Pregnancy is not a disease and abortion is not “health care”!

Media Release 19 November 2025

Abortion is an intrinsically evil action, it violently destroys a defenceless unborn child, a miracle of God’s loving Creation and seriously wounds the mother spiritually, physically and psychologically, this is not “health care”.

New Zealand repealed the death penalty for homicide and treason in 1961. Parliament has retained the death penalty for unborn children, for the crime of being “unwanted”. There is no right of appeal and the sentence is carried out promptly by the State.

Health NZ is engaged in a campaign to convince our community to accept the fiction that abortion is “health care”. It believes that is no longer a crime to kill an unborn child, as it is not a human being with a right to life until it is born.

Right to Life encourages our community to strenuously reject Health NZs campaign to promote a culture of death and acceptance of abortion as health care.

The poisoning an unborn child, scraping it from its mother’s womb, or violently dismembering the child, are not in any way considered “health care”. It is the objective of Health NZ to make abortion “safe, consistent and quality abortion care.”

Right to Life believes that the undeclared objective of Health NZ, “safe, consistent and quality abortion care” is to ensure that it produces dead babies. Women are discouraged from changing their minds and are prohibited from stopping an early medical abortion with the abortion pill reversal protocol. The Ministry of Health has threatened to prosecute doctors who use Progesterone to reverse a chemical abortion and save the unborn baby.

The Second Vatican Council affirmed:

‘Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception: abortion and Infanticide are abominable crimes’ (“Gaudium et spes,” n. 51).

The Ministry of Health is committed to improving access to abortion, no matter whereabouts a woman resides.

Since the passing of the Abortion Legislation Act in 2020, the Ministry of Health has sought to reduce barriers:-

• A woman can self-refer to an abortion provider

• The number of health professionals who may perform abortions as abortion providers has been increased from medical practitioners to include midwives, nurse practitioners and pharmacists

• Unborn children are no longer to be recognised as human beings from conception, endowed by their Creator with an inalienable right to life

• An abortion is no longer required to be performed in licensed abortion premises

• A woman can have an abortion up until 20 weeks gestation, for any reason including for sex selection

• From 20 weeks gestation to birth, an unborn baby may be killed when a medical practitioner considers it “appropriate”

• An abortion provider is not permitted to enquire why a woman requires an abortion up to 20 weeks gestation

• Abortion pills can be posted or couriered to the woman to allow her to kill her child in her own home

The right to make autonomous decisions about one's reproductive life, in the view of Health NZ, is known as reproductive autonomy. Forcing someone to carry on an unwanted pregnancy, or forcing them to seek out an unsafe abortion, is a violation of their human rights, including the rights to privacy and bodily and reproductive autonomy. There is no consideration for the right of privacy of the child in its home, its mother’s womb, or its right to life and bodily autonomy.

The killing of an unborn child violates the purpose of genuine health care, which is to protect the life of the patient, and to promote the good health of the patient.

Abortion also violates the Hippocratic tradition, that all medical practitioners are expected to uphold.

“I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly, I will not give to a woman and abortive remedy.”

Right to Life is committed to opposing the killing of the unborn and the campaign to make abortion health care. We will continue to campaign for genuine health care that protects the life of God’s precious infants and the health and welfare of women.

Ken Orr,

Spokesperson,

Right to Life New Zealand Inc.