Legal Protection for Mothers and their Unborn

24 January 2012

Media Release

Legal Protection for Mothers and their Unborn

The Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRANZ), has recently made false claims in the media that Right to Life is seeking through the courts the banning of abortion. The Association should be well aware that this is not correct. Right to Life is not seeking to change the law, that is the role of Parliament.
Right to Life is however seeking to have the legislation passed by our Parliament in 1977, upheld. Our Society’s objectives in the courts have been clearly presented in court documents and are available to the public. The objectives have been:
• to seek legal recognition of the unborn child as a human being endowed with human rights, the foundation right being a right to life.
• To seek the full protection of the law for the health and welfare of women.
• To ensure that the certifying consultants were accountable to the Abortion Supervisory Committee for the lawfulness of the abortions they authorised and to seek the independence of pregnancy counsellors from abortion providers.
The Abortion Law Reform Association [ALRANZ] claims that a United Nations World Health Organisation report published last week in the Lancet (the world’s leading medical journal), showed that unsafe [read illegal] abortion rates have risen by 5 per cent between 1995 and 2008 with a resulting increase in maternal mortality. The claim is dubious and is being used by the pro-abortion movement including the Guttmacher Institute, the political lobbying arm of Planned Parenthood in the United States and the pro-abortion World Health Organisation to support their international campaign to have so-called “safe” abortions legalised worldwide.
There is no such thing as a safe abortion. Abortion is always violence against women, it results in one dead baby and a wounded mother.
Statistics proof that countries where abortion is illegal have the lowest maternal mortality rates. Ireland, where abortion is banned, has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. Poland which banned abortion 20 years ago saw its maternal mortality rate drop 40 per cent. The rate in El Salvador dropped by half after abortion was re-criminalised in 1998.There is no such thing as a “safe” abortion. Every abortion is violence against women and their unborn. It results in one dead baby and a wounded mother.
ALRANZ claims to champion the cause of women. The Association is to be commended for its zeal: its zeal is however misplaced, for the Association betrays women by promoting a non-existent mother’s “right to choose” to kill her unborn child for any reason. It is also a betrayal of women to deny that the unborn child is not human and does not have a right to life.
Right to Life is pro-women, pro-life and pro-family. Susan B Anthony, a leader in the women’s liberation movement in the United States in the nineteenth century, called abortion ”child murder.” and said “when we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” Another feminist leader, Alice Paul, said, “abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”
Right to Life invites ALRANZ to inform the community why it believes the following:
• that an unborn child, even one in its third trimester, is not a human being and does not have a right to be born.
• that a woman has a “right to choose” to kill her child, even just before birth for any reason or no reason.
We also ask why ALRANZ supports eugenics and a woman’s ”right to choose” to kill her baby because it is not physically perfect?
ALRANZ has no reservations on how a baby is killed, why then do they support partial birth abortions where a baby in a late term abortion is delivered feet first and before the head leaves the birth canal scissors are plunged into the neck of the baby and its brains are sucked out?
ALRANZ is not the champion of women nor is it the voice of women as it purports to be.
Here are the words of another great American leader in the women’s movement “…so when a woman destroys the life of an unborn child it is an evidence that either by education or circumstance she has been greatly wronged.” Women do not willingly choose an abortion. It is often a choice made by others.
It is an unjust and impoverished nation that offers vulnerable women distressed with an unplanned pregnancy the destruction of her child. Women deserve compassion and practical help. When is our community going to confront this justice issue and protect women from being exploited and abandoned?

Ken Orr
Spokesperson,
Right to Life.