Page 2717 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 26 September 2007
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This bill devalues at most, or ignores at worst, wrongfully or with good intentions, this other side to giving birth: the need to keep reproducing that life every day, putting food on the table and providing clothing, shelter and education to a child who, regardless of how much they are loved by their parents, is, on one level, the product of a medical error.
This bill is a valiant attempt to turn back the clock, to return us to a time when children were seen as acts of God rather than as the result of medical interventions which, of course, can also produce miracles. It is an attempt to hold back the tide of new and perplexing situations, which new technologies will continue to confront us with. Thank goodness we have legal avenues to protect us to a small degree against the mistakes that will inevitably occur. I cannot vote to remove that avenue, for if we are going to have all these choices in the reproductive armoury, we need safeguards. We cannot use our ability to make law to lead us to believe that we have the right to take away the choice of seeking monetary support for the expenses incurred as a result of what is, essentially, the consequence of medical negligence. (Time expired.)
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (4.38): Mr Speaker, I rise to support Mrs Dunne’s Civil Law (Wrongs) Amendment Bill, and I commend Mrs Dunne for bringing this legislation on here today. Mr Speaker, why is this bill being introduced? Well, it is because we, the opposition, value the dignity of the child. We value the dignity of the child which is currently under attack in one of our own courts at this moment. There is a well-publicised case before the courts, and I am not going to refer to it here today in the interests of the privacy of those children involved.
Mr Speaker,what is the objective of this bill? The objective of this bill is to ensure that all children born healthy are spared the trauma of feeling unwanted or perceiving that their existence is somehow impinging upon the lives of those who gave the child life. To illustrate that paramount objective, I want to give you a little anecdote now. I am going to refer to a really sad interview I heard on the Ross Solly ABC 666 morning show a couple of days ago. A lady talking to Ross said that she was one of seven siblings born into a family, and that her younger sister committed suicide. She said the family believe—although they cannot be entirely sure about it—that the reason that this poor little kid committed suicide was because she had overheard her mother who, without any malice, had said “Oh well, that was the unplanned child. Number seven was always the unplanned child”. She carried that feeling with her, according to the sister who spoke quite publicly about that. It is exactly that circumstance that we wish to see avoided.
Mr Speaker, this bill of Mrs Dunne’s goes to the very core of what it means to become a parent and to be part of a family. The decision to create life inherently entails an obligation that as parents we will love, protect and nourish our children unconditionally. Mr Speaker, we do not believe we should seek to treat our children as commodities. Frankly, I believe that where it is demonstrated that parents do view their children as commodities for damages profit, their right to parent must be put under the closest scrutiny, and you have got to ask that question in terms of contemporary events right now.
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