Criminal Law Consolidation (Offences Against Unborn Child) Amendment Bill
27/11/2013
The Hon. K.L. VINCENT (00:28): I will speak as briefly as I can tonight. It has already been a long day of sitting. Probably I have done more sitting than most of you—that is a pun I will never get sick of making. I would like to start off by saying, as many members have, that this is a conscience issue for the Dignity for Disability Party. Having stated that, I will now try to be as cohesive as I can, given the hour, in telling you what is on my conscience.
I would like to note that my office has received about 50 emails on this topic in the past 48 hours or so, and at last count just over half of the senders of those emails were against the passing of this particular bill. There was also a snap protest on this issue organised by the South Australian Feminist Collective out the front of Parliament House today, as I am sure members are aware, rallying against the bill. I attended and spoke on issues relating to this bill, along with fellow MPs the Hon. Mr Hunter and the Hon. Tammy Franks.
I appreciate that this is a very emotional topic for many people if not all, and I appreciate that each person will respond differently to the death of a foetus or a baby that is in utero as a consequence of a car accident, a fall, a bike accident, an assault, an illness or any other reason. I also appreciate that there will be a range of responses felt by the partner of the woman carrying the baby, family members and so on. I have absolute empathy for those people. However, I also have a deep belief in good law making and I hold particular concerns about this bill when it comes to good law making, especially for the reason that has already been mentioned that for a bill with ‘unborn child’ in its title there is no definition of an unborn child in the bill and I think that creates a concerning breadth and scope for this bill.
I do not believe that making foetal personhood laws will solve the differing human emotions and grief that can occur when a baby is lost as a result of assault or intentional harm. Some of the emails to my office supporting this bill suggest that this bill could be one way of eliminating or at least reducing violence against women, presumably because if the perpetrator realises that they could be charged with the death of a foetus they will not assault the woman that they are planning to assault. I find this a little odd. I do not think that this argument recognises the often complex nature and issues surrounding domestic violence, in particular.
People who choose for any reason to perpetrate domestic violence can already be charged with assault and murder or having restraining orders against them, yet they still perpetrate these crimes, and I assure you I agree there remains far too much violence perpetrated against women as commentators such as Graeme Innes, Elizabeth Broderick and Natasha Stott Despoja as well as I all noted at and/or around White Ribbon Day on Monday through various media forums. However, I fail to see how the introduction of foetal personhood laws could change this. To improve the safety of women we need better education and support for women to report violence in relationships. I suppose what I am trying to say is that I believe the best way to protect a foetus is to protect the woman who is carrying it.
We need better support for women and their children and indeed all their family members to leave violent relationships. We need male leaders in sport, law, politics, music, the arts, religion, multicultural communities, medicine, health and every other sphere of life to be good role models and set high standards of behaviour and have no tolerance for violence against women. We need police to be adequately trained and resourced to manage domestic violence reports and respond to the needs of alleged victims accordingly.
We also need to understand that women with disabilities are far more likely, research would suggest, to face domestic violence than their non-disabled pregnant peers. Unfortunately there is no solid research I can find on the incidence of violence against pregnant women with disabilities but that is an area I am interested in investigating further.
We need to sort out how we treat the people we already have living, breathing and moving around the state before we worry about foetal personhood laws. We need to figure out how we are going to look after all the children in schools in this state we have failed to adequately protect from child abuse. We need to get protections in place so that people with disabilities that arguably make them vulnerable to abuse do not get exploited, assaulted and sexually assaulted while living in state funded facilities or anywhere else, I might add.
We need to figure out a way to prevent women with disabilities being twice as likely to experience violence and abuse as their non-disabled female peers. Whether a woman has a disability, a baby in utero, is black or white, employed or unemployed, rich or poor, they do not deserve to have violence perpetrated against them.
We need to focus on improving the safety of women. We need to enhance the rights of women. We need to do this not because a woman is carrying a foetus but because she is a living, breathing human being. Passing a law that makes foetuses of indeterminate growth into people is not the answer. Let’s focus on the people and the humans we already have in our community because at the moment we are letting them down.
