Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I strongly support this motion from Senator Babet in favour of saving the lives of babies born alive. For six years, I've spoken in the Senate while wearing a lapel pin which depicts an infant's feet at 10 weeks of age, just 70 days old. My opposition to abortion comes from my humanity and my role as a father and grandfather.

Sadly, Queensland's Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018 allows for unrestricted access to abortion up to 22 weeks. After that point, two doctors must be convinced the abortion is in the mother's best interest—doctors who make their living signing off on abortions. As Rhodes Scholar and leading researcher Professor Joanna Howe has found, between 2010 and 2020, 4,929 babies were killed between 20 weeks and birth. In Queensland, of these babies, 329 were born alive and left to die. This is an urgent matter.

Last week, I was pleased to attend a protest on the federation lawn out the front of Parliament House that was a memorial to the 5,000 babies born alive when aborted around Australia. The memorial comprised 5,000 pairs of babies' booties in the shape of a cross—babies who were thrown aside and left on a cold stainless steel slab to die alone. Nearly 50 per cent of these babies were perfectly healthy with nothing wrong with them. Why were they induced and delivered stillborn instead of alive and then placed for adoption?

Under the Queensland Criminal Code, the current law is clear: this is a crime. Section 292 provides that a child becomes a human being after being born and proceeds in a living state from the body of its mother, whether or not it has breathed and whether or not it has had independent circulation. Section 302 defines murder as done by someone who intends to cause death—which is the case with these 328 babies—or causes death by an act or omission made with reckless indifference to human life. Currently the penalty for murder in Queensland is life—how ironic! There are protections for medical practitioners who induce the stillbirth of a child. That protection stops when the child is born alive.

Queensland MP Robbie Katter has introduced a bill to ensure the rights of babies born alive. Under the bill, the duty of a registered health practitioner to provide medical care and treatment to a person born as a result of a termination would be no different from their duty to anybody else. This means babies would be given care, allowing them to survive where possible, while babies unable to survive would instead be given palliative care. In yesterday's hearing into this bill, courageous maternity nurse Louise Adsett described in heartbreaking detail the fate that has awaited so many beautiful young Australians in Queensland maternity wards: babies left to cry themselves to death, alone. Louise described nurses holding babies that have been marked for death until they drew their last breath—a breath surrounded with love, not cold, hard, stainless steel. There's no legal grey area here. Allowing a child born alive to die in Queensland is a crime, and that crime is murder. To the Queensland police I have this simple message: do your bloody job! Failure to prosecute the first murder has led to 327 more human beings losing their lives, and that's on you.

The preamble to the international Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 explicitly recognises the unborn's right to life. This is a matter that can be legislated federally, and, if the states will not police their own laws, then the federal government must intervene. I have yet to hear an abortionist successfully explain at what time in the development of a child it ceases to be a collection of cells and becomes a baby. Until you can show a physiological point before which the child is just a bunch of cells and after which a child is a living human being, I will continue to defend every life and oppose abortion, except abortion when the mother's life is in danger.

If these practitioners were proud of their actions, they would not be changing the name of their trade from 'abortion' to 'reproductive care'. There's no reproduction, and there's no care for the child. At least be honest with yourselves. This is not care. This is designed to dehumanise mothers and fathers, dehumanise society and harden the hearts of our community. Neither can this be described as women's health. The health of the mother is the same, no matter if the baby is put up for adoption or murdered. Women's health does not, apparently, include the health of the one half of these aborted babies who themselves would grow into women.

My office has received over 1,000 emails and calls today from Queenslanders who are horrified at this practice—so much so I feel the need to remind everyone that, while God loves everyone, God punishes those who kill. These human babies deserve better. Babies deserve to have the same rights as have all human beings, and foremost among these is the right to life. (Time expired)