Page 2427 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 June 2005
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Mr Stanhope does not want to create a conflict of rights between a woman and the child, the embryo that she bears. He does not want to do anything that might break down the legal fiction that children in the womb do not have rights. But there is nothing in our experience that tells us that these people in the womb do not have rights. We know in our hearts, if we thought about it, that they do have rights.
The progress of science tells us that these people have rights. Once upon a time we could content ourselves by saying, “It is not really a human being.” But we now know that, through the miracles of IVF, these human beings can be conceived outside the mother’s womb—they are definitely separate from the mother—and they can be conceived from genetic material that does not belong to the mother. It put paid to the notion that a human embryo is just part of its mother’s body and does not have rights separate from the mother.
I could say that we would have a legal fiction. Mr Stanhope would call it a longstanding tenet that should not be tampered with. But what we see is a progress in our thinking, a progress in our understanding of what happens. What Mr Pratt’s bill does is draw attention to the heinous end of the scale, where people willingly, negligently, recklessly inflict harm on someone that results in the death of a wanted baby. And that is a huge loss.
Mr Seselja touched on the issue of a huge loss. We all know someone who has wanted a baby, who has lost it through miscarriage or through an accident, or the child has died. We know what that is. We know what that loss is. There is not one person in this room who has not experienced that, either at close hand or, somewhat removed, through their circle of family and friends. We know what loss these people experience. Imagine, if you experience that loss in the way that Kylie Flick did, how much more that loss is exacerbated. There is no recourse for Kylie Flick and for her family. And there is no justice for the baby that was killed.
We have all sorts of strange anomalies. It is possible for someone who is born and who has suffered damage because of a botched attempt at an abortion to sue for damages for that. Those rights only seem to accrue because that person was born. But the damage was inflicted and the damages are paid as a result of something that happened when this person did not have, according to Mr Stanhope, a legal, separate identity.
There are already a vast number of inconsistencies in the law. Mr Stanhope’s wanton look—“We cannot discuss this because it is too difficult, it is too inconvenient and it gets in the way of a good argument, and I really do not want to have that argument”—is not a reason. We have been sitting here, time and again, having Mr Stanhope, when we passed the Human Rights Bill, saying, “I’m gunna fix up chapter 5 of the Criminal Code.” When we debated a similar bill to this one in the previous Assembly, he was gunna fix up chapter 5 of the Criminal Code. He comes in here today and says, “I’m still—
Mr Stanhope: We do it with every chapter of the Criminal Code, one by one.
MRS DUNNE: Whatever the chapter is. “I’m gunna fix up the relevant chapter of the Criminal Code. I’m gunna do it.” He comes in here today and says, “I really need to
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