The issues of abortion need to be discussed more freely and openly

Until Senator McGauran's intervention, no one else wanted to touch the case. The Coroner said she had no jurisdiction to act because the baby was “stillborn” and not a reportable death. But the baby was “still” because she had potassium chloride injected into her heart before labour was induced.

McGauran has every right to question the diagnosis of dwarfism – the ultrasound diagnosis was not definitive. "The baby doesn't look small" was a nurse’s note in the records.

The mother did not want to continue her pregnancy. She didn't have to. Labour could have been induced - either way she had to deliver the baby. A live baby could have been delivered rather than a dead one. No one was forcing her to keep the child.

Even the Royal Women’s Hospital’s own legal representative, Mr John Snowdon, told the State Coroner’s Assistant “in theory, at least, the option of vaginal delivery of a living baby was available, with a baby to then be separated from the parents if that was their wish".

Why shouldn't someone - even a politician - ask where we should draw the line? Why shouldn’t we ask difficult questions such as what if the baby had been a week or even a day from birth? Or is an abortion at this stage closer to infanticide? What does it say about the status of people with disabilities if the medical profession thinks it's ok to abort children who are considered too short?

And what kind of a society can do no better than offer women only one alternative: a dead baby?