Last night, women across NSW celebrated a very significant win. A year-long campaign to introduce foetal personhood in NSW has ended in a final defeat – Zoe’s Law has failed to pass the upper house.
Fred Nile and the Christian Democratic Party have been attempting to win support for the bill in the upper house since it passed the lower house last year but, as of last night, the bill officially dropped off the parliamentary agenda for 2014.
This means that if Nile and the other MPs who support the bill want to continue to push their foetal personhood agenda, they will have to start all over again with new legislation when parliament reconvenes next year.
This will be an even more cumbersome task for the Zoe’s Law supporters because Chris Spence, the MP who introduced the legislation, is not re-contesting his seat in March. Why? Because he has spent the last months being investigated for political corruption by the ICAC.
The bill’s failure to pass follows a backlash from women’s groups as well as medical and legal professionals against the implications of foetal personhood on reproductive rights in NSW. The bill would allow NSW law to prosecute a person for harm to a foetus – in other jurisdictions, this has led to the criminal prosecution of mothers for decisions made during their own pregnancies.
Thanks to a long campaign against the bill from these groups, the majority of MPs in the upper house signaled they would not support foetal personhood in Australia. Without enough votes to pass the bill, the Zoe’s Law team allowed the bill to lapse.
“Thanks to pressure from everyday women and women’s rights groups, as well as the legal and medical community, the MPs pushing for the foetal personhood law have failed to bring it forward for debate on the last day of parliament,” said Greens MLC and spokesperson for women Mehreen Faruqi.
While the final defeat of Zoe’s Law in the upper house is encouraging, women’s groups are warning that MPs will continue to try to introduce legislation seeking to control women’s bodies and that the campaign to protect reproductive rights is not over.
“It is, however, just a matter of time before another foetal personhood bill or another such bill that would seek to control women’s bodies is debated in parliament. It is therefore critical that we build the campaign to remove abortion from the crimes act,” Faruqi said.