Media Release 3 January 2023
Right to Life applauds unmarried women in New Zealand who choose life for their child and who reject abortion, they are heroes. Today we should also weep with our sisters, the wounded and victimised women who weep for their children torn from their womb by the state under the guise of health care.
It takes heroic courage for a woman to resist pressure from Family Planning, from the father of the child and from family and friends to terminate the life of their child.
There were 58,749 live births in New Zealand for the year ending September 2022. There were 29,508 babies born to unmarried parents, this was the first year that the number of babies born to unmarried mothers, 50.2%, exceeded those born to married parents. In 1964 less than 10% of all live births were to unmarried mothers. A third of these babies, 7,506 were to parents not living together, these are solo mothers.
The number of unmarried women who had an abortion is not known, as this statistic is not collected by the Ministry of Health. It was previously collected by the Abortion Supervisory Committee and in its report for 1990 revealed that nearly 60% of women undergoing an abortion had never married, 7% were living in a de facto relation and 21% were married.
There were 13,257 abortions in 2021, it is estimated that 7,956 of these abortions were performed on unmarried women.