Implications For Women's Legal Status And Public Health

Running head: TORT LAW
TORT LAW
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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TORT LAW Crimes Amendment (Zoe’s Law) Bill 2013 (No 2) is referred as one of the most
controversial bill that has been proposed to be enacted by Australia’s New South Wales
Parliament1. The purpose of this bill is to provide legal status to a fetus the age of which is 20
weeks or more and further to provide redress to such fetus under legal guidelines of Criminal
Provisions of Australia in cases involving grievous bodily harm if at all enacted and come
into force. The act was focused to be acquainted with the criminal misconduct of grievous
bodily harm against an unborn child and will impose penal duties upon the person causing or
influencing the same. However, the enactment of the bill has been lapsed on prorogation on
8th of September 2014. This study aims to scrutinize importance of enactment of the Zoe’s
Law in order to provide protection to the right of a fetus or an unborn child as per the legal
guidelines.
The history of the bill states that the name Zoe’s Law has been adopted from the name
of that unborn child of New South Wales whose mother named Brodie Donegan was struck
by a car which caused her several injuries and subsequently concluded in the thrashing of her
32 weeks old fetus. The incident took place in the year 2009 but the driver was accused with
injuries caused to Brodie Donegan and not with Zoe’s death. This is due to the fact that,
according to the provision of law a fetus did not receive the status of a legal person like a
ordinary human being2. This led to the idea of protecting the right of a fetus as legal unit
under the provision of law. The bill was first presented in the New South Wales Parliament
by the State Liberal MP Chris Spence.
The bill was approved by the lower house by a satisfactory margin of 63 votes on
November 2013. However, it has been argued that the bill might curtail women’s
1 Parliament.nsw.gov.au, "Crimes Amendment (Zoe's Law) Bill 2013 (No.
2)", Parliament.Nsw.Gov.Au (Webpage, 2013) <https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/bills/Pages/bill-
details.aspx?pk=2778>.
2 The Conversation, "Zoe's Law Could Take NSW Backwards In Women's Rights", The
Conversation (Webpage, 2014) <https://theconversation.com/zoes-law-could-take-nsw-backwards-in-
womens-rights-33681>.

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TORT LAW
reproductive right by various women’s right group and women’s commission. It has been
stated by these groups that this bill has a capability to grind down the women’s rights of
autonomy and further the value of their consent and independence regarding pregnancy and
childbirth decisions. Further it has been argued that, passing of this law would impact upon
legal status of abortion in New South Wales, which the one out of two Australian states
(Norfolk Island) that has not imposed any sort of reform upon the law of abortion and it is
referred as a criminal offence under sections 82–84 of the New South Wales
Crimes Act 1900. However, the legal interpretation of the provisions has been made in the
case of R v. Ward, where the court held that an abortion can only be held as legal if the doctor
performing such abortion has a reasonable and honest belief about the existence of mandatory
fact such as any social, medical or economic factor due to which such abortion is necessary to
perform in order to protect a women from the danger of losing her life or suffering from any
other physical or mental distress which can occur if the pregnancy continues. Therefore, after
such hard fight the provision relating to abortion finally come out of the 119 year old criminal
code and recognized as a medical process by the enactment of Abortion Law Reform Act
2019. The Act has been passes by both the House of the New South Wales Parliament and
recognized under the Royal Assent. Therefore, it has been argued that through the enactment
of the bill as an act, all such hardships and fights will go in vain as Zoe’s Law might offer
ammunition to such opposite rules of legality of abortion and might make the process of
abortion a difficult thing to acquire.
During the introduction of the bill for the first time Mr. Spence stated that the current
criminal law does not recognize the legal value of a fetus as a living being under its
provision. Therefore, it was necessary to come up with a law which will recognize the pre-
mature death of a fetus and will give the family especially the mother a right to get birth and