Media Release 13 January 2024
How can the government authorise, fund and call abortion health care, when it results in the violent killing of an unborn child and the suicide of their mother?
There were 31 maternal suicides reported in New Zealand in 2023 by the Perinatal Maternal Review Committee for the period 2006 to 2020. The total of direct maternal deaths were 76 women.
Information was provided under the Official Information Act to Right to Life by the Health Quality & Safety Commission New Zealand. The Commission advised that, “around a quarter of maternal suicides occur following a termination of pregnancy.”
Right to Life believes that It is an appalling tragedy that 31 distraught new mothers ended their lives by suicide. For those women who have lost their child, especially through abortion, the pain is unbearable, with the mother experiencing grief, sorrow and regret. Maori women were nearly three times as likely to die by maternal suicide than European women.
A direct maternal death is the death of the woman during pregnancy, or following birth, or from miscarriage or from an abortion or within 42 days of the termination of the pregnancy. Every year there are 650 babies and 10 mothers who die in pregnancy or shortly afterwards.
Right to Life respectfully asks our Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, whom we know is genuinely concerned about women’s health, an important question.
Will he now institute a national study into the damage done to women’s health by abortion, and enquire why innocent and grieving women are resorting to suicide to end their grief and pain?
Fathers who lose their child this way may also commit suicide in despair, because they cannot protect their precious child from being killed by an abortionist.
Right to Life acknowledges that the circumstances around suicide are complex and that there may be other contributing factors such as mental ill health. Right to Life believes that these 31 suicides are just the tip of the iceberg, as it is believed that women also commit suicide many years later as a direct result of an abortion.
These statistics dispel the myth, propagated by Family Planning and the pro-abortion movement, that abortion is safe and that since 1977, no women have ever died as a result of having an abortion.
Every abortion kills a defenceless and innocent child in the womb, then wounds and sometimes sadly destroys their grieving mother. Both abortion and suicide are cries for help from women in despair.
Right to Life believes that the extremist Abortion Legislation Act 2020, which effectively allows abortion up to birth, will result in more women suiciding, to heal their pain and to allow them to be with their child, who has been so cruelly taken from them.
We should mourn for these women, who are innocent victims of abortion and suicide, as their deaths and those of their unborn children are a tragedy for their families and our communities.
Ken Orr,
Spokesperson,
Right to Life New Zealand Inc.