The Silencing of a Damning Abortion Report

Approximately ten days ago, during one of the busiest weeks of the year, and with mere days to go until everyone would be breaking for their Christmas holidays, the NZ Ministry of Health released its annual abortion report.

To call such timing highly unusual would be a major understatement, and it raises serious questions about whether this was a deliberate attempt to try and minimise public attention being drawn to the alarming details contained within its pages.

Not once in the past 20 years has the annual abortion report ever been released so late in the year, in fact this could well be the only time such a thing this has ever happened in the entire history of NZ abortion reporting. The only way this could have been any more suspect was if this report had been released last thing on Christmas Eve.

The extremely unusual irregularities don’t end there though.

An even more troubling anomaly has been the stark absence of mainstream media coverage about the release and contents of this report.

I am writing this article a full 10 days after the report was released, and yet another news specific Google search conducted just moments ago has, once again, returned zero mainstream media articles covering the release or contents of this report.

There is nothing normal about any of this, and the only thing that seems to make sense of these truly bizarre irregularities is the extremely troubling findings contained within the pages of this report.

Firstly, it reveals that there has been a massive 14.9% increase in abortions in 2023, which comes on the back of the previous 6.8% increase in 2022.

The number of abortions per known pregnancies has now risen to 221 abortions per 1000 pregnancies (22% of all pregnancies). The last time it was this high was 24 years ago, in the year 2000, when the annual report recorded 220 abortions per 1000 pregnancies.

To put this into some important perspective: abortions have now risen by almost 23% since the passing of the extreme Abortion Legislation Act (2020).

What’s even more of a problem for the architects, supporters, and mainstream media cheerleaders of that legislation is the huge rise in late term abortions.

Since its passing, there has been a massive 67% increase in abortions taking place at 20 weeks or more - an outcome caused solely by the Abortion Legislation Act’s removal of all meaningful restrictions on late term abortions in this country.

The problems don’t end there though.

The latest report also reveals that 60.7% of people having abortions were not using contraception when they got pregnant.

This means that abortion was employed as a means of birth control by almost 10,000 New Zealanders in 2023, painting a damning picture about the abject failure of contraceptive based sex education in schools - a utopian project that was sold to the public as the best way to produce sexually responsible citizens and thus reduce risk-taking and bad outcomes.

Finally, the latest report also reveals that the number of abortions resulting in adverse outcomes for the mothers who have abortions has now almost doubled since the passing of the Abortion Legislation Act - increasing from 1.3% in 2021, to 1.6% in 2022, to 2.2% in 2023.

Abortions are now resulting in far more adverse outcomes for women than what they were prior to the passing of the Abortion Legislation Act in early 2020.

The report makes it abundantly clear that this particular outcome is being caused by the major increase in the use of early medical abortions (the two stage abortion pill process), driven by the 0800 dial-a-DIY-abortion hotline established by the Labour government less than 24 months after the passing of the Abortion Legislation Act.

This concerning Government programme has all the hallmarks of a state funded and facilitated backstreet abortion service, where desperate women and girls can ring a toll free number and be sent abortion drugs to carry out their own unsupervised home abortions.

The table of adverse abortion outcomes on page 40 of the latest report (below) exposes that the early medical abortion method (EMA) is causing far more adverse outcomes than surgical abortions are.

Table of adverse abortion outcomes caused to women in 2023

And that’s to say nothing of the 36 women who had EMAs in 2023 and then subsequently never engaged in the follow-up process (which can often be women who have no desire to discuss their abortion any further due to the adverse nature of the experience).

For those who might be wondering, we have known for many years that this particular form of abortion carries greater risks.

Back in 2011 The Australian reported about a study of 7000 Australian abortions carried out in 2009 which found that 3.3% of women having EMAs later ended up at emergency departments to seek treatment for adverse outcomes, compared to only 2.2% of women who had surgical abortions.

The same study also found that 5.7% of women having EMAs had to be admitted to hospital for post-operative treatment, compared to only 0.4% of women undergoing surgical abortions.

Now that the previous Parliament has opened the floodgates to allow telephone facilitated do-it-yourself EMAs on the back of the passing of the Abortion Legislation Act, it seems likely that it is only a matter of time before one of these unsupervised home abortions claims the life of a desperate Kiwi mother.

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, one of the most shocking aspects of this latest abortion report is its one page forward authored by Director-General of Health Dr Diana Sarfati.

Not only does she fail to specifically acknowledge the seriousness of the negative outcomes contained within its pages, but she actually states that:

“The findings within this report highlight continued improvements following both the 2020 law reform and the 2022 health reforms.”

and then signs off her forward with:

“While there are areas for improvement, I am heartened by the continuing progress toward equitable and accessible service provision for this important health service.”

Did she actually read this report properly, or could the unthinkable be true, that our Director General of Health genuinely considers the atrocious outcomes it contains to be positive developments?

To suggest that there is zero public interest in the shocking findings in this latest annual abortion report is absurdly incongruous with reality - so why the media radio silence?

Firstly, this wasn’t supposed to happen.

I still remember the advocates of the extreme Abortion Legislation Act vociferously insisting that it was nothing more than the legislative removal of abortion from the Crimes Act, and that anyone who claimed it would cause deleterious outcomes was engaging in baseless scaremongering.

We were also told that this much vaunted piece of legislation would be a major advance for the women of our nation - a claim proved false by the almost doubling of harmful outcomes for females having abortions since the passing of the act.

Another glaring factor in all of this is that the Abortion Legislation Act was the pet political project of Jacinda Ardern.

She proudly advocated for it in the lead up to the 2017 election, and then boasted about it as one of her great accomplishments after its passing.

It isn't just Ardern who is implicated in all of this though.

Many of our current MPs and party leaders also voted for this extreme piece of legislation, and are thus marred by the poisoned fruit it has yielded.

As are those in the mainstream media who propagandised, demonised critics, and promoted misinformation or misleading claims about the Abortion Legislation Act and its outcomes.

The simple truth is that many in our political and media classes are deeply embroiled in the disastrous outcomes that the latest annual abortion report reveals.

If you were looking for possible motivations as to the questionable timing of this report and the subsequent lack of media coverage, you needn't look much farther than the damning nature of its contents and the actors that it indicts.

Let me conclude by drawing your attention to another curious mainstream media event that took place only seventeen days before this report was released.

One of our largest state funded media outlets published a print and audio piece lauding the establishment of abortion facilities in New Zealand emotively titled ‘Remembering the lives lost to illegal abortion in NZ’.

If I was a more cynical man, I could be tempted to see some sort of collusion between state media and a state bureaucracy in this highly coincidental occurrence - a seeding of the ground, if you will, intended to try and create a more favourable narrative just days before the release of a report showing abortion spiralling out of control in our country.