The woman who moved to confiscate guns opens fire on the innocent
AT a time when everybody’s nerves are frayed by a pandemic, when there seems to be enough death and dying in the world – actual, feared, pending or possible – she struck. Jacinda Ardern used the Chinese coronavirus as handy cover to rush through abortion liberalisation laws which even Roe vs Wade bastion The New York Times reports with a headline that includes the ominous words, “gone too far.” And it’s not hard to see why even ‘pro-choice’ agitators are unsettled. The measures mean New Zealand is now one of the most extremist jurisdictions in the world for women wishing to end their pregnancies. They will henceforth be free to do so up until birth at taxpayers’ expense. The Abortion Legislation Act also makes it legal to terminate unborn girls for any reason – a ‘reform’ backed by the feminist Prime Minister. Time-limits on disability abortions have been scrapped; this means cleft lips, club feet or Down syndrome are reason enough to abort in any trimester, even at nine months. There will be no restrictions either on so-called “partial birth” abortions which allow babies to be killed even as the first air available to breathe surrounds their then dismembered bodies.
Desperate for some remnant of humaneness to survive in the law, MP for Tamaki, Simon O’Connor, proposed an amendment in committee stipulating that health professionals must at least administer medical help to babies born alive after ‘failed’ abortions but even this heritage gesture to the Hippocratic Oath was voted down 80 to 37. Mrs Ardern was one of the 80. Like Brenton Tarrant, they showed no mercy. Such was the mania in the ranks of the Prime Minister and her fellow ayes that a planned referendum on these ‘reforms’ was ruthlessly dumped by 100 votes to 19. There would be no public scrutiny.
Other attempts besides Mr O’Connor’s to soften what was, by any sane measure, beyond softening included amendments requiring pain relief for babies being aborted – between 20-weeks and birth – and stronger protections for medical staff who conscientiously object to performing or assisting at abortions. These were also rejected. Marama Davidson of the the Green Party had one last thing on her wish list: to ban pro-lifers from the vicinity of clinics on pain of arrest and prosecution. This failed but only by procedural accident. Finally, the government ensured no official statistics on abortion would be kept. This was no doubt actuated by spite but it’s oddly cagey for out-and-proud proponents who wear amputated baby limbs as badges of honour.
The comparison with the Christchurch mosque shootings is not only fitting – except perhaps for its unfairness to the murderer, who killed far fewer innocents than will the Ardern government’s open slather ‘reforms’ – but also partly explains the liberalisation. Leftists have always seen abortion ‘law reform’ as a cudgel to hammer the people it hates: conservatives, Christians and family traditionalists. The motivation is to burn down the bridges they cherish and psychologically overwhelm their resolute hostility to a modernity whose defining idea must be state nihilism enforced by the courts, the police and the media. This has been true most obviously in the United States where opponents of abortion on demand are banned from seeking office by the Democrat Party. Virtually before the bodies had been removed from the crime scene in Christchurch last March, left-wing politicians and commentators began promoting the notion that “right-wing” citizens shared in the blame and were a menacing, continuing threat to New Zealand. A year later, almost to the day, the Ardern government calls off a plebiscite, shuts down public submissions and enacts into law a gruesome rejoinder.