05:10

One minute before question time, MP Barnaby Joyce has made an explosive contribution to the debate in the NSW parliament about decriminalising abortion.

Joyce:



On the first of June, Vicky’s and my son Tom took his first breath. This was not the start of his life, the reality was he was part of this world for some time and was merely passing from one room to another.

Joyce said that Tom “was a person – long before he was born” and “had rights even though he was not conscious of them” which “no parliament can take away”.

The hour of birth is an arbitrary point in modern medicine ... it didn’t endow him with greater rights as a person ... To say he didn’t have the rights of other human life is to say he is sub-human. Historically that concept is not unusual.

Joyce appears to be using the rhetoric of anti-abortion philosophers who make an analogy between abortion and slavery, by arguing that he and Vicky have obligations to Tom as a person, not “merely a property right”.

Joyce then accuses the NSW parliament of seeking to declassify foetuses in the womb as humans, at which point he is shouted down by Labor and his time expires.