Right to Life questions the Green Party’s policy announced by Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei MP, “We want every single Kiwi kid to have a great start to life. That is a Green Party priority and we make no apologies for that.”
Metiria Turei knows that human life does not start at birth but rather at conception. The start that every Kiwi kid needs and has, is an inalienable right to be allowed to be born. The Green Party’s adherence to a policy which would decriminalise abortion stands in utter contradiction to this right. Right to Life makes no apologies for that statement.
Right to Life does applaud the Green’s commendable objective of addressing child poverty and the positive measures announced by Metiria Turei, however the Green’s are guilty of discriminating against children in the womb. The greatest poverty that can be inflicted on a child is to be deprived of its right to life before it is born. The Green’s website makes the following statement in relation to it’s “Children’s Policy”
‘Let’s give our children the best possible start in life.’
Lets be quite clear, The best policy to give New Zealand children the best start in life is to allow them to be born and not to kill them.
When it comes to respect for human life, The Greens are the most anti-life Party in Parliament with a policy to increase the war on women and their precious unborn. A vote for the Greens is a vote for a culture of death.
The Green’s child policy should be viewed in the light of its previously announced Childs policy to decriminalise the killing of the unborn to deal with “unwanted” children. How can the Greens claim “every child matters” when they are campaigning to remove legal protection for the right to life of children before birth? Decriminalisation means that it would no longer be a crime to kill an unborn child for any reason effectively up to birth.
If we wish to know what the Green Party means by decriminalisation of abortion we only have to look at the Green Party’s bill to decriminalise abortion that was recently defeated in the New South Wales Upper House in Sydney, when this contentious bill was defeated 25 to 14.The bill would have allowed abortion up to birth for any reason, with no requirement for informed consent, counselling or screening for domestic violence and coercion.
Ms Turei has sat in Parliament with her colleagues since August 2002, since that time more than 250,000 children have been murdered in their mother’s wombs. To the Green’s everlasting shame, during this time they have done nothing to protect women from the violence of abortion or to defend the right to life of our children in the womb. On the contrary there has been a deafening silence. Why then should we believe that the Green Party really cares about women and the unborn?
If the Greens are really serious about reducing child poverty and helping families, they need to recognise that depriving a child of its inalienable right to life, is the ultimate poverty. Protection of children commences in the womb. Right to Life calls upon the Greens to reject their anti-life campaign to decriminalise abortion and instead to become the champions of women and the protectors of our precious unborn.
Ken Orr
Spokesperson,
Right to Life
Well, perhaps we can convince them to adopt strengthened antismoking efforts directed at pregnant women. I know it’s indirect, but it should surprise no-one that smoking cigarettes while pregnant damages the livers of unborn children. Our best bet for that is with a Labour/Green/New Zealand First (…???) coalition in power:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-40084844
A Labour Greens anything coalition would have abortion and euthanasia decriminalised within half a term. Not quite sure how you come around to this viewpoint Rhona.
I think you’re wrong about the extent of support within the Labour Party for pro-euthanasia positions. Maryan Street is no longer a Labour List MP and I have found in lobbying Labour MPs and party officials that they *do* listen to people known to support disability rights in this context when we say that lobbying for euthanasia is a betrayal of socialist values of interdependency and social solidarity. It’s one of the hidden blessings of ACT’s David Seymour signing up for the End of Life Choices Bill, actually- people take a long hard look at the repulsive radical libertarian agenda that he also stands for and compare it to the socialist politics of inclusion, solidarity and interdependency that the disability rights movement embraces.
As for the National Party, while Bill English is devoutly Catholic and pro-life, many of his caucus embrace the radical libertarian philosophy and if National doesn’t win the forthcoming election, he may be replaced by Paula Bennett or Stephen Joyce, both of whom are of the aforementioned radical libertarian persuasion. Remember, . John Key was no friend of the pro-life movement, was he? He’s to blame for the Health select committee hearings on assisted killing, pandering to ACT, its coalition partner, on that issue. Both ACT and United Future are not pro-life allies on this issue either.
New Zealand First masquerades as value conservative, but while Mr Peters is pro-life on abortion, I cannot forgive his party for supporting Peter Browns’ pro-euthanasia “Death With Dignity” Bill in 2005. Let’s face it, if the Voluntary Euthanasia Society went down the referenda route, the binding referenda fanatics would embrace the pro-euthanasia cause and we would risk the same fate as Oregon, Washington state, Zurich and Colorado, where referenda results have given a spurious ‘legitimacy’ to the pro-euthanasia cause. And when it comes to binding referenda, the Conservative Party are so obsessed with the ‘right’ to hit children in the name of corporal punishment that they don’t care about the very real concerns that many in the pro-life movement have about such a scenario. On the other hand, many Labour and Green MPs and supporters oppose binding referenda too and we could use that as leverage to repeal the CIR Bill and stop such a backdoor route to legailising euthanasia in its tracks.
As for the issue of abortion, I think one of the chief mistakes the New Zealand pro-life movement may have made after 1980 is the excessive influence that the United States then had on its subsequent development. Certainly, Ronald Reagan was profoundly pro-life, but then the United States has far higher levels of religious observance than many other western countries. That led to disastrous results like kneejerk opposition to Labour, especially after homosexual law reform here, and embracing the radical anti-homosexual agenda when really, that had nothing whatsoever to do with the sanctity of human life. For a long time, one of the chief standard bearers of alleged religious social conservatism was a conservative Calvinist whose party openly embraced the death penalty, despite the deep abhorrence many Catholics, Labour supporters., disability rights supporters and lesbian and gay people feel toward it. That man later turned out to be a serial pedophile.
Many Labour activists got the idea that opposing abortion was antithetical to socialist values because they associate it with the centre-right. It’s quite different in Britain and Australia, where their respective pro-life movements didn’t make that sort of mistake. Granted, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria have all decriminalised abortion, sadly, but New South Wales and Queensland have not done so. Moreover, in the case of Victoria, that happened with the connivance of the Liberal Opposition leader and many of his state MPs. That has happened because the mainstream pro-life movement there has observed scrupulous neutrality and has been able to tap Catholic elements within the Labour Party and unions there, much of which can also be said to be the case for the United Kingdom. Interestingly, despite the fact that South Australia is governed by a Labour state government and that Tasmania’s Labour Party presided over the decriminalisation of abortion, both Australian states have rejected euthanasia.
The Greens are in a different situation. I think one way to deal with this is to appeal to the same values of diversity, inclusion and interdependency that are at the core of green social and political values. Peter Singer may be an Australian Green Party activist, but frankly though, there are parts of his evil book “Should the Baby Live?” that are a goldmine in lobbying that party against recognising euthanasia. Particularly some of the more horrific statements that Singer makes about disabled people, especially people with Down Syndrome. And remember, opponents of euthanasia like disability rights activist Huhana Hickey are still Green Party members.
Their adoption of assisted killing was largely attributable to former Green List MP Kevin Hague, and one of the most heartening things about that was the extent to which such pro-euthanasia stances are now being questioned within lesbian and gay circles- because they see the disability rights cause as a sister social movement to their own, and because of issues like the Nathan Verhelst euthanasia case in Belgium. Maryan Street and Kevin Hague are isolated within that community on that issue. Opposition to euthanasia isn’t seen as a “Christian Right’ cause, but as a legitimate concern of the kindred disability rights movement and related to other aspects of escalating disability discrimination. With some effort and the right kind of lobbying from supportive Green activists, it may be possible to reverse their current pro-euthanasia policies.