Zoe’s Law By Mrs Vera West

     I have written before about my concern with botched abortions leading to a live baby, who is then left, conveniently, to die. Somewhat related to this issue; there is a move to consider foetal manslaughter laws, at least in New South Wales. Some background to the law here is given at this very good website:
  https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/the-foetal-manslaughter-debate-should-unborn-babies-be-separately-protected/

“The case of R v Iby [2005] NSWCCA 178 reiterates the earlier decision in R v F (1996) 40 NSWLR 245 which found that a homicide can only be committed against a being that is “fully born in a living state.” However, it should be noted that Chief Justice Spigelman remarked that the ‘born alive rule’ is based upon “anachronistic… [and] indeed antiquated, factors” in so far as it “adopts an artificial and non-scientific concept of when life begins.”

Other states:

Indeed, legislation enacted in other Australian jurisdictions has repealed the common law rule. Section 313 of the Criminal Code in Queensland, for example, contains a crime of ‘killing an unborn child’ which prescribes a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for: “Any person who, when a female is about to be delivered of a child, prevents the child from being born alive by any act or omission of such a nature that, if the child had been born alive and had then died, the person would be deemed to have unlawfully killed the child”. Western Australia and the Northern Territory also have discrete offences for ‘killing an unborn child’, which apply “when a woman is about to be delivered of a child.”” And the Australian Capital Territory has enacted a law against “child destruction.”

     The question that has been raised before  is: would this therefore be a backdoor way of prosecuting women for obtaining abortions? Now, I believe that abortion should be illegal as it was in most of modern Western history, but leaving that aside for the point of this particular  argument, I do not see how it could be unless there was a continuation of the practice of allowing live births from late term abortions to continue. Clearly, that practice is an entirely different moral and legal argument to early term abortions, and it is possible that a feminist could support abortion in early term, while rejecting what amounts to infanticide. Surely the feminist argument of a right to one’s body, does not continue after the foetus has been removed? Whose body is it then, and when does the women’s right therefore end?

     Therefore, there is no good reason for not having what has been called Zoe’s law, after an unborn baby who died after her mother was tragically hit by a drugged out driver. There has not been a floodgates of problems from other jurisdictions from foetal manslaughter laws, and we should not expect this here in New South Wales either.