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When Professor Rees Neil met with Endeavour Forum during the consultation process for the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s Report on the Decriminalisation of Abortion, he was warned that he would not want to be remembered like the judges in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v Sanford US slavery case, who found that blacks were property and not entitled to the rights of US citizens. The judge’s decision read, in part:

 "Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?........We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them........"

Professor Rees did not heed our warning - his Report, offered three Models for decriminalization, A, B and C, each Model being worse than the preceding one. The entire Report implies the same kind of invidious discrimination as in Dred Scott - the child in utero is an inferior being, has no rights, and is called a fetus. The report does not even recommend banning the horrific practice of partial-birth abortion, now illegal in the US.

There are other parallels between 'academic' discussions on the status of negroes a couple of centuries ago, and the status of fetuses now - some 'scholars' then defined negroes as three-fifths human, eerily reminiscent of today's discussion about gestational limits on abortion when the fetus 'becomes' more human in the second and third trimesters. The Rees' Report did not recommend gestational limits - Model C implies that a "fetus" can be aborted at any time prior to birth by the decision of its mother.

This Report could have been written by the abortion industry because it rejected every commonsense recommendation, e.g. that women be given full information on the physical and mental health risks of abortion, and that there should be anti-coercion legislation (as in the US) to protect pregnant women from bullying by boyfriends or family. As Archbishop Hart commented "...The Commission rejected recommendations for making supportive counselling available, requiring an independent medical opinion or reporting adverse events......the Commission's Report is anti-choice and anti-women because it shows no commitment to women having access to accurate information.....the only person required to provide information is the abortion doctor, who in many cases is the very person whose livelihood depends on their willingness to perform abortions...."

 "Women's autonomy" runs through the Rees' Report, like a medieval chant, providing the rationale for rejecting basic health recommendations that would be mandatory in any other surgery e.g. providing to women considering abortion ultrasound pictures of what is being operated on.

It is science that has made the Rees' Report outdated before it was even tabled in Parliament in June 2008.  New 3-Dimension technology enables parents and other family members to see a lifelike, real-time picture of their unborn child. It will become impossible for the abortion lobby to claim the infant in utero as "just a clump of cells" when it appears on screen with a beating heart, bouncing around, sucking its thumb, and laying claim to our intelligence and emotions as a small human being needing our protection.