Before going any further with this discussion of New Zealand’s abortion law, now five years old, let’s take a brief look at what happens in an abortion. Please don’t read on if you wish to avoid being upset.
This is not a pleasant topic, but these things need to be discussed. It’s something that happens away from the public gaze and so it’s all too easy to forget about it.
I don’t know absolutely what methods are and are not used in New Zealand, because such information is hard to find. Before legalisation in 2020 there was at least the Abortion Supervisory Committee which published an annual report. Now the information is published by the Ministry of Health and focuses mostly on their passion to make abortion readily and easily available to all women in New Zealand, whatever their circumstances.
Their annual report released in December 2024 gives the statistics for 2023. These show that early medical abortions increased by 11 per cent compared with the previous year and surgical abortions correspondingly decreased by 12 per cent. Overall, the number had increased by 14.9 per cent from the previous year. Early medical abortions are widely lauded as being safer for the mother but in fact they carry more risk of complications.
There is no method of abortion that is easy, primarily because babies in the womb are difficult to kill and a mother’s body is designed to nurture and protect her child. In some methods, a strong saline solution is injected into the womb to burn the baby to death or the baby itself may be given a lethal injection. But these more crude methods have largely been superseded by the abortion pill, or rather two pills, which the mother simply swallows. The first one inhibits progesterone, the hormone that supports pregnancy, and the second one (usually taken two days later) stimulates the uterus to contract and expel its contents.
Hearing it like that, the way it’s told in the official version, you would get the impression that it’s something like a miscarriage: the pregnancy ceases to progress and then the baby (or embryo, or ‘cluster of cells’) is passed. However, what really happens when progesterone is suppressed is that the baby’s supply of oxygen and nutrients is cut off and it dies a slow death from starvation and suffocation. It is then expelled from the womb far more quickly than would be the case in a normal miscarriage, putting the mother’s body under a great deal of strain.
As pregnancy progresses, killing the unborn child becomes much harder to accomplish. This is why surgical abortion usually has to be resorted to. The official version is that the operator uses forceps or a suction tube to remove the contents of the womb. But again, this doesn’t tell you what is really going on: the baby is actually torn limb from limb and removed from the womb in pieces, before being re-assembled on a flat surface to make sure that no parts have been left behind.
When the pregnancy nears full term, the size of the baby’s head becomes a major problem. (Of course, delivering the head is usually the greatest challenge in childbirth.) Hence the development of partial-birth abortion, in which the operator delivers the baby breech (feet first) with the head remaining inside the birth canal, then pierces the base of the skull and vacuums out the brain to collapse the head.
I do not think that this method has been used in New Zealand, but I do know that it is now legal. I have heard of a baby being aborted at 38 weeks and another that was born alive and left to die. Remember that Simon O’Connor proposed an amendment to the law to require medical care and attention to be given to a child accidentally born alive and that Andrew Little called his concerns “patronising” and “ill-informed”. They said that it wouldn’t happen, but it is happening.
This has been an extraordinarily difficult article to write. I cannot go on. Reader, please, do not ignore the plight of the unborn. Be angry, be sad and resolve to do what you can to help mothers and to save babies.
