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| A potential victim of crime. |
Zoe's Law is a bill currently before the New South Wales Parliament to amend the section of the Crimes Act dealing with grievous bodily harm, adding a specific definition of 'unborn child' (being a foetus of twenty weeks or more gestation, or a mass of at least 400g).
Most troubling for pro-choice advocates, it includes this provision:-
(2) For the purposes of an applicable offence:
(a) an unborn child is taken to be a living person despite any rule of law to
the contrary, and
(b) grievous bodily harm to an unborn child is taken to include the
destruction of the unborn child.
There are savings provisions to the effect that the section does not apply to medical procedures or acts by consent of the woman concerned. These exist to placate women worried about the erosion of their right to decide to legally terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Why we might be worried by this type of reform? We only have to look to Georgia, USA in 2011 - when a representative tried to pass a bill that put the onus on women who miscarried to prove they weren't guilty of murder. NSW Liberal MP Chris Spence, who introduced the bill, should be able to
understand why women's advocacy groups are touchy on this
subject. Granting personhood to a foetus is traditionally a legal
position that has not boded well for a woman's right to choose to take a
pregnancy to full term or not.
Mr. Spence has beseeched anyone with doubts about the intent of Crimes Amendment (Zoe's Law) Bill 2 (2013) to go read the second reading speech. Heavily doubt-laden, I did just that. I learned that the bill is a response to a case where a woman (Brodie) was crossing a road when she was hit by a drug and alcohol affected motorist. She was thirty-two weeks pregnant at the time. The force of the impact caused extensive injury to her - shattering some of her bones. The previously healthy foetus, which she had named Zoe, was stillborn. The driver responsible was charged, and served jail time for the offence of grievous bodily harm of Brodie. Zoe was listed as an injury to Brodie, not a death in and of herself. The core part of this issue seems to be that the parents felt less vindicated in their grief because their unborn child was not treated as a person for the purposes of the Crimes Act.
Mr. Spence refers to a variety of legal mechanisms which apply only to a foetus lost after 20 weeks. The loss must be recorded with Births, Deaths & Marriages and certificates issued. The baby bonus is available. Maternity/grief leave is available. It seems an arbitrary line. In circumstances where a birth is happily anticipated by a mother, if the pregnancy fails at 19 weeks and two days we don't extend the baby bonus or maternity leave, and this feels arbitrary and wrong. Does a matter of days or weeks make that much difference between the grief felt over a miscarriage? I suspect not. Drawing the line at 20 weeks for the state to include vengeance into criminal statute is similarly arbitrary and insufficient, if the goal is to give grieving parents satisfaction. It is an area which I think must be deeply personal and deeply subjective, and in such fields the law is an indelicate instrument.
