A baby in the womb over 23 weeks that is lost as a result of careless or dangerous driving would be recognised in law for the first time under a Bill being brought forward with cross-party support.
The proposed legislation, known as Jax’s Law, would recognise a stillborn baby as an individual victim of a road-traffic collision.
The Bill is named after Jax Aylward, a baby boy who died at 31 weeks’ gestation after his mother, Saoirse Aylward, was the victim of a three-car collision caused by dangerous driving.
Aylward, who spoke while holding a framed photograph of Jax at the launch of the Bill outside Leinster House on Tuesday morning, had been travelling in a car with her partner Nathan Ferguson Murphy when a van had crashed into another car and forced it into their path.
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The incident took place in January 2024 on the main Rosslare to Wexford road. The van had been driven by a Ukrainian man called Yurii Dudek, who in February was sentenced to six months in jail for careless driving causing serious bodily harm.
At the time of the incident, Aylward was taken to Wexford General Hospital for an emergency Caesarean section. When she woke up from the procedure, she was told that her baby boy, Jax, was stillborn.
Gardaí had initially told her they had recommended that the driver face a charge for harm to both Aylward and a separate charge for the harm to Jax. But the Director of Public Prosecutions later clarified that there was no existing law to recognise an unborn baby as a victim of a road-traffic collision.
“Obviously, that highlighted to me the gap. Straight away, from that day, I spoke to the guards and said I’m going to make sure that I speak up as much as I can, and make sure that this is changed, because it’s not right. And it puts so much trauma on us,” she said.
“I spoke to my family, and I said it was almost as traumatic as the crash itself, to go through that and have to try and justify your son’s life. Jax was a 4lb baby, he had to have a postmortem. I had to bury him. My 11-year-old daughter visits him at a gravesite, but yet, the law says that he doesn’t exist.” She pointed out that under existing law, if a woman lost a pregnancy in a road crash then legislation could be interpreted to say that there was “no loss at all”.
[ All babies who die in the womb as a result of crime must be recognised as peopleOpens in new window ]
The same Bill is also being supported by Colleen Langan, whose pregnant aunt, Róisín Connolly, and her unborn baby, Catherine, both died in a crash caused by a drunk driver in 2010. Two other people, who had been passengers in the drunk driver Kevin McArdle’s car, also died.
Langan said there was a “clear gap in Irish legislation that overlooks unborn victims of road-traffic collisions. There has been an overwhelming consensus that these unborn children deserve acknowledgment.”
The Bill was brought forward by Fine Gael TDs Barry Ward and Emer Currie. Ward said the Bill has cross-party support and that Minister for Road Transport Seán Canney has also agreed to support it “in principle”.
The Bill, if it became law, would change the offences of both careless and dangerous driving to include the loss of a pregnancy as well as the existing offence of causing death.
The Bill includes a clarification that it is not intended to “confer personhood” on an unborn child, and that the Bill would also not mean that a person whose driving had resulted in the loss of a pregnancy would be considered to have committed the offence of murder. The Bill would also not leave a woman open to prosecution if she was the driver of a car that was involved in a collision that resulted in the loss of her own pregnancy.
Ward said the Bill would use the existing legal definition of a stillborn child, which is a pregnancy of at least 23 weeks’ gestation, or where the unborn baby is at least 400g in weight.
Langan and Aylward said they are also calling on the Road Safety Authority to start collecting statistics on road-traffic collisions that result in the loss of a pregnancy, including a pregnancy that may be lost before 23 weeks’ gestation.
