Every Life Matters? Really?

The government has chosen an unfortunate slogan for its commendable campaign to reduce suicides. If "Every Life Matters", as we’re now being told, how come the same government wants to liberalise the abortion laws?

More than 13,000 abortions were performed in New Zealand last year, indicating that there are few barriers to the procedure even under existing law. How many more abortions will be carried out if those few barriers are removed, as the government intends, is anyone’s guess.

We’re constantly told that the current abortion law is archaic and no longer fit for purpose, but one thing hasn’t changed. The 1975 Royal Commission on Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion accepted expert evidence that life begins at conception. The science hasn’t changed, even if the prevailing ideology has.

Any point after conception that is claimed as the starting point of life is an entirely arbitrary one, adopted for convenience.

That royal commission (appointed, incidentally, by a Labour government) also found that the unborn child, “as one of the weakest, the most vulnerable and most defenceless forms of humanity”, was entitled to protection.

That hasn’t changed either. If this government truly believed that every life matters, it would apply that principle to abortion as well as to suicide. Otherwise it stands accused of adopting a glaring double standard.