Media release Tuesday 17th October 2017
Right to Life questions the anti-life philosophy of Dr Helen Paterson, a certifying consultant and presumed abortionist of Dunedin. Dr Paterson in a letter to the Abortion Supervisory Committee [ASC] in July stated, ”I feel the prospect of a government body passing judgment on the reasons that a citizen might seek an abortion does violence to the dignity of that citizen and breaches her natural right to bodily autonomy and moral agency.”
This is an appalling statement from Dr Paterson who is a highly trained Obstetrician and Gynaecologist. She has been trained to provide professional care for mothers and their precious unborn children. Right to Life questions how can she provide proper professional care for women and their unborn when she embraces a flawed and dangerous philosophy that is anti-women and anti-life. In making such statements Right to Life questions how the Abortion Supervisory Committee can maintain her appointment as an Abortion Certifying Consulatant, given her statements are directly antithetical to section 30 [5] [b] of the Contraception Sterilisation & Abortion Act 1977,
She knows that when caring for a woman who is with child that she has the privilege of caring for two patients. The child in the womb is her patient, the weakest and most defenceless member of the human family who is deserving of respect and protection. How can she coldly reject this little patient and conspire to destroy it?
It is deeply saddening that Dr Paterson denies the inalienable right to life of every human being from the moment of conception. She is denying the sanctity of life ethic which the medical profession has so nobly upheld for more than 2,000 years.
Dr Paterson is concerned about the imagined violence to the dignity of women seeking an abortion, but is oblivious to the real violence inflicted on women by abortion and the violence inflicted on the defenceless unborn who are torn limb from limb in the womb.
Dr Paterson claims to be concerned about the mythical “natural right to bodily autonomy and moral agency” of a woman seeking an abortion. There is no natural right for a woman to kill her child and she fails to recognise that the child is not a part of its mother’s body, as it is a separate and unique human being with its own DNA, its own beating heart and with its own blood type.
Right to Life believes that the ASC has a duty to protect women from Dr Paterson whose anti-life philosophy is in breach of our abortion legislation. The Committee should immediately cancel her appointment as a certifying consultant.
Ken Orr
Spokesperson,
Right to Life.
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