Media Release 25 February 2024
Right to Life requests the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, to urgently address the threat to our nation of our birth rate of 1.56 children per women of child bearing age (15-49 years), the lowest in our nation’s history. Demographers warn that a birth rate of 1.5 is the point of no return, why is the government silent?
Right to Life encourages the government to launch a massive campaign to promote open adoption to encourage women to choose life for their child in preference to a painful death for their child in abortion.
The greatest threat to the future of our nation is not global warming but the increasing demographic Winter.
Right to Life believes that our nation is rejecting the blessings of our Creator by ignoring the command of our Creator given to us in the scriptures, Genesis 1:28 – Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it..”
Right to Life challenges the government to cease promoting and funding the violent killing of our precious children before birth as a health service and to be concerned about our appalling fertility rate?
Children are our nation’s most precious resource, it is intolerable that each year the government authorises and funds the murder of more than 14,000 defenceless unborn children. They are poisoned, sucked out of their mother’s wombs or violently dismembered, their bloodied bodily remains treated as medical waste.
Our birth rate has been below replacement level since 1975.
Why were the former Prime Ministers, Jacinda Ardern and Christopher Hipkins and their government, silent in response to New Zealand’s appalling birth rate? Our nation is facing an increasing demographic winter which will have a catastrophic effect on the future of this nation. We have an increasing ageing community with a declining workforce to support them and look after them. Why does the government not have a policy to increase our birth rate and confront this crisis?
Statistics NZ announced on 19 February 2024 that our fertility rate was now 1.56, the lowest ever recorded in New Zealand since 1894.
The replacement birth rate is 2.1 for women between the ages of 15 and 49.
There were 56,955 live births in 2023, the lowest number of life births in 20 years, and there were 37,884 deaths in 2023, there were 19,071 more births than deaths, the lowest natural increase in the population of New Zealand since 1943.
Demographers warn that a birth rate of 1.5 is the “point of no return”, when the number of deaths exceeds the number of births.
Our birth rate has been in decline since the 1960s, when the contraceptive pill was introduced.
In 1931 at the height of the great depression, the birth rate was 3.61. In 1974 the birth rate was 2.12, just above replacement level and that was the last year that we had an above replacement birth rate.
Right to Life applauds the courageous women who sacrifice themselves by choosing to have children and raise them in spite of the formidable obstacles confronting them, especially the more than 200,000 solo mothers who are raising children alone. We also applaud the noble women who chose life for their baby in the face of abandonment of the father and coercion to choose abortion.
Ken Orr,
Spokesperson,
Right to Life New Zealand Inc.