All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
Andrew Hastie, Tony Pasin, Henry Pike and Barnaby Joyce all used speeches in the federal parliament’s Federation Chamber on Wednesday to suggest new laws ensuring women who experience a stillbirth or neonatal death will retain access to maternity leave could have “unintended consequences”.
‘Baby Priya’s Bill’ was spurred by the case of a mother, who, after telling her employer of 11 years that her infant daughter Priya had died at just 42 days old, was faced with negotiating a return-to-work timeline she hadn’t planned for — while simultaneously grieving her loss.
It introduces a new principle into the Fair Work Act that employer-funded paid parental leave must not be cancelled because a child is stillborn or dies, attracting bipartisan commitment before the last election.
In 2022, more than 3,000 families lost a child to stillbirth or within the first 28 days of their birth, according to data by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released in July.
Joyce said: “The day after a child is born, no matter what medical conditions or impairments that may be there, you have no right to interfere in their life. And therefore, the day before, we believe, is the same.”
But Health Minister Mark Butler has rejected the conflations, defending the definitions in the bill as “very clear” and noting a termination is “very different” to a stillbirth or neonatal death that occurs as a result of a “natural spontaneous event”.
“To try to conflate the two things is, I think, a very cynical, deeply distressing political exercise,” he told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing on Wednesday.
“The men who are doing this — and they’re all men — know the difference between stillbirth and abortion.”
Source: Coalition MPs face growing criticism over abortion claims: ‘Rosaries off our ovaries’ | SBS News
This appears to be an effort to introduce into Australia and Australian law ‘principles’ (sic) akin to those in US states such as Texas where retributive, misogynistic laws have been introduced, particularly post Dobbs v Jackson (https://lawreview.syr.edu/dobbs-v-jackson-the-overturning-of-roe-v-wade-and-its-implications-on-substantive-due-process/ – accessed 31 October 2025), to penalise women suffering miscarriage or stillbirth – and those who do seek to address pregnancy through termination. This approach must be resisted and women’s right to healthcare without sex-based discrimination must be supported unequivocally. On this see Women Power and Autonomy – Rights Respect and Representation in Law and Society, Chapter 8 ‘When a Woman’s Body is Not her Own – Regulating Women through Abortion Law ‘ (JA Scutt), publisher Palgrave Macmillan, due out 12 November 2025.