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New laws will crackdown on mothers who try to hide their baby’s birth under tough legislation announced by NSW Attorney-General Brad Hazzard
The new powers aim to clampdown on instances of child abandonment following a newborn boy found in a drain in Sydney’s west and a little girl whose body was found in a shallow grave on Sydney’s Maroubra beach.
The Daily Telegraph reports that Mr Hazzard expressed an inter-agency taskforce was being formed to fix holes in the birth registration system involving the Department of Justice, police, NSW health, Family and Community Services and the Ombudsman’s Office.
“The aim of the working party is to develop a consistent policy to improve the way we respond when a baby is born and not registered within 60 days,” a spokeswoman for Mr Hazzard told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
“[Our] experience is the overwhelming majority of parents are registering their babies within 60 days.
“However this is about ensuring no child remains unregistered in NSW.”
Currently the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages uses Lifelink – an automated system which matches birth notifications from hospitals to registration from parents – but the technology will not be fully operational until next year.
Obstetrician Andrew Pesce, the Sydney West Health Service head of Women’s Health and former Australian Medical Association president, questions the proficiency of the current system which only chases up parents who have not registered their babies with emails, letters and phone calls but not physical visits.
“They say that abandoned babies are a very rare event. This begs the question of how do they know that it is a rare occurrence?” Dr Pesce told the Telegraph.
The newspaper reports that if a baby is born outside a hospital without a midwife and the parents do not notify a hospital or the registry then there could be no trace of it.
The little boy found in the drain at Quakers Hill was allegedly abandoned by his mother and left there for six days until passers-by heard the baby’s screams and rescued it. The 30-year-old mother has been charged with attempted murder.
Meanwhile the newborn girl found on Maroubra beach buried 30 centimeters underneath the sand was so badly decomposed that a post mortem examination could not tell if the child was still born or if it lived for several days.
Thus far police are still appealing for the little girl’s mother to come forward.
