A Vote to Kill

25jul07


I THOUGHT killing baby Jessica with an injection into her beating heart was so wrong that good people would cry, "enough".

Surely we'd make sure such a cruelty could never happen again?

Wrong. Instead, Labor MP Candy Broad last week put up a private member's Bill that her supporters boast will let doctors kill children just like Jessica without any risk of prosecution.

Indeed, this is the only solid reason any of them give for backing it.

Jessica was still in the womb, but just a month from term when a prominent Melbourne specialist told her mother that ultrasound tests showed she might be a dwarf.

The baby otherwise seemed healthy, but her mother was deeply superstitious and highly emotional.

She insisted that under her traditions giving birth to a dwarf would bring bad luck and she threatened to kill herself if her child was not destroyed.

Her specialist agreed to abort her child. But at 32 weeks, Jessica was able to live outside the womb, and so first had to be killed.

She was - with a needle to her heart.

How deformed was she really? According to evidence presented in Federal Parliament, a nurse at the birth of the killed child noted: "On delivery, the baby doesn't look small."

Yes, it seems possible that Jessica had not only been healthy, but "normal" too.

Yet she'd been killed, just a month before term, when she would have been saved by our laws against murder.

True, Broad, a former minister, did not mention Jessica in introducing her Bill, which mirrors the state Labor Party's official policy but faces the opposition of Premier Steve Bracks.

Nor did she discuss late-term abortions generally - the abortion each year in Victoria of as many as 100 babies big and healthy enough to live outside the womb. And be adopted.

Instead, Broad insisted her Bill to decriminalise abortion in Victoria would actually change nothing at all, so go back to sleep.

"The Bill would neither alter the number of abortions performed or the way in which services are regulated," she told Parliament.

Indeed, "current practice will continue".

Really? But if Broad's Bill will change nothing, why bother with it at all?

Broad burbled through a few explanations last week that suggest to me that she is not being entirely frank.

Although abortion is still illegal under the Crimes Act, the 1969 ruling of Justice Clifford Menhennitt of the Supreme Court allowed abortions if a doctor agreed that giving birth would harm the mother's physical or psychological health.

This now-routine formality has made abortions so legally acceptable that 20,000 Victorian women each year have one - and with taxpayers' support.

That's a lot. Yet Broad still claimed the Crimes Act, with its technical ban on abortions, was "a significant barrier to accessibility".

Broad's other arguments were even weaker. For instance, she said abortion's "uncertain legal status creates an atmosphere whereby it is acceptable to harass women and doctors".

More piffle. In fact, the vast majority of Victorians would think it contemptible to heckle women and doctors at abortion clinics.

So if Broad's excuses for her Bill are mere fluff, what might her real reasons be?

Listen to her noisiest backers. Listen to Dr Leslie Cannold, president of Reproductive Choice Australia, who said Broad's Bill must pass to stop "anti-choice crusaders" from using the Crimes Act to prosecute abortionists.

But which abortionist has faced possible legal action in this state in the past couple of decades?

Cannold could cite only one - the doctor who killed baby Jessica, and who in fact was never charged with anything after a long and largely secretive inquiry.

Listen also to obstetrician Dr Desiree Yap, of the Association for the Legal Right to Abortion, who on 3AW likewise argued that abortion had to be decriminalised to protect abortionists.

She, too, cited just one case where a Victorian doctor might have faced charges. Again, it was the doctor who killed baby Jessica.

And Sunday Age columnist Terry Lane referred to the very same case this week, saying the Crimes Act had to be changed so that some "Catholic zealot" couldn't "persecute" someone like Jessica's mother "for trying to do the best for herself and her family".

Broad's three backers have blown the whistle.

Hers is not a Bill that changes nothing about abortion other than its image.

This is a Bill that its supporters hope and believe will give doctors more freedom to kill healthy, kicking, grimacing, thumb-sucking babies who are just a couple more weeks from birth - and to kill them for no better reason than a mother's wild superstition.

If our politicians are happy to have such killings in our hospitals, then they should vote for Broad's Bill.

But for heaven's sake, let's have them at least speak frankly about what they intend to do, and about the children they will allow to be so freely destroyed.

Let's have them admit that this is in fact a vote to kill Jessica, and unlucky children just like her.


Have your say on Andrew's blog at www.blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt

bolta@heraldsun.com.au