a significant, sensitive issue – fertility and conception – with a worrying background. It called for gravitas. Instead he addressed it in a way that came across as hypocritical opportunism, while deflecting attention from the government’s own hypocrisy. It’s difficult to see how he messed up without some background. At the heart of it all is the current IVF law, which forbids surrogacy and the donation of sperm or eggs (gametes donation). Among other consequences, it means lesbian couples cannot have IVF treatment in Malta. It doesn’t mean that the law directly discriminates against lesbian couples. The law discriminates between kinds of conception. The motive is not to interfere in adult freedoms. It’s to avoid any possible unintended harm to children: the psychological consequences of having a biological parent who is ‘merely’ a donor cannot be known with certainty, at least just yet. The total number of...