Media Release 21 December 2024
Right to Life’s prayer is that our community will enjoy the unsurpassing peace of God which is the fruit of the respect for the right to life of God’s precious infants and the vulnerable in our community.
World peace begins in the womb, there will be no peace in the world until we outlaw the violence of abortion. It was Saint Teresa of Calcutta who said, “the greatest destroyer of peace in the world is abortion.”
We look forward to celebrating Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, true God and true man who comes to bring peace to men of good will.
At the birth of Christ the angels sang, proclaiming that God’s Messiah had been born: “Glory to God in the highest and peace to men of good will”.
The birth of Christ presents us with a beautiful pro-life message. We cannot enjoy the beautiful blessing of peace that comes from pleasing God until we uphold the following teaching:-
“Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.” Catechism of the Catholic Church 2270.
The message of Christmas is that Christ confirmed the sanctity of the womb by choosing to become an unborn child and spending the first nine months of His earthly life in the womb of His mother Mary. He has affirmed the intrinsic value of every human being created in His image and likeness. That life begins at conception, that the unborn child is a human being and is endowed with an inalienable right to life.
Mary, the mother of Jesus is a model for solo mothers, who willingly chose life for her child Jesus and trusted in God for His plan for her life, acknowledging that God is the author of life and that He alone has authority to give and take life.
Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, is a model for fathers in accepting his God given vocation as protector of Mary and her unborn child. This is in stark contrast to those today who support a culture of death and the war against women and their unborn and who believe that every woman has a right to choose to kill the child before birth because the unborn child is not a human being with a right to life until it is born.
Right to Life believes that the challenge today of the celebration of the birth of Christ is to promote a culture of life by;-
• Supporting pregnant women with all the love, assistance and help they need to choose life for their precious unborn child.
• Continuing to campaign for the repeal of the extremist Abortion Legislation Act 2020, which effectively allows the killing of defenceless unborn children for any reason up to birth. There were 16,277 unborn children killed in N.Z. last year, all funded by the government as a health service, i.e 45 children every day.
• Continuing to campaign for legislation which recognises the status of the unborn child as a human being from its conception, endowed by its Creator with an inalienable right to life.
Ken Orr,
Spokesperson,
Right to Life New Zealand Inc.