True peace begins in the womb!

Media Release 23 August 2025

Right to Life welcomes the Catholic Bishops Conference statement on “Peace the goal for Social Justice Week” for 2025. The statement is titled “Let’s build peace together.”

Right to Life supports the enlightened statement made by Saint Teresa of Calcutta at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 1994 that: “ abortion was the greatest destroyer of peace in the world”.

Justice precedes peace, so if we seek a peaceful society, then we must first achieve a just society. To have peace in our homes, in our communities, and in the international community, it is imperative that we believe that peace begins in the womb. Abortion is violence against the innocent and defenceless unborn children, and the mother of the unborn child, and it destroys peace.

Every child is a unique and unrepeatable miracle of God’s loving creation. From the moment of conception, it is a human being endowed by his or her Creator with an inalienable right to life, which cannot be taken away from him or her.

In God’s plan, the home of the child is the womb of his or her mother, where for the first nine months of life, it will reside safely and in peace.

It is folly for our community to believe that we can achieve peace in our community, while we accept the violent destruction of more than 17,000 defenceless unborn children each year in New Zealand by poisoning, being scraped from their mother’s womb, or being dismembered under the guise that it is so-called “health care”.

Right to Life believes that to achieve a genuinely peaceful society, we must first achieve a just society which recognises the unborn child as the weakest and most defenceless member of the human family, who deserves our respect and total protection. That pregnant women are given love, protection and help to bring their children to birth.

In the pursuit of justice and peace the government must enact the following:-

• Amend the Crimes Act 1961, to recognise the unborn child as a human being, endowed with an inalienable right to life, and that it is a serious crime to kill an unborn child.

• Repeal the extremist, anti-life Abortion Legislation Act 2020.

• Fund pro-life pregnancy services, to enable them to provide financial and moral support to women, to choose life for their child.

• Promote adoption as an alternative to abortion.

A nation which conducts war against its women, and kills its own children, is an unjust nation and will never know true peace.

Ken Orr,

Spokesperson,

Right to Life New Zealand Inc