With the Minister for Health, Tony Abbott's rediscovery of the son he adopted out at birth, the abortion debate has been rekindled once more. Pro-life activists have used this joyous reunion as an advertisement for adoption as well as a form of attestation against abortion. The use of the Minister's son, Daniel Abbott, as a political football has re highlighted the need to implement changes to existing family law. There can be only one acceptable stance and that must be based around a fact we all already know, murder is wrong.
Perhaps one of the strangest contradictions in law is the acceptance of the unborn as humans in some circumstances and not in others. An unborn child can own land. An unborn child can become the legal heir to a fortune. Even in other countries a pregnant female on death row cannot be executed until the birth of their baby. Yet, after being in existence for 9 months and about to make the transition from the womb to the world, a child can be killed at very little expense at the whim of its mother.
With over 100000 abortions in Australia last year alone, a rate of one in four pregnancies being aborted, we can realistically label this infanticide a seemingly socially acceptable comparison to Hitler's holocaust of the Jews, or the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines. In the case of the Tasmanian aborigines in particular it seems history is almost directly repeating itself, as the apparent ‘justification' in both cases, is the incorrect belief that both groups were not human.
Advances in medical science have proven beyond doubt that the human embryo or foetus is biologically separate from its mother. From the moment of conception after the sperm penetrates the egg, a new individual comes in to existence, genetically different from its mother and father. This individual must be human, and far from being part of the mother, the baby is in fact foreign tissue to the mother. The baby's immediate environment, the amniotic sac, part of...