IVF Bill a complete travesty, warns former PL minister

Former Labour Minister George Vella has branded the IVF Bill “a complete travesty of ethics, morality, and human dignity, allegedly to remove ‘discrimination’ imposed by nature herself”. Furthermore, he questioned the reasons why the government was going down a “slippery slope” to deliver “the utopic promise of equality”. The former foreign minister, who until June last year was a key figure in Joseph Muscat’s Cabinet, let rip against the government’s plan to introduce embryo freezing and adoption on Twitter. The Bill also seeks to widen access to treatment for same-sex couples and persons who are single by choice and to launch a public consultation on surrogacy. Dr Vella’s harsh criticism was levelled within hours of the unveiling of the Bill by Health Minister Chris Fearne, who emphasised that Labour’s parliamentary group had unanimously backed the changes. Dr Vella’s outburst followed an opinion piece published last month in the Times of Malta in which he had sounded the alarm bells against the introduction of abortion in Malta.  On that occasion the former minister, who is also a retired specialist in family medicine, had voiced concern on the government’s intention to...