Media Release 8 M

Right to Life fully supports the International Women’s Day 8 March, to promote gender equality, and to oppose discrimination including violence against Women. We  commend the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for speaking out against violence against women. Violence against women and girls is an international problem of pandemic proportions. Violence against women is always a violation of human rights; it is always a crime and it as always unacceptable.

Right to Life asks the Prime Minister “how can you oppose violence against women and yet support the violence done in abortion against women and their precious unborn? How can you say you are opposed to violence against women and yet say that killing a woman in the womb is not a crime but a “reproductive health choice for women?”

Andrew Little on 27 October 2018 made the following comments on Newshub Nation, in response to concerns about the options put forward by the Law Commission. He said in regards to the potential lack of safeguards concerning sex-selection abortions, that women are “quite capable of making these judgements themselves. I don’t buy into this argument that we should start working through a checklist of potential things, reasons why women might seek an abortion.”

Right to Life believes that this statement by Little shows an appalling discrimination against women in the first nine months of their lives in the womb. What in effect he is saying, is that he believes gender should be a ground for abortion. We believe that the vast majority of New Zealanders would be shocked by a Miniser of Justice making such statements which may be construed as his support of sex selective abortion

The Police in New Zealand received over one hundred thousand in fact, 118,910 family violence calls to be exact, in 2017.  There were 13 women killed by their partner or ex partner in 2015. Violence against women takes many forms. It is disappointing that our community is in denial and refuses to recognise that abortion is violence against vulnerable women and their unborn child. An abortion entails an assault on the womb of a woman and a lethal assault on the life of her child.  Frequently it is because the father of the child wants the child killed because he refuses to accept responsibility for the child he has fathered, or for the care of the mother of his child. Nearly half of the children conceived yearly are female. What greater violence is there against women than to be killed in your mother’s womb?

It is thus disappointing that the government and Parliament actually continues to sanction and fund violence against women by financing the violence of abortion under the guise of health care. The government should not be surprised if New Zealand continues to be an increasingly violent society with the worst rate of family violence in the world

If we truly want to live in a society that respects women we must first protect mothers to be and their babies. The first step in achieving this is to ensure that our MP’s stand up against injustice and Jacinda Ardern’s attempts to decriminalise this awful and violent act.

Ken Orr
Spokesperson,
Right to Life New Zealand Inc.