At some point in the not-too-distant future, Australia’s federal Parliament will vote on whether a baby born alive during an abortion must be provided with lifesaving treatment or be left to die.

The latter is currently the case across Australia, although some jurisdictions are more transparent with the relevant data than others. We know that between 2010 and 2020 in Victoria, the cause of death of 396 newborn infants was listed as ‘Termination of Pregnancy’. In Queensland, the number is 328. In Western Australia, there were 27 confirmed abortions resulting in live births in which the child was left to die between 1998 and 2017.

The Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill 2022, first introduced by George Christensen and taken up by Senators Canavan, Antic, and Babet, seeks to make the provision of lifesaving treatment for such infants mandatory across Australia. If it is impossible to save an infant’s life because it is not medically viable, then ‘appropriate palliative care’, which may require clarification, would be required. At the moment it seems that Australia sets aside funding for ending life but not for saving it.

The bill refers to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states: ‘every child has the inherent right to life’ and ‘States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child’. The Convention defines a child as a ‘human being below the age of eighteen years…’ While the ‘born alive’ scenario is not specifically addressed by the Convention, logic would suggest that its definition of child would include newborn children, including those born during abortions, and that leaving an infant to die is a failure to ‘ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child’.

However, the logic of abortion de facto alters the concept ‘child’. If an unborn child is not a child, why is a born child one? In other words, if life does not begin at conception, when does it begin? To abortion supporters, what matters is not whether an unborn child is a person, and therefore the holder of certain rights, but whether it is wanted, hence children born alive during abortions are left to die.

Various pro-abortion groups have voiced their opposition to the Born Alive Bill. One such group is SPHERE – the Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Coalition. Their response to the bill asserts that it ‘is an infringement on the reproductive rights of pregnant women and may be detrimental to their health and wellbeing’. They also claim that the situation is covered by existing clinical practice, questioning the examples used.

However, ‘wellbeing’ is an obscure concept. One 2013 study from the United States, which surveyed 954 women who had sought, though not necessarily procured, an abortion, found that: ‘Women’s reasons for seeking an abortion fell into 11 broad themes. The predominant [overlapping] themes identified as reasons for seeking abortion included financial reasons (40 per cent), timing (36 per cent), partner related reasons (31 per cent), and the need to focus on other children (29 per cent).’ While some women seek abortions due to extreme circumstances, the themes in this study were more about convenience than life-or-death situations.

A 2010 Victorian study on reasons women seek abortions explained: ‘Women commonly felt too young or otherwise unready for the commitment of motherhood… Thirty women identified their youth and immaturity as important reasons for not committing to motherhood.’ In other words, they felt frightened and overwhelmed by the prospect of motherhood.

Another theme was ‘not wanting to overstretch the family’s capacity to the detriment of existing children…’ As one woman interviewed for the study, who had an abortion, said:

‘There’s just not room. Like we both work full time. I have morning shift, he has afternoon shift. And financially we, like, couldn’t change cars and move and all the things that it takes for a fourth.’

The Victorian study paints a picture of a society that devalues motherhood and of women who view abortion as a kind of retroactive contraception. Whether their unborn child was a person with the right to life, or whether this was a factor in the women’s decisions, was left unaddressed. It is tragic that these women felt so unsupported, but ‘wellbeing’ can mean pretty much anything.

Another point SPHERE made in response to the Born Alive Bill is that: ‘Legislative approaches that mandate ‘life-saving’ [note the quotation marks] treatment for extremely premature neonates ignore the law and variable survival rates that are highly dependent on the availability of advanced neonatal medical care and expertise that cannot be feasibly financed or standardised across and within Australian jurisdictions.’ Does this mean that it is too expensive and complicated to save these infants?

However, SPHERE also recommends that the government ensure that private health networks, whose ethical principles may be pro-life, are ‘funded to develop an integrated regional approach to abortion care that involves: Identifying gaps in service provision at a local level.’

SPHERE also raise the question of viability in their response to the bill: ‘There is broad agreement in the medical community that this period of gestation [22 weeks] is a ‘grey zone’, where a small proportion of foetuses have survived only through major medical intervention and most with ongoing disability…’

Their argument is that because abortions may result in children being born who may require ‘major medical intervention’ (surgeries, life support, etc) to survive, and may end up ‘with ongoing disability,’ medical intervention is not worthwhile or in what is perceived as the interest of the child.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organisation that became Planned Parenthood, asked, ‘Can the children of these unfortunate mothers be other than a burden to society – a burden which reflects itself in innumerable phases of cost, crime, and general social detriment?’

The answer is yes – such children can lead full, beautiful, and meaningful lives full of love. Moreover, a child is a human being with the right to life, regardless of whether he or she is viewed as a burden by abortion advocates, or what someone else thinks of their ‘quality of life.’

Another argument raised by SPHERE in opposition to the bill is that: ‘Later gestation abortions (i.e., after 14 weeks) are very uncommon.’ But uncommon does not mean impossible. Many children are aborted so early in gestation that they cannot survive, hence the Born Alive Bill provides for ‘appropriate palliative care’. If later-term abortions ‘are very uncommon’ then the bill would simply protect those few babies that are born during them. One wonders why this is objectionable to abortion advocates.

However, later-term abortions, and babies being born alive during them, may not be as rare as abortion advocates would have us think. South Australia’s Health website states: ‘In the last three years of data collection, there have been 5 terminations of pregnancy between 24 weeks to 26 weeks gestation.’ That’s over six months into pregnancy. According to ABC News, data from Queensland revealed that, ‘In 2015, 27 babies of five month’s gestation survived [abortions], only to later die after not receiving life-saving treatment.’

Imagine a woman who procures an abortion at 20 weeks gestation (five months) and her child is born alive during the abortion. The child is protected thanks to the Born Alive Bill and survives following major medical intervention. The woman elects to not raise the child, but she will always know her child is out there, and that the child will grow up knowing that its mother tried to abort him or her. That mother will likely experience guilt and distress over her abortion, which will affect her ‘wellbeing’.

There are those, myself included, that cannot help but notice that these discussions expose the practice of abortion as the killing an unborn child, largely for the sake of convenience, in the name of so-called sexual liberation.

Our elected officials will soon vote on a question that everyone knows does not require a vote – the question of whether an innocent and helpless, though unwanted, baby must be saved, or whether it may be discarded in the name of ‘wellbeing.’ Perhaps they will vote in accordance with conscience and reason, or perhaps they will decide that ‘sexual liberation’ and ‘wellbeing’ are more important than life itself.

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