Media Release 13 February 2021

Right to Life is opposed to the government’s promotion of medical abortions that impose on women all the responsibility for killing their defenceless unborn child. There is no place in New Zealand for death drugs that are designed to kill babies.

Dr Ayesha Verrall, the Associate Minister of Health has been given the deplorable responsibility of promoting increased access to the killing of the unborn, preferably early and by lethal drugs. Right to Life believes that Dr Verrall, an infectious disease expert considers pregnancy a disease that requires treatment.

Pregnancy is not a disease and abortion is not health care. There is no medical condition known to humans that can be treated by killing a child in the womb. The government can do more for our women than funding the killing of more than 13,000 unborn New Zealanders every year. Dr Verrall can do more for women than offer a violent and painful death for their child.

Every day an estimated 36 unborn children are taken to hospitals and clinics in New Zealand to be poisoned, sucked out of their mother’s wombs or violently dismembered. Remember that these are potentially normal pregnancies mostly terminated for socio-economic reasons.

The Abortion Supervisory Committee in its report to Parliament in 1988 stated, “that the emphasis should be on education aimed at achieving a higher proportion of planned pregnancies than perpetuating the present unwieldy system of authorising the termination of potentially normal pregnancies on pseudo-legal grounds.”

With a medical abortion the women accepts full responsibility for the killing of her child, for it is the woman who chooses to take the lethal drugs. She alone bears the guilt, the remorse, the grief and the pain. A surgical abortion is something that is done to her by a doctor and the guilt is shared. Why are we allowing the government to inflict more pain and guilt on women with its imposition of chemical murder promoted as health care? RU-486 cheapens the value of human life even more than surgical abortions.

Information released by the Ministry of Health to Right to Life under the Official Information Act reveal that in 2020 there were 5,349 medical abortions an increase of 47.92 % over the 3,617 medical abortions performed in 2019. Surgical abortions fell from 9,262 in 2019 to 7,861 in 2020.

Medical abortions are unsafe. A Finnish study conducted in 2009 of the data on all Finnish women who had an abortion between 2000 and 2006 and were of a gestation of 63 days or less found that that even under the best conditions, chemical abortions had four times more complications than surgical abortions. Women who took abortion pills haemorrhaged over seven times more often than surgical patients, they had more failed abortions which required surgical follow-up, and suffered a 20 times greater risk of operative injuries from emergency surgery compared to surgical abortion patients.

Why are our women seeking an abortion not being given this information? As of December 2018, the US Federal Drug Admin reports that 24 women have died after taking Mifepristone for medical abortions.

Ken Orr,

Spokesperson,

Right to Life N.Z. Inc.