Conflicting Unborn Child Laws in Australia

This is the Queensland Criminal Code Act 1899. It can be found online via Queensland Legislation. I was just looking through this the other day, it’s a bit of an interest of mine. Specifically, Section 313, Killing unborn child. I know, it’s a bit of a grim topic, but as with all criminal law, these rules are important to maintain social order and cohesion. Without laws, who knows what might happen? Anyway, “Any person who, when another person 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, is guilty of a crime, and is liable to imprisonment for life.” The second part, “Any person who unlawfully assaults another person who is pregnant with a child and destroys the life of, or does grievous bodily harm to, or transmits a serious disease to, the child before its birth, commits a crime. Maximum penalty—imprisonment for life.”

Essentially, Queensland society has decided that attacking a pregnant lady, and causing the death of her child, is equivalent to murder, and I think most of us would agree. What a horrible thing to do. Depriving not only a mother of her child, but also depriving the child of life. Of course, there is one major exception to this rule, the one that I’ve had greyed out this entire time, and I think you can probably guess what it is.

So again, Queensland society has decided that on the one hand it’s completely wrong to kill an unborn child, so much so that you could be sent to prison for life, but on the other hand, it’s fine. From a moral perspective, it seems to not follow. Look, I’m not here to debate this particular point, but I’d just like to say that we could all agree that almost every person on this planet would agree that stealing someone’s property is wrong, but we could also agree that a much larger proportion of the world’s population would disagree with at least some elements of this practice.

I found it interesting though, that not all states of Australia agree with Queensland law about the seriousness of killing an unborn child. For example, this is the Victorian Crimes Act 1958 in which the only mention of a pregnant woman comes under the heading of “serious injury”. “Serious injury means—the destruction of the foetus of a pregnant woman, whether or not the woman suffers any other harm”. Of course, they include an exception, “other than in the course of a medical procedure”. Just accidentally, I’ve stumbled upon the Victorian definition of woman, “woman means a female person of any age.” See, that wasn’t so hard. I’m not sure why politicians have been struggling so hard to define it. Admittedly, this definition was written back in 2008, so it seems like modern society has become stupider over the years. So killing a foetus in Victoria is considered “serious injury”, outside of medical procedures of course, where causing serious injury intentionally in circumstances of gross violence has a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment. So even within Australia, we seem to treat life of unborn children differently. There is clearly no universal agreement on this.

Although Australian society claims to be virtuous, if different states can’t even agree on “What is a person?”, then we’re a long way off from building a unified society that genuinely embodies its values.

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn