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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Wednesday, 10 March 2004) . . Page.. 965 ..

the perpetrator under civil law, what about human life? There is currently no protection for the life of the unborn child, and Mr Pratt is seeking to reverse that situation.

I wonder how many women, who have lost babies because they have not gone full term as a result of physical crime against them, the government has consulted with. I note with interest Mr Stanhope’s comments: “ideological”, “no consensus in the community”, “an unborn child needs to be a separate person away from the mother,” “legal”, “spiritual”, “social”, “economical”, et cetera.

When does life begin? That is a big debate, and it is very important that we have this debate right now. We cannot simply put a bandaid over it and say, “This is when life begins” and draw a line—and that is it. Mr Pratt has actually gazumped the government, and it will have to go back to the drawing board, as was indicated by the Chief Minister earlier this week when he said, “We will think about that next year.”

The government does not want this topic to surface, because the jury is still out. It flies in the face of all that Mr Stanhope and this government stand for, so how on earth could this Labor government agree with the bill? The human rights bill does not recognise life until the baby actually pops out of the womb and can live unaided. This is an extremely contentious issue—I had to smile when Mr Stanhope said that Mr Pratt’s bill was divisive.

Indeed, we have said that under civil law there are opportunities for the perpetrator of such a crime against a woman to be prosecuted. However, to that woman her unborn child is a real and growing person. Indeed, if people have been keeping up with the media, they will have seen some exceptional foetoscopy in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday 6 March.

We need to be extremely careful about the path we are travelling down. We need to be very careful that we have not got to a place where we think, “We’ve arrived. We know exactly when life begins and ends. We’ve got it all right.” No, we have not. The author of the article, the science writer for the Telegraph, Simon Benson, wrote:

The images are provoking. They present another way of looking at the question of when human life truly begins. …

The images of early, tiny embryos were taken using a specially designed wide-angled camera—only 1mm thick—which was inserted through a fine needle.

How can we not accept what Mr Pratt is proposing? How can we say that there is no consensus in the community? Always err on the side of caution, then. It is not a debate about abortion; it is a debate about the rights of a woman to be protected if she is attacked and as a result of which attack, her unborn baby dies. We have laws to protect her when her handbag is snatched, as I have said.

I will stand corrected on this, but I understand that a death certificate must be issued for a child that dies having not gone full term at 20 weeks and/or weighing 400 grams. How can a death certificate be issued when there has not first been a life? Isn’t a death certificate issued when a person dies? We have a problem. Something is growing and developing in the womb, as some photographs—which other members may see—clearly

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