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So how are we doing, after five years of legal abortion up to birth?
First of all, the number of abortions has increased dramatically. Last year’s statistics are not available yet but, by the end of 2023, the numbers were up 25% since legalisation. Abortion enthusiasts are excited that more of these were early medical abortions, which are seen as safer than the surgical procedure. In reality, however, complications are almost four times more common in medical abortions, and one alarming ‘complication’ is ‘failed abortion’, which may be followed by repeated attempts to kill the child.
Although abortion is now legal up to full birth in New Zealand, only one per cent of abortions were reported as having taken place after 20 weeks’ gestation. Still, one per cent of 16,277 is quite a lot. Those who think as I do will say that killing the unborn is murder at any stage but there is something especially horrifying about destroying a child already old enough to survive outside the womb. Health NZ may call it “a well-established, safe, healthcare procedure” but abortion is never safe for the baby, and it is never truly safe for the mother. In every way – physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually – women suffer both during and after. Dr Norman MacLean, a Kiwi doctor who changed his mind about abortion, has pointed out that it should not be called healthcare, because it never is that – it is always health harm.
Women’s health is declining all over the world, not surprisingly given that so much of women’s health is tied up with childbearing. Falling birthrates, a decline in breastfeeding and the fake environmentalism that blames population growth for all the world’s problems paints a grim picture for the female sex. Whatever feminism and the other pressures of the modern world want us to believe, women’s wellbeing revolves around nurturing young – and, for those who have not been blessed with offspring, being significant in the lives of their younger relations. Nothing has taken the place of this because nothing ever can.
Sanitised terms for murder like reproductive health care, reproductive rights and healthcare procedure do violence to language and make no acknowledgement of the horror that is going on. And that, in turn, negates womanhood and all that defines it. The baby is a zero, and the mother and her overwhelming instincts to nurture and protect are also a zero. No wonder 31 per cent of women in New Zealand are struggling with their mental health. Surely this affects us all.
