How can the government authorise, fund and call abortion health care when it results in the violent killing of an unborn
child and the suicide of the mother?
There were thirty-one maternal suicides reported in New Zealand in 2023 by the Perinatal Maternal Review Committee for
the period 2006 to 2020. The total of direct maternal deaths was 76. Information was provided under the Official
Information Act to Right to Life by the Health Quality & Safety Commission New Zealand. The Commission advised that, “around a quarter of maternal suicides occur following a
termination of pregnancy.”
Right to Life believes that It is an appalling tragedy that thirty-one distraught women ended their lives as maternal
suicides. For those women who have lost their child especially through abortion the pain is unbearable with the mother
experiencing grief, sorrow and regret. Maori women were nearly three times as likely to die by maternal suicide than
European women.
A direct maternal death is the death of the woman during pregnancy, following birth, miscarriage or abortion or within
42 days of the termination of the pregnancy. Every year 650 babies and 10 mothers die in pregnancy or shortly after.
Right to Life respectfully asks our Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, who we know is genuinely concerned about women’s
health, will he now institute a national study into the damage done to women’s health by abortion and enquire why
innocent and grieving women are resorting to suicide to end their grief and pain. Fathers also commit suicide in despair
because they cannot protect their precious child from being killed by an abortionist.
Right to Life acknowledges that the circumstances around suicide are complex and that there may be other contributing
factors such as mental ill health. Right to Life believes that these thirty-one suicides are just the tip of the iceberg
as it is believed that many women commit suicide many years later as a direct result of an abortion.
These statistics dispel the myth propagated by Family Planning and the pro-abortion movement that abortion is safe and
that since 1977 no woman has ever died as a result of having an abortion. Every abortion kills a defenceless and
innocent child in the womb and wounds and sadly sometimes kills a grieving mother. Both abortion and suicide are cries
for help from women in despair. In both instances the woman is lonely, is in a state of despair and facing
insurmountable odds.
Right to Life believes that the extremist Abortion Legislation Act 2020 that effectively allows abortion up to birth
will result in more women killing themselves to heal their pain and to allow them to be with their child that has been
so cruelly taken from them. We should mourn for our women, innocent victims of abortion and suicide, their deaths and
those of their unborn children are a tragedy for their families and for our communities.