Parents who lose their unborn child before 26 weeks of gestation should have the choice to bury the remains and government has no right to place legal barriers in their way.

This, observes a Pretoria News report, is the argument of a group calling itself 'Voice of the Unborn Baby', in its constitutional challenge against the provisions of Births and Deaths Registration Act (Badra) denying parents this right.

The group is asking the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) to declare these provisions unconstitutional. It wants Parliament to amend the Act to allow for the burial of foetuses up to 26 weeks.

In the interim – until Parliament have changed the Act – the group wants an immediate solution by which parents who lose these foetuses are issued with a death certificate, allowing them to bury the foetus.

As things stand, parents who lose a foetus younger than 26 weeks do not have the right to bury or cremate the remains.

These remains are regarded as medical waste. Badra provides for the issuing of a certificate of burial only in cases where a human dies after being born alive, or where the unborn child has lived for longer than 26 weeks in the womb, but died prior to birth.

The Catholic Archdiocese has joined the proceedings, as it believed that from a Christian point of view parents should have a say in whether or not to be able to bury these unborn children.

Government, however, argued that a foetus has no legal rights because it is not yet a human being and not capable of surviving on its own. Thus, it said, there is no legal or scientific justification as to why the law should recognise the burial of a foetus of less than 26 weeks upon termination of pregnancy or pregnancy loss.

Full Pretoria News report