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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 546 ..

through laws restricting termination of pregnancy. These provisions are freedom of thought, conscience and religion; physical security and bodily integrity; and privacy.

Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ensures our right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Laws criminalising pregnancy termination remove women’s rights to control their own bodies and lives by imposing one particular religious and moral view on all. As such these laws intrude on personal liberty and privacy in pursuit of moral and religious aims.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (9.17): This is a very important and fundamental matter that we are discussing here. I hope members will listen to what I have to say rather than to the assertion of the Chief Minister that it is just not so. Firstly, Ms Dundas, questioned how far we go back—six months, five months, four months, three months or two months? If you don’t know when life begins—we often adopt a precautionary principle in this place—then you should not adopt the section at all. Nobody in this place can stand up and tell me exactly where life begins. In all the abortion debates that we have had in this place, I have asked that question several times. It would make my life really easy if somebody could give me the certainty and the proof that life begins when the child is born. Fantastic—that would be the end of all the argument about abortion. But nobody has ever been able to, and I don’t believe that anybody ever can. The Warnock report, which was done in England some years ago, covered when you should be able to use stem cells and at which stage an individual life exists in the foetus. The conclusion was probably after 14 days—up to the 14-day point. There were some circumstances that would preclude bestowing the status of an individual life on the embryo as it was developing. So another version is 14 days. The interesting thing is that we have not agreed to it.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is mentioned as the basis of part III. If you go to the schedule at the rear of the act, clause 9 (1), “The right to life”, is reflected in clause 6.1 in the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights. If you go to article 6 and you read paragraph 1, you will find that it is very similar to 9 (1) in Mr Stanhope’s act:

Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.

The interesting thing is that section 2 in this act is not replicated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, so we do take it a step further. In reading through the six parts of the general comments on its implementation, it is interesting that, when you get to section 5, most of this section is about the death penalty, not about abortion or the termination of an early life. Section 5 says:

Sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age and shall not be carried out on pregnant women.

So if you are not pregnant and you are a woman you can be executed, although the general thrust of the whole article is that nobody should be executed, which I think most people here would agree with. This section says that death sentences shall not be carried out on pregnant women. The intent of this act is that the unborn are seen as a separate entity in their own right. That is why you would not execute a pregnant women as

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