Last week the Ministry of Health (MOH) released a new report about abortions in New Zealand in 2020.

Those who were closely following the introduction of Labour’s extreme Abortion Legislation Act (ALA) last year will be aware that this is a change in procedure from previous years.

Under the former law, the Abortion Supervisory Committee (now defunct) would publish an annual report, and Statistics New Zealand would separately publish comprehensive statistical data about abortions every year as well.

This was one of the many areas of concern that we had about the new law. The previous abortion law mandated a high standard of data collection and public reporting, which is obviously vital for transparency and accountability.

The Abortion Supervisory Committee was disbanded by the ALA, so they will obviously no longer be producing an annual report. Statistics New Zealand was also removed from the system of data collection, so there will no longer be any annual abortion statistics published by them either.

From there, the reporting requirements in the ALA become a bit vague, and although this new report from the MOH contains some important information, it is unclear exactly what sort of information will be made public on an ongoing basis from this point onward.

Over the previous months leading up to this report we have had serious concerns about whether proper standards of data collection were being maintained under the ALA. On more than one occasion, we have discovered discrepancies in the data we obtained from different District Health Boards.

At this stage, we do not have great confidence that transparency regarding the practice of abortion in this country will be as open and honest as it previously was under the former law (and even that had flaws!)

We will be happy if we are proved wrong on this point, but only time will tell whether good and timely standards will be maintained.

The obfuscation and hiding of the truth has been a hallmark of the abortion industry around the globe for many decades now, and there is little reason to think that New Zealand could remain immune to this problem for ever.

 

A disturbing introduction 

Before we get into some of the important specifics of what has been revealed in last week’s MOH report, we felt it was important to highlight the opening pages.

On the very first page of the report, we are presented with the perversely titled section “The Ministry of Health’s values and our vision for abortion services”.

It’s hard to imagine a more euphemistic and dystopian way of speaking about the institutionalised killing of unborn children.

That section becomes even more twisted when it lays out the four “values” it believes underpin this practice:

• manaakitanga – we show care, inclusion, respect, support, trust and kindness to each other

• kaitiakitanga – we preserve and maintain an environment that enables the Ministry and our people to thrive

• whakapono – we have trust and faith in each other to do the right thing

• kōkiri ngātahi – we connect and work together collectively towards a common purpose.

All of this is presented without the slightest awareness of the disturbing irony in using such terminology to describe an evil as barbaric as the deliberate ending of more than a classroom full of unborn children every single day of the year.

Clearly none of these values are applied to the unborn human beings who are deliberately killed every time these ‘values’ are applied.

What does the report reveal about abortion in 2020?

The first and most important point to note about this report is that it reveals the tragic fact that there was an increase in abortions last year.

13,246 abortions were performed in 2020, an increase of 389 abortions from the 12,857 abortions carried out in 2019.

To put this in perspective, many schools around the country have student rolls smaller than the increase in abortions we saw last year.

What’s important to note about this increase is that it isn’t simply an increase in the total number of abortions (which could simply be representative of an increase in your country’s total population.)

The report is clear that 18.6% of known pregnancies ended in an abortion in 2020, compared with 17.7% in 2019. In other words: more pregnancies ended in abortion in 2020 than in 2019.

The number of Maori and Pacifica abortions decreased in 2020 by almost 2% for each group (Maori down to 21.7% from 23.1%, and Pacifica down to 8% from 9.8%).

The number of early medical abortions increased significantly in 2019, from 22% to 36% of all abortions performed.

As you can see from the chart below, the largest provider of abortions, by a massive margin, was the Epsom Day Unit abortion facility in Auckland:

The troubling spectre of repeat abortions and sex-selection 

The report also reveals that approximately 12% of women having abortions had already had two or more previous abortions.

Most troubling was the fact that it also reports that 44 females who had abortions last year had already had six or more previous abortions, 54 had had five or more previous abortions, and 116 had had four or more previous abortions.

One other point of note about this MOH report is that it makes a very brief mention of the fact that they are required to track the issue of sex-selective abortion in New Zealand. Troublingly though, it provides absolutely zero indication of any methodology that might be utilised to ascertain this, and nor does it clarify exactly when we might expect to see any reporting on this issue.

It can be easy to become lost in the weeds when it comes to statistically focused reports like this, however we shouldn’t allow that to distract us from two tragic and brutal realities.

Number one: we are aborting more than an average classroom of unborn children every single day in this country.

Number two: the number of unborn children killed by abortion last year increased.

This makes abortion the greatest killer of human beings in this country, by a long-shot.

In fact, last year, the number of Kiwis killed by abortion was almost twice as many as were predicted to die under the recent worst-case Covid-19 modelling for our country.

This should spur all of us on to greater activism for the culture of life, and to doing everything in our power to build a more peaceful future in this country where the violence of abortion is as unthinkable as it is unnecessary.

By Voice For Life.