Page 347 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006
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You are not being honest with the people of Canberra. You have introduced into the Assembly today an amendment to this piece of legislation which is designed to reopen an opportunity for those that oppose abortion to take that opposition one step further through the creation in a foetus of a separate personality which would then be subject to the ordinary operation of the criminal law. That is your intention. That is what you seek to achieve. I do not dismiss your right to seek to achieve that. You all oppose abortion. You all oppose a woman’s right to choose whether or not that is a procedure or an option which she wishes or might wish to take for herself. That is your position. You do not accept the right of women to choose an abortion and you will do everything in your power to prevent abortions.
But you owe it, in my submission, to the people of Canberra to be honest with them and tell them that that is what you are doing. I believe it is dishonest of anybody to seek to introduce law reform or changes to the law of this order without letting the people of Canberra know that that is what you are trying to do. I do not believe it is honest at all. It shows absolutely no respect to the people that you purport to represent. It is not honest.
We will not support the amendment because of the very complicated complex moral and legal issues which it would create. They are complex because of the dichotomy of cause which would be raised or created between a pregnant woman and an unborn child. There is absolutely no community consensus on that. We see that in this place time and again. There is no community consensus on the moral issues that unborn child offences, such as you seek to introduce, would create or raise.
As I have said—and I will conclude with this summary of the position—creating a separate legal personality in the unborn child will give rise to complex legal issues that have the potential to create conflict. That is what they would do—they would create a conflict between the rights of the mother and the rights which you seek to invest in the foetus. They will have profound implications for the mother’s right to privacy, to freedom of thought, to freedom conscience and to freedom of religion. Most particularly—which, of course, is what you seek to achieve—they will have a most profound implication on a woman’s right to choose an abortion.
The offences in the government’s bill will effectively achieve the same result as unborn child offences, except they will do so in a way that the whole community can embrace outside the context of the debate around the right to choose to abort or not. This is because—and this is, of course, why we chose this particular model—the aggravated offences in the government’s bill are referenced against the mother. It is an offence against the mother. They do not create a separate legal personality in the foetus from the mother and they therefore avoid the conflict of rights between the mother and the foetus, which your amendment would create. It would create two sets of rights. There is a set of rights in the mother and you seek to create a set of rights in the foetus—rights which the law currently does not recognise, and does not recognise for very good reasons.
Our bill will leave the current law with respect to abortions unaffected and thereby avoids the angst and the division in the community that reopening the debate would inevitably bring.
Mr Pratt: The same as our amendment.
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