Page 398 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 7 March 2006

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(a) a lawful abortion; or

(b) anything done by a pregnant woman in relation to her own unborn child; or

(d) anything done otherwise within the usual and customary standards of medical practice.

That is pretty clear, I would have thought. In the framing of this amendment, an amendment which seeks to add teeth to an otherwise weak bill, we have enshrined the provisions in existing law about abortion rights and the rights of women to choose abortion and the rights of women to privacy.

We have gone out of our way—we have executed cartwheels in anticipation of the Chief Minister’s smokescreen counterattack—to ensure that our amendment enshrines provisions under existing law. Why? Because we do not want the damn debate; we do not want the waters muddied, diverted down that track. We want to see put in place good law that goes to protecting the pregnant woman and her unborn, which is why we support the government’s bill. It is at least a bill that provides something that we currently do not have. I have put that on the record again and again.

We have the media today asking the question of me: “Is this just a backdoor approach to abortion?” Why did they say that? Because the Chief Minister probably put that stupid idea in their heads. I make that very, very clear. In fact, his rambling attack on the amendment was just a load of old bollocks. It was simply a smokescreen on his part to cover his failure to take action. I put that on the record.

Let us look at the Attorney-General’s rejection of our point that his law is too soft and that the penalties are not comprehensive enough. We have said that his law is wishy-washy. We have said that his law provides a soft deterrent. There is some deterrent but it is still a soft deterrent Yes, we acknowledge that there are significant penalty increases—25 per cent for assault, 30-odd per cent for GBH and 25 per cent, if my memory serves me correctly, for manslaughter. Yes, they are significant penalty increases. But these are penalty increases on a very narrow base. What we are saying is that the overall frame of the government’s legislation leaves so many other scenarios untouched. While there are significant penalties, they are on a narrow base.

Let me illustrate this way the point I am making: this law will be of no compensation to a pregnant woman who is assaulted, and there will be little justice for her for the benchmark, most-likely offence. I am talking about a direct violent assault, an intended violent assault, on a pregnant woman. Yes, there may be a significant increase of three years maximum for GBH if the woman happens to lose her pregnancy. But there will be no compensation or justice for the death of the unborn.

Under this law that the Chief Minister is proposing, there can be no manslaughter applied for the loss of a pregnancy because he is concerned that we might be seen to qualify the termination of the foetus before that foetus had become a living being. That is unfair

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