Media’s conspiracy of silence!

Media Release 19 January 2026

Right to Life is concerned at the deafening silence of the daily newspapers in New Zealand refusing to publish any information on the Ministry of Health’s annual report on abortion statistics for 2024, released on 10th December 2025.

Right to Life asks: Are pilot whales of greater value than unborn children?

Recently all daily newspapers gave extensive coverage to the stranding of 55 pilot whales, the heroic efforts of hundreds of volunteers who valiantly laboured to save these precious whales and finally the tragic mercy killing of 13of these pilot whales.

Right to Life believes that the media have a serious duty to the community, unborn children and to women to publish this abortion statistical information to ensure that the community is well informed on the serious human rights abuses that are permitted and funded by the government.

The media should be at the forefront in defending the right to life of every New Zealander from conception to natural death and being opposed to the killing of the unborn.

Right to Life believes that the media, by not publishing the abortion statistics, is imposing censorship and effectively violating the New Zealand Bill of Rights by :-

• Failing to advocate for the life and safety of unborn children who are cruelly deprived of their life, failing to protest at the torture and cruel treatment of unborn children who are poisoned in early medical abortions, scraped from their mother’s wombs or are brutally dismembered.

• Failing to advocate for women who are seriously wounded by abortion that could leave them with a lifetime of spiritual, psychological, physical and emotional damage.

Right to Life recently wrote to the editors of the 18 daily newspapers in New Zealand, to express disappointment at the total absence of publication of the 2024 abortion statistics and to ask when they would be published, there was no reply. Should we be surprised at the declining trust of the community in the main stream media?

We believe that the news media have decided that following the passing of the Abortion Legislation Act in 2020, the killing of the unborn is no longer a justice issue, and abortion is now a “health issue”. Abortion now does not constitute the killing of an unborn child, who has been endowed by its creator at conception with an inalienable right to life. In 2020, our Parliament embraced the fiction that the unborn child does not become a human being with a right to Life until it is born.

Right to Life believes that the media have decided that the murder of 17,785 unborn children in their mother’s wombs in New Zealand in 2024 is not an issue and is not newsworthy. The murder of an estimated 49 unborn children every day, nearly one in four New Zealanders before birth, is now accepted and the government and media pretend that the debate is over.

Right to Life makes no apology for defending life and we are passionately committed to protecting the lives of God’s precious infants and their precious mothers. God the Lord of life will not be mocked and the culture of life will ultimately triumph over the culture of death.

Ken Orr,

Spokesperson,

Right to Life New Zealand Inc.