When MEPs ask critical questions, the correct answers to which would leave the Commission utterly exposed, there is only one option open to the Commissioner responsible for drafting the reply: make a lot of unnecessary words, whilst sidestepping the essential question. One may go about it more skilfully or less skilfully – but the seasoned reader will always check whether the nub of the matter has been addressed. If it hasn’t, it is an embarrassment for the Commissioner, who evidently has no useful answer to offer and hopes that no one will notice.
Such an embarrassment is the response given by Commissioner Lahbib, a fanatic supporter of abortion, to the question posed by a number of MEPs as to how the Commission could have come up with the preposterous idea of allocating funds from the European Social Fund to finance the killing of children, which is euphemistically referred to as ‘interruption of pregnancy’.
The Commissioner writes:
“One of the specific objectives of the of the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), set out in Article 4(1)(k), is that of enhancing equal and timely access to quality, sustainable and affordable services, including the access to person-centred care including healthcare. Therefore, the ESF+ can support initiatives, selected at national level, that aim to ensure and enhance equal and timely access to healthcare services.”
Whilst that is true, it leaves the crucial question unanswered: how can one assert, without turning the meaning of the term on its head, that the deliberate killing of a healthy child in the womb of a healthy woman is a ‘health service’?
Commissioner Lahbib has no answer. She passes over the decisive question in silence, hoping that no one will notice.
To plug this obvious gap in her argument, she puts forward another argument:
“With regard to medical termination of pregnancy carried out in line with the law of the country where it takes place, the CJEU has found that it ‘constitutes a service within the meaning of Article 57 TFEU.”
Yes, dear. But this is completely irrelevant. The CJEU could say as much about prostitution, pornography, and similar services, if they are carried out in line with the law of the land. If contract killing were legal in a country, then, according to the case law of the Court of Justice, this would of course also constitute a ‘service’, and that classification would be accurate. But the ESF+ cannot be used to fund just any kind of services. You are saying that it can be used to fund health services. The decisive question is then not whether abortion can be described as a ‘service’ in any sense, but whether it is a health service.
If the Court had ever asserted that abortion is a health service, the Commissioner would surely not have failed to mention this.
But Commissioner Lahbib leaves that question unanswered. Why? You guess.
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