Media Release 10th June 2018

Every woman has a right to life, a right to be born and the right to vote.

This year we celebrate the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New Zealand.  On 19 September 1893, the Electoral Act 1893 was passed, giving all women in New Zealand the right to vote.  As a result of this landmark legislation, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which all women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections. 

Every woman has a right to vote, this victory was won by heroic women like Kate Sheppard (pictured), who campaigned courageously to achieve this right. It is a violation of human rights that today thousands of New Zealand women are denied the right to vote. Not only the right to vote, but they are being denied their right to life and the right to be born. Every year 12,000 New Zealand children are killed in the womb, which includes nearly 6,000 innocent and defenceless women who are violently killed. Since 1978, more than 250,000 women were killed before birth. How then can we claim that we are promoting the equality of women and that we are leading the world in promoting the rights of women?

How many of the over 250,000 women killed before birth since 1977, would have been among our Members of Parliament and would have been the mothers of future generations of New Zealanders? We should weep for our children lost and for their mothers whose abortion was a cry for help unheeded by our community which sadly believes that abortion is a health service.

Why does the Prime Minister not support the right to life of all women and their right to be born and their right to vote?

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has marked International Women’s Day on 8th March with a plea for Kiwis to keep “pressing for progress”.

“Here in NZ we’re celebrating 125 years of women’s suffrage. We have, right now, in our Parliament the greatest representation of women we’ve ever had,” she said.

“There is change that we still need. Let’s remember that true equality is achieved when women are free from violence and when they have financial security.”

How can the Prime Minister be sincere about celebrating women’s suffrage when women are not only being denied the right to vote but being denied the right to life and the right to be born? How can she claim to oppose violence inflicted on women when she supports such mega-violence against women in the womb by the decriminalisation of abortion?

Why is she now blindly committed to inflicting increased violence on women by having children both male and female in the womb removed from the Crimes Act, so that it will no longer a crime to kill a child before birth? She is now determined to have the killing of unborn children treated not as a justice issue but “as a health issue that is a reproductive choice for women, rather than as a criminal issue.“

It is an appalling tragedy for the cause of women’s equality that the Prime Minister who is herself with child, will by her actions increase violence against women under the pretext that the abortion of a woman before birth for any reason is not a crime, but a health issue.

It is the earnest hope of Right to Life that the birth of her lovingly nurtured and protected child will be a cause of joy and happiness and the realisation that every child is a unique and unrepeatable miracle of God’s creation who should be respected and protected.

Ken Orr

Spokesperson,

Right to Life.