Oppose ACT Bill to empower doctors to kill more patients!

Media Release 26 August 2025

Right to Life requests that all members of parliament withhold their support for the End of Life Choice Amendment Bill bypassing the ballot and being sent immediately to a select committee. This is the Private Member’s Bill of ACT’s Todd Stephenson, MP.

This Amendment Bill, placed in the ballot in September 2024, was withdrawn and has now been redrafted to include 25 recommendations from the Ministry of Health’s official 3 year review of the End of Life Choice Act. This Bill recognises that it is cheaper to kill patients than to care for them, and that we have a “right to choose” to be murdered by a doctor with a lethal injection.

The MP Todd Stephenson has written to all MPs requesting that they support his Bill bypassing the ballot, and being sent straight to a select committee; he requires the support of 61 MPs for his Bill to be sent to a select committee.

ACT is the pro-Euthanasia party, which was responsible for drafting the End of Life Choice Act, and for passionately promoting its support in parliament and in the community. The End of Life Choice Act needs to be repealed, it does not require amending.

Euthanasia and Assisted suicide are all about doctors killing their patients with a lethal injection or assisting in their suicide; it is intrinsically evil, it violates human rights and the Fifth Commandment of God, “Thou shalt not kill”. Euthanasia is not health care, it promotes a culture of death, it denies the culture of life and the inescapable truth that our lives belong to our Creator and that we are privileged to be stewards of our life.

This Bill is a threat to not only the vulnerable, but to every member of our community.

Five of the twenty-six objectives the Bill seeks to achieve are :-

• To remove the criteria that the patient is expected to die within six months, death would no longer be an issue.

• To permit a doctor to raise the issue of euthanasia with a patient as part of a person’s treatment and end of life care options.

• To set out the obligations of health practitioners not to allow conscientious objections to override their duty to act in accordance with the Code of Health and Disability Services Consumer’s Rights, and specific actions that health practitioners must take to facilitate continuity of care.

• To require hospices, retirement care facilities, rest homes and private hospitals including religious facilities to provide access to “assisted dying”.

• That Health NZ be required to undertake a number of functions to support “assisted dying as a health service”.

Right to Life will be writing to every member of parliament to:

• request that they withhold their support for this anti-life Bill bypassing the ballot and being sent directly to a select committee

• remind them also that the first duty of those elected to our parliament is to legislate to protect the right to life of every member of our community from conception to natural death

• tell them that those MPs not prepared to do this are not worthy to sit in our parliament and should be replaced.

Ken Orr,

Spokesperson,

Right to Life New Zealand Inc.