This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
Canada: 
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The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld an exclusion of criminal code in a case of concealing a stillborn child’s body, asserting that it does not criminalize women who miscarry. The case entails a woman named Ivana Levkovic, who confessed that she was alone at the time of a baby girl’s delivery in April 2006, whom she did not believe was alive. The court’s ruling depicts that she will now face a new trial.
Levkovic’s lawyer had asserted that the law was unconstitutionally imprecise while implying the words “before birth,” as the difference is not unambiguously determined between a stillbirth and a miscarriage, whereas in any case, it is impossible to clarify at which stage in gestational spectrum does a fetus becomes a “child” under the laws. During trial, a judge agreed and removed the word “before” birth, although it was again restored by the Ontario Court of Appeal. Whereas, on Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada declared in a unanimous 7-0 judgment written by retiring Justice Morris Fish, that the law was not too vague, and that it has a “clear late-term focus” which involves “the event of birth.”
In his judgment, Justice Fish wrote that it “only captures the delivery of a child that was likely to be born alive.” He added that “a conviction would only lie where the Crown proves that the child, to the knowledge of the accused, would likely have been born alive.” Both parties, Crown and the defence, have already agreed that the law on “concealment” did not target abortion.
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