Media Release 6 February 2022
Right to Life challenges the claims of Clare Perry, Deputy Director General of Health that abortion is safer than birth and that there is no record of women dying from an abortion in New Zealand since 1977.
The claim that abortion is safer than birth is false and demonstrably untrue. The objective of this cruel lie is to deceive women into choosing to kill their unborn child on the pretext that they are endangering their lives by allowing their child to be born. We will never know how many women died in an abortion, because to avoid shame and humiliation, the death of the woman will be attributed to another cause.
Right to Life wrote to the Minister of Health in January, to express our concerns at the injustice of abortion being publicly funded. In response he directed Clare Perry to reply.
Abortion is never safe for either mother or child. The sole objective of abortion is the violent killing of a defenceless child. Since 1977 there have been more than 546 000 children killed before birth. More than 270 000 of these babies killed were female and future women who died in an abortion. Why don’t these unborn future women count? Abortion is also never safe for the mother as it wounds her physically, mentally and spiritually.
A maternal death is that of a woman who dies in child birth or from any cause related to, or aggravated by pregnancy or its management (excluding accidental or incidental causes) during pregnancy and childbirth or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy.
The Health Quality & Safety Commission NZ advised RTL that there were 28 maternal deaths reported in New Zealand between 2006 and 2016. Seven of these deaths were the result of suicide within 42 days of having an abortion. These tragic deaths are irrefutable evidence that women are dying from the grief and remorse of abortion.
Every maternal death is a terrible tragedy, that the death is suicide following the appalling grief of losing your precious child in an abortion is heart rendering.
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 seven suicides are just the tip of the iceberg as it is believed that many women commit suicide many years later as a direct result of an abortion.
These findings concurred with a large record-based study of 600,000 women conducted in Finland in 1997 which found that women who chose abortion over birth were six times more likely to die by suicide in the year following the pregnancy.
Right to Life estimates that as a consequence of the more than 546,000 abortions performed since 1978, there have been more than 25 maternal deaths by suicide following 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 woman has died as a result of having an abortion. Every abortion kills a defenceless and innocent child in the womb, and wounds and sadly sometimes kills a grieving mother. Both abortion and suicide are cries for help from women in despair. Stop saying that abortion does not hurt women.
Ken Orr,
Spokesperson,
Right to Life N.Z. Inc.