Abortion law under review
The Law Commission says New Zealand’s current abortion law leads to delays and presents barriers for women seeking abortion services.
Yesterday, the commission released its briefing paper examining alternatives to abortion law, following Justice Minister Andrew Little’s proposal to make abortion a health issue rather than a criminal one.
The commission proposed three new legal models: a statutory test to ensure the abortion was appropriate in the circumstances; no test and the decision would be made by the woman and her doctor; or a test only for a woman more than 22 weeks pregnant. Currently, a woman must get two certifying doctors to agree that continuing the pregnancy would result in serious danger to the woman’s mental or physical health. The Law Commission report suggested a number of reforms to improve access to abortions as the current law caused delays and presented barriers for women.
Abortion Law Reform Association (Alranz) president Terry Bellamak said she supported the decision to treat abortion as a health issue rather than a criminal one.
‘‘The abortion laws here are discriminatory. You have to jump through hoops to have an abortion, including seeing two separate doctors when nobody has to do that for other health issues.’’
Earlier this month, Alranz took a complaint to the Human Rights Commission alleging abortion laws discriminate against women and pregnant people.
Voice for Life spokeswoman Kate Cormack said the organisation had concerns about the haste with which the report had been handled and the lack of conversation around it. ‘‘Voice for Life are ready for the conversation and we want it but we want it to be an extensive and broad conversation.’’
The Law Commission received just under 3500 submissions from the public, as well as meeting with health sector representatives.
THE CURRENT LAW
The Crimes Act 1961 determines the grounds for an abortion under 20 weeks which can be: serious danger to life; any form of incest or sexual relations with a guardian; mental sub normality; and foetal abnormality.
Extremes of age and sexual violation can also be taken into account but aren’t grounds in themselves.
After 20 weeks gestation the grounds are different.
Abortions can only be performed to save the life of the mother or to prevent serious permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the mother. For terminations under eight weeks, women can be given pills and have the abortion at home. After that, abortion is a surgical procedure.
Any new legislation would be a conscience vote.
THE NUMBERS
The New Zealand abortion rate increased slightly in 2017 to 13.7 abortions per 1000, compared with 13.5 in 2016, according to Statistics NZ. In total, 13,285 induced abortions were performed in 2017, an increase of 462 (3.6 per cent) on the previous year.
About one in every five pregnancies ended in abortion, the data showed.