Well, didn’t Labour MP Steve Chadwick set the cat amongst the pigeons last weekend with her declaration that she will be putting her name to a new bill to legalize abortion on demand up to 24 weeks in New Zealand?

I’d love to know more about the power behind the throne in regards to this little proposal, because, as with most controversial and agenda driven pieces of legislation like this one, it is unusual for the person with their name on the bill to be the only individual who has had a hand in coming up with the specifics of the actual bill.

Perhaps if we had more than one or two quality investigative journalists in this country we’d at least have a fair idea by now of who, and how many wizards there are behind this legislative curtain.

After reading Chadwick’s comments in last Saturday’s edition of the NZ Herald I couldn’t help but think to myself that this has to either be one of the most foolish, or one of the most cunning political machinations we’ve seen in NZ politics for a long time.

If this is a piece of political cunning on the part of Chadwick, then last weekend’s announcement is merely the tip of a despicably clever and much larger Machiavellian ice berg.

You see, if Chadwick is working an angle, then her initial announcement was designed to soften the blow for a future policy announcement which will be less extreme than the ‘abortion on demand up to 24 weeks’ that she has already proposed, but will still represent a major liberalization of our current abortion laws.

So why start with something as extreme as a bill which would legalize abortion on demand up to 24 weeks gestation?

Well, because when you (or another confidant involved in the ruse) later starts telling the NZ public that you now have a new bill which is not as extreme as that which was first announced, the unsuspecting public are inclined to be more accepting of the second bill, because, it appears to be a less extreme compromise on what was first announced.

This is one of the oldest political tricks in the book, and it is a powerfully deceptive way of lulling the public into accepting a piece of legislation that would have been rejected outright if it had been announced without the prior groundwork of a more extreme version of the legislation first being mooted in the public square.

Think of it like haggling over a price, and you are the seller, so, like all clever sellers, you start with a higher sale price than what you are actually willing to accept for the item that is being sold.

This way, the buyer wrongly assumes that they have gained the upper hand and got themselves a bargain when you eventually settle on a lower sale price (even though what you have agreed to was actually the very sale price that you had in mind the whole time).

This political scheme can also be used to serve two other purposes:

a)    It creates a false impression in the public square that there is a need for the legislative changes you want to impose, and it helps to promote the idea that the impetus for this change is something that has sprung up from the public consciousness, rather than from the mind of an ideologue with a political tenure.

b)    It lulls the public into thinking that you, unlike 99.9% of all other politicians, are actually interested in what the public have to say on any given issue, and you are willing to heed the voice of the public and change your politicking to suit (‘gee, that Steve Chadwick’s a real stand up gal, after all, she listened to the voice of the people and adjusted her own bill to make it less extreme after the public raised serious concerns about abortion on demand in NZ’)

So, the million dollar question has to be: is this a clever political ploy on the part of Chadwick?

Hard to say for sure, but there are a couple of things about the nature of her venture that certainly raise some suspicions.

Firstly, she waited until the end of a relatively quiet political news week to announce her intentions to the media.

Anyone in media or PR will tell you that this is a move that is designed to maximize media coverage and public exposure for an announcement, due to the fact that weekends are generally quiet news times, especially weekends at the end of a quiet news week.

Secondly, there is the fact that Chadwick has so boldly announced that her current bill will result in abortion on demand up to 24 weeks in New Zealand.

Make no mistake about it, this is an extreme position, and if the bill is passed it would result in an extreme change to the current legislation in this country.

Now the normal course of events would see a politician disguising such ideological and legislative extremes within a bill by giving it other, and less extreme, aims as its publicly stated main purposes; or it would hide the extreme changes as loopholes within the bill.

Another trick for achieving extreme change is to engage in ‘creeping normalcy’ legislative machinations. This is where you propose a much less extreme change, knowing that you, or one of your fellow ideological travelers, will revisit the issue later on to introduce a further liberalization of your original legislative change, and so on, and so on, until one day the country awakes to discover that it has abortion on demand, and that it was achieved by a process that the Chinese call: ‘Ling Chi’ (slow slicing), or: ‘death by a thousand cuts’.

By taking the bold step of announcing that her intentions for NZ abortion legislation are so extreme, Chadwick is either trying to manipulate the public, or she is extremely foolish.

And if this isn’t a Machiavellian scheme, then why is it so dumb?

Well, it’s very foolish on several levels.

First, it is foolish on a political level, because, at the worst moment possible, Chadwick has decided to drop her party right back in the proverbial by announcing to the public that Labour is still the party of extreme social engineering policies.

Phil Geoff must have been tearing his hair out last weekend when he picked up his Saturday paper and read of Chadwick’s little plans for increasing the number of abortions in this country.

It was only weeks ago that several high profile Labour MPs were caught out for abusing their taxpayer funded credit cards, including to pay for pornographic movies in hotels.

And simmering away in the background are the proposals to tighten up the New Zealand drinking laws which Labour liberalized (most notably by lowering the drinking age to 18) during their term in office.

Oh, and we mustn’t forget that, pretty much since he took control of the Labour party from Helen Clark, Phil Geoff has desperately been trying to rid the Labour party of its rightly deserved image as the party of extreme social engineering and anti-family policies.

So, unless this is a Labour scheme, or he is incredibly politically inept, Phil Geoff must have been swearing up a storm last Saturday weekend when Chadwick made her decision to reestablish Labour as the party of choice for the ideologically extreme.

This is hardly something that Labour wants hanging over its head on the downhill slope into next year’s general election, and it is just the sort of extreme policy that is likely to scare a lot of Labour’s traditional voting base into looking elsewhere come election time (John Key was probably wearing a bigger smile than usual last weekend).

Make no mistake about it, despite what ardent pro-abortionists like Steve Chadwick say in public, the simple fact is that very few people, even those who call themselves ‘pro-choice’, want to see abortion on demand up to 24 weeks in NZ.

And even fewer politicians want anything to do with the political career-killing issue of abortion.

Most Kiwis are smart enough to know that abortion on demand equals more abortions, and average mums and dads know that it means an increased likelihood that their own families will be subjected to the harm of abortion.

It’s one of the bizarre oddities of the ‘pro-choice’ populace, the majority of whom develop a pressing anxiety when confronted by the large number of abortions that take place in their country each year (as I always say: ‘if you truly do believe that there is nothing wrong with choosing one abortion, then why would you have any problem with nearly 18,000 people choosing an abortion each year?’)

The other thing which makes this bill so foolish is the fact that it would result in a situation of unrestricted abortion at the very time when more and more research is showing that what is actually needed are far more restrictions on abortion.

The week before Chadwick made her announcement, a new study from Sri Lanka linked abortion to breast cancer, which makes it the fourth epidemiological study in fourteen months pointing to the abortion/breast cancer link.

About the same time a new study was announced which showed a seriously increased risk of subsequent premature birth after just one abortion, a risk that other studies have confirmed and shown to increase even more dramatically in anyone who has had more than one abortion.

Oh, and let’s not forget the longitudinal research, of New Zealand’s very own Professor David Fergusson, showing a link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems – a link which has been shown by many other overseas studies also.

On top of this, and most importantly of all, our understanding of every human being’s beginnings, and our window into the womb and the miracle of human pregnancy has become greater than ever before. These important developments mean that a continued insistence on allowing the abortion of unborn human beings is based either in ignorance, or worse, denial, of the truth that the entity which begins growing in the female body at the moment of conception is a unique, living and self-directed human being.

Make no mistake about it, the last thing we need is abortion on demand, instead it is time that the Steve Chadwick’s of this world were asked to give a reasoned philosophical account for their belief that abortion is a morally acceptable deed, and that there should be unrestricted access to it.

They expect you and I to fund their personal belief that abortion is morally acceptable with our tax dollars, so the very least they owe us is a reasoned explanation as to why they think it is morally acceptable to have laws which sanction the killing of living human beings.

Do they believe that unborn babies are not living human beings?

Or is it that they believe that unborn human beings aren’t entitled to the same fundamental human rights and protections that already born human beings are?

Like my, as yet unanswered, offer of a public debate with pro-abortion lobbyist Margaret Sparrow, I won’t be holding my breath for this philosophical justification of the pro-abortion position to come anytime soon.

Chadwick’s bill will not be passed in its current form, and she either doesn’t realize this, which points to foolishness, or she does actually know this, which is extremely worrying, as it means that this is merely the first step in a much larger plan to liberalize abortion laws in this country.

We need to hope that this is just plain foolishness, while at the same time treating it as if it is merely the initial part of a calculated scheme to advance the pro-abortion ideology in NZ.