No Lizzie Marvelly – Abortion is in the Crimes Act for a Very Good Reason

On the 28th July 2017 the New Zealand Herald featured an article by feminist Lizzie Marvelly  expressing lament about how difficult it was for New Zealand women to abort their unborn children.  It really makes you wonder what sort of world she would like us to live in given that last year over 12,823 unborn children were aborted. The post featured below is a guest post by Lydia Mead commenting on the Marvelly article. Lydia blogs under the title of Kiwi Girl in Wales. Reads…

Lizzie Marvelly long-time respected writer for The New Zealand Herald is accusing NZ law and Government of suppressing women’s rights.  In damning language she describes the law and Government as conducting themselves as overbearing, condescending and often tyrannical, all without good justification: “(this) 40 year old law treats them like idiots who cannot make their own decisions… they are forced to lie to doctors, and required to put up with long waiting periods.” Then comes Marvelly’s clincher, the one thing that should make all of this overbearing behaviour seem the nonsense it is: “They do all this in order to obtain an abortion.”

Ah. It would seem then that the law and Government together believe something about abortion that differs from Marvelly’s opinion of it. Her temper is not at all improved when she turns her attention to an inspection of the law as it currently stands: abortion is tucked into the Crimes Act, inserted in amongst Slavery, Murder, Bestiality. Abortion’s bedfellows in the Crimes Act seem to increase her irate mood:

“Women have had the vote for 123 years. surely we can trust them enough to make decisions about their bodies for their own reasons – without requiring two doctors to deem them mentally at-risk?”

What is remarkable is that after being treated to a series of groundless and emotive charges against the current law, Marvelly despairs: “In 2017 nothing has changed. Abortion is still a crime.” Yes. It is still a crime because the nature of the act remains the same, despite the number of years that have passed since its first writing. Along with murder, it was and still is (in the eye of the written law at least) regarded as destroying the life of the innocent. Along with slavery, abortion treats the unborn baby as the property and commodity of the mother, to be granted or denied life as the mother chooses. Marvelly and her kin pose no argument that the nature of the unborn child has in any way changed (an unborn child has looked roughly the same in every country, throughout history). They have not proposed a redefinition of murder (it should be legal to kill anyone who helplessly depends on you for care).  No, instead we are expected to be likewise indignant that women are not (technically, at least) given the freedom to have their unborn children destroyed for any and every reason, with the least amount of bother to themselves possible.

While I can’t agree with the rationale behind the exceptions to the NZ abortion law (mental health, physical health of the mother, disability of the baby or rape), they were meant to weed out every other reason as being insufficient to qualify a woman for an abortion: because at the back of it all was a belief that the unborn was a human child, dependant and needing the law to maintain its right to life.  Marvelly’s emotive discourse on specious ‘women’s rights’, is more disturbing than it may first come across. If she were writing with greater honesty she would come out and say it: any baby in the picture is merely a woman’s property, which she should be allowed to do with whatever she likes. No government or law should seek to protect the unborn baby because in doing so it will deny the mother’s rights.  Such an honest statement would expose the selfish callousness of such a proposition. It would also perhaps make us wonder about the basis for our legal system in a world where one person’s rights really do have more weight than another’s.

Lydia Mead is a follower of Jesus,25 year old, wife to Alex and mother of two little girls. A New Zealander, her involvement in the pro-life movement started when she was 17, running a pro-life club at the university she was studying at and she has since been involved in local and national level pro-life organizations in NZ and Australia. Now she lives with her family in Wales where she is getting involved with pro-life work. She blogs over at www.kiwigirlinwales.WordPress.com