Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Thursday, 1 April 2004) . . Page.. 1571 ..

symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. In fact one in five turn into carcinoma, a form of cancer.

The promise of a cure is always attractive. None of us wants to see somebody in agony or see a loved one die. My mother died of cancer. I would love to see a cure for cancer. I certainly would not like to think that other lives were being sacrificed to find a cure for me. That is a hard call. I think we all need to look at ourselves, enter into our own hearts and have that discussion with ourselves before we have the discussion as a society.

Those examples were taken from an article written by the President of the ACT Right to Life Association, Mary Joseph. As just those three examples clearly show, the jury is out. There is no evidence to suggest that there will be a cure and perhaps there is no evidence to suggest that there will not be a cure. Again, if you want to apply the precautionary principle—we often talk about the precautionary principle in this place but we are selective in its use—the precautionary principle itself would say that, given that we do not know, first, whether or not we consider that the embryo is a life, and, second, we do not know where this research will take us or what it will achieve, then we need to be a little more cautious before we launch into what we do.

I said in the last debate—and I have said it many times—that I am of the opinion that life begins at conception. If somebody can disavow me of that I would be delighted because it would make many of these decisions so much easier. It would make it so much clearer for all of us and it would make some of these debates so much easier. But, until somebody does so, my respect for the human embryo will say that I could not possibly vote for a bill like this, much less vote for a bill that would say that, for the first eight weeks, we consider these cells, or these excess embryos, fair game for harvesting of any kind. I do not believe that is appropriate, and I do not believe it adds to us as a society that we devalue life at that early stage.

This bill has attracted a number of amendments. I have some temptation to support the amendments of Ms Tucker. They seek to limit what is being proposed by the bill, as I understand it, to allow assisted reproduction technology to continue, but nothing more than that. That will be allowed to continue to be carried on in the ACT even if this bill goes down.

With that in mind I would say that I will not be supporting any of the amendments at this stage. I think we need to send a clear signal that, first and foremost, as lawmakers the overriding right to life is the object of what we do. Going back to the bill of rights, it says that everyone has a right to life after they are born. I recall that there used to be a sign on the side of a big building in Newtown saying that the greatest violation of a woman’s rights is to abort her. That was a reference to the huge number of female embryos that are aborted. What this bill will do I think is debase even further our attitude to the embryo. What it does now is turn the embryo simply into an object that can be harvested and used for eight weeks. I think that is a horribly retrograde step.

Perhaps the minister will explain where the eight-week limit comes from; the logic of that would be interesting. As I have said, the Warnock report in the UK said two weeks. How did they achieve that? They found a certain number of characteristics or changes that occurred after two weeks. They thought that up until two weeks was acceptable but not beyond that. If we can have an answer as to why we are going to go four times that

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .