Media release from Right To Life New Zealand.
A total of 877 women were admitted to hospital in New Zealand between 2009 and 2011 for the treatment of complications following abortions. The total number of bed-days totalled 1047. These important statistics reveal that abortions not only kill an unborn child but can result in damage to a woman’s health.
This information was recently obtained under the Official Information Act, from the Ministry of Health. Information on the nature and severity of the complications is not available. There were a total of 52,120 abortions reported to the Abortion Supervisory Committee in 2009 to 2011. The hospital admittance rate for women being treated for complications arising from abortions was 1.68 per cent. This important information is not included in the Committee’s annual report to Parliament.
Abortionists are required to report to the Committee any complications that result from abortions prior to the woman being discharged. It is noted that a number of the 877 women admitted for treatment for complications would have been admitted to hospital immediately following the abortion, however their hospitalisation is not required to be advised to the Committee. The remainder of the women would have been discharged from the abortion facility after their abortion and then subsequently readmitted to hospital.
In 2010 Right to Life obtained from the Committee under the Official Information Act, statistics of complications reported by abortionists to the Committee in 2010.The information revealed that there were a total of 73 complications reported in the performance of 17,550 abortions; a complication rate of 0.42 per cent. These statistics are collated by Statistics New Zealand on behalf of the Committee. The Abortion Supervisory Committee does not include these statistics in its annual report to Parliament on the grounds that the incidence of complication is so small and not worthy of report.
Right to Life believes that there is considerable under reporting of complications by abortionists that give women a false impression that abortion is a safe procedure. The Committee also excludes from its annual report to Parliament any statistical information on the number of women who are admitted to hospital for the treatment of a complication arising from abortion. The Committee has for many years congratulated abortionists for their skill in providing the women of New Zealand with “safe” abortions.
There are many complications both physical and psychological that damage a woman’s health. Right to Life sought information under the Official information Act from the Ministry of Health on the number of women who were admitted to hospital for psychiatric treatment following an abortion. Our Society was advised that this information was not recorded.
A study of the medical records of 56,741 California Medicaid patients revealed that women who had abortions were 160 per cent more likely than women delivering a baby to be hospitalised for psychiatric treatment in the first 90 days following abortion or delivery. Rates of psychiatric treatment remained significantly higher for at least four years. A five year retrospective study in two Canadian provinces found that 25 per cent of women who had had abortions, made visits to psychiatrists and were more likely than others to require admission to a psychiatric hospital.
The Committee has a statutory duty under the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act to provide an annual report to Parliament. Section 14 states that the Committee has a duty “To monitor, analyse, collate, and disseminate information relating to the performance of abortions in New Zealand.”
Right to Life asks:
- Why is information about the number of women admitted to Hospital for the treatment of complications resulting from an abortion not included in the Committee’s annual report to Parliament?
- How does the Committee reconcile a complication rate of 0.42 per cent with a hospital admittance rate of 1.68 per cent? (which is four times higher!)
- What action is the Committee taking to ensure that all complications resulting from an abortion prior to the discharge of the woman are notified to the Committee?
- Why does the Ministry of Health not record the admittance of women to a psychiatric hospital for treatment as a result of having an abortion?
Cross posted from the Culture Vulture.
Last Friday night, within hours of the NZ Courts releasing the official documents announcing that Right To Life had been granted leave to appeal their case against the Abortion Supervisory Committee (ASC) in the NZ Supreme Court, the Abortion Law Reform Association of NZ (ALRANZ) had issued a press release decrying the decision.
Mostly the press release is the pretty stock standard stuff that you’d expect from a pro-abortion lobby group; talk of ‘grave concern’, etc, but there are a couple of statements worthy of discussion.
The first is this:
“Dr. Healey said this parlous state of affairs was the direct result of Parliament’s failure to act to secure a woman’s right to make her own decision about abortion.”
Firstly, notice the totally fallacious use of the word ‘right’ here, which is yet another example of the pro-abortion ideology which tries to impose abortion upon society as a human right.
Then there is the completely erroneous claim that women in NZ can’t choose to have abortions, which is obviously a complete untruth – there are approximately 17,500 legally approved abortions every year in this country, and that’s because current NZ law allows NZ women to choose abortion.
So with this important fact in mind, one can only assume that either Dr. Morgan Healey is totally ignorant of NZ abortion law, or, and far more likely, Dr. Morgan Healey doesn’t consider the current NZ abortion law liberal enough for her, and instead she wants to go to the extreme of abortion on demand.
Scary stuff.
Then there is this:
“If a politically appointed statutory body like the Abortion Supervisory Committee is given the power to second-guess medical judgments, then abortion access for individual women will become a political, not a medical decision.”
Hold on a minute, has Healey failed to notice the word ‘supervisory’ in the title of the Abortion Supervisory Committee – their official name alerts us to the fact that they are indeed meant to oversee the actions and decisions being made by certifying consultants and abortion doctors in this country.
How exactly does it benefit NZ women to have a completely unsupervised abortion industry in NZ anyway?
Just consider the deaths and serious harm caused to women in the Philadelphia abortion clinic of Kermit Gosnell because a lack of official oversight into his abortion practices.
And I’d also like to know how Dr. Healey has managed to come to the conclusion that having an Abortion Supervisory Committee that functions in an oversight role is going to make abortion access any more ‘political’ than it would be otherwise.
The fact is that all legislation, on any matter, not just this one, is about a political decision – politicians decide what legislation will be passed into law, and the rest of us are subject to it. So whether it’s legislation option A, B or C that’s put into effect, all options are equally political in origin.
And lastly, there is this comment:
“Because politicians have refused to take action to decriminalise abortion in New Zealand, the courts are having to act for them, putting all women’s access to reproductive health care at risk,”
And there we have it, ALRANZ giving official approval to judicial activism, one of the more problematic and divisive aspects of American abortion politics.
Judicial activism means that a small handful of unelected officials start creating and implementing legislation without any accountability to the general public, this is definitely not something we want here in NZ, but then it’s probably not surprising that ALRANZ is proposing such problematic changes to NZ society when one considers that Morgan Healey isn’t actually a New Zealander, she is an American.
One can’t help but wonder what other divisive and problematic American policies she is planning to promote here in NZ during her tenure at the helm of ALRANZ.
I have unfortunatley been too busy to be able to make any comment on the decision of the Court of Appeal which came out on Wednesday night regarding the Right to Life v Abortion Supervisory Committee case.
You will probably have seen the news article by now and the headline which says, “Unborn have no right to life, Court of Appeal rules.”
The case dealt with two issues, one was over whether the unborn child has a right to life, and the other over whether the Abortion Supervisory Committee has been carrying out its role correctly in supervising abortion certifying consultants.
In 2008 the High Court found there was doubt over the legality of many abortions, however this was overturned by the majority in this case who said that the law had been used correctly and that the appropriate avenue for any further action would be a complaint to the Health and Disability Commissioner or the police.
While the issue over the right to life was a likely result, the result on the second issue is surprising. As Brendan Malone at the Culture Vulture says, “why would the very committee that is charged with overseeing the practice of abortion in NZ have no ability, or responsibility to actually ensure that procedures are being followed to the letter of the law?!”
Brendan helpfully provides an easy to understand version of what the Judges say as well.
Anyway this case result got me thinking. It made me actually go looking, to see if I can find a picture of the Abortion Supervisory Committe, and I have finally found one. Here it is:
All eyes will be on Right to Life now, to see if they appeal to the Supreme Court.
According to ParliamentToday.co.nz…
Following Question Time today MPs will debate appointments to the Abortion Supervisory Council and legislation relating to Financial Market Regulation.
The Council appointments are made by the following Government Notice of Motion:
Hon SIMON POWER to move, That, pursuant to sections 10 and 11 of the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977, this House recommend His Excellency the Governor-General reappoint Professor Dame Linda Jane Holloway of Dunedin and Reverend Patricia Ann Allan of Christchurch as members of the Abortion Supervisory Committee, and appoint Dr Tangimoana Frances Habib of Hamilton as a member of the Abortion Supervisory Committee, each for a term of three years from the date of appointment, and appoint Professor Dame Linda Jane Holloway as Chairperson of the Abortion Supervisory Committee.
H/T to Simeon for the heads up…
Late last night the Women’s National Abortion Action Campaign (WONAAC), a NZ pro-abortion lobby group, issued a press release expressing great angst about the fact that the NZ Family Planning Association (NZ FPA) didn’t get permission from the Abortion Supervisory Committee (ASC) to start carrying out RU-486 chemical abortions on women in NZ.
Here’s a segment of the press release…
“The Committee should have told the public immediately as this withdrawal suggests the clinic could not comply with legal conditions. Instead the Committee gave the impression in its Annual Report it wanted earlier medical abortions to be more widely available. What on earth is going on?”
Hold on a minute WONAAC, surely it’s not the job of the ASC to announce to the public that a party, who voluntarily applied to them seeking an abortion license, has subsequently withdrawn from the application process.
If you must be angry at anyone, then how about getting angry at the NZ FPA for not announcing their withdrawal?
Besides, aren’t you pro-abortion groups actually talking to each other?
Shouldn’t you have known about this before the news broke in the public arena?
After all, you have been a public supporter of this license application?
Maybe the NZ FPA was trying to tactically hide their withdrawal from the public, you know, trying to save face and all that.
From last week’s Dominion Post…
It went unnoticed by the media, but Justice Minister Simon Power recently issued a press statement announcing that Rosemary Fenwicke had decided not to seek reappointment to the Abortion Supervisory Committee.
There’s a story behind this. Dr Fenwicke, a member of the three-person committee since 2007, is an abortion certifying consultant who earns fees by approving the termination of pregnancies.
She is also a former medical director of the Family Planning Association, a major abortion referral agency.
She was nominated for the committee in 2007 by the Labour government of Helen Clark, whose pro-abortion sympathies are well known.
The appointment seemed not only an unconscionable conflict of interest, but a calculated insult to the many New Zealanders who regard abortion as deeply repugnant.
Were they really expected to believe the government couldn’t find someone who didn’t have a material stake in the abortion business? (Certifying consultants were paid $5 million in 2008, and even pro-abortionists acknowledge it’s a lucrative business.)
The very nature of her professional activity suggested Dr Fenwicke was not neutral on this divisive issue, yet Parliament rejected an attempt by MP Gordon Copeland, a staunch opponent of abortion, to overturn her nomination.
(It was supposedly a conscience vote but Labour MPs were instructed to support Dr Fenwicke, meaning her appointment was assured.)
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