NZ Abortion Access Back in the Dock

  

What if you had a way of providing an essential medical service that was safer, cheaper, less traumatic for patients, and meant they didn’t have to travel more than an hour each way to access it? Well, if it was for anything other than abortion, you’d be its champion. But this is abortion, and now the pioneering Tauranga Family Planning clinic, which has been providing early medication abortions in the Bay of Plenty since 2013, is under threat by anti-abortion court action that could worsen New Zealand’s already poor record on abortion access.

            The court action by the Catholic anti-choice group Right to Life is a direct result of our now 38-year-old abortion laws, which criminalise abortion and continue to block the use of newer and better ways of providing it. And it’s not the first time our backward laws have been recruited for the purpose of banning or restricting abortion access. A 7-year case by the same group seeking to wind back access went all the way to the Supreme Court, where in 2012 Right to Life lost by a frighteningly narrow 2-3 ruling. The fact that abortion access in New Zealand was one justice away from being severely restricted in 2012 should have been a wake-up call that our criminalised abortion laws need urgent change. But, again, this is abortion and if there’s one thing (almost) all politicians agree on, it’s that they’d rather do nothing than wade into a debate about reproductive justice. 

            So nothing happened, and so here we are again, with abortion access back in the dock. The implications of this case are significant (more on that below), and underscore the urgent need for supporters of reproductive choice and access to press politicians to take action to give our fragile abortion access a secure foundation.

 MPs have been on notice for decades that our laws are barely able to function: the Abortion Supervisory Committee has said so, the courts have said so, even the United Nations has said so. And still there is silence. To quote Prime Minister John Key during the 2014 election campaign: “I’m opposed to changing the law … I think the law broadly works.” And that’s been the standard line from the abortion liberals in Parliament for decades now – apart, that is, from a few stand-outs in the Green Party, which became the first-ever major party to adopt a pro-choice platform in 2014, some impressive Young Labour activism and a bold stand in 2010 by former Labour MP Steve Chadwick.

Importing U.S.-Style TRAP Laws

            The new case at hand was publicly announced on Sunday, when Right to Life said it was headed to the High Court to challenge the Abortion Supervisory Committee over granting a licence to Family Planning to provide early medication abortions at its Tauranga clinic. (Family Planning is only an “interested party” in this case, and it will be the Crown Law Office that plays defence.)

Though we haven’t yet seen Right to Life’s formal arguments, the media release and RTL’s previous posts about the Tauranga clinic indicate this effort is straight from the American TRAP law playbook (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers). In this case, RTL plans to argue that our law requires any institution providing abortion have “adequate surgical and other facilities” for the performance of safe abortions. As even RTL acknowledges, when the 1977 Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act was enacted, there were no medical abortions. Since Family Planning’s Tauranga clinic isn’t a hospital or a surgical facility, I’m assuming RTL will claim it doesn’t have the “adequate surgical and other facilities” needed to hold an abortion licence under the law so the ASC shouldn’t have given it one. (A hearing will take place at the High Court in Wellington on 2 June starting at 10 a.m. According to the court, it should be open to the public.)  

It’s important to explain a bit about what early medication abortion is. At the Tauranga clinic, medication abortions are available only up until 9 weeks of pregnancy (63 days), and involve bringing on a miscarriage using two medications usually taken 48 hours apart, Mifegyne or Mifepristone (formerly known as RU486) and Misoprostol (also known as Cytotec). You can read more here from Family Planning itself about what an early medication abortion entails. It’s also worth a reminder that people seeking abortions in the Bay of Plenty – as elsewhere – must still meet the requirements of our criminal statutes: Before you can get an abortion, two doctors (certifying consultants) must agree that your case meets one of the half dozen criteria listed in the Crimes Act. 

Defend Family Planning

Back when Christchurch anti-choice activist Andy Moore was still around (he’s gone and left us, and moved to Texas), he and a few others set up a campaign called Stop Family Planning (FP) – a campaign that looked a lot like the one in the U.S. against Planned Parenthood.

The campaign here was prompted by FP’s proposal, which began in 2009, to provide early medication abortion at its Hamilton clinic – which was to be a sort of a test clinic for possibly offering this option elsewhere. FP waited two long years for a decision from the Abortion Supervisory Committee, while the anti-choicers got busy whipping up a frenzy. Eventually, in 2011, FP withdrew the application, and last time I checked, women from the Waikato who wanted an early medication rather than a surgical abortion had to travel to Auckland for it. You can thank, in part, our backward laws for that – and for the fact that we’re way behind comparable nations in providing this early abortion option. But not helping the situation of course were the sterling efforts by Right to Life and Voice for Life and ProLife NZ and all those charities like Family First and Family Life International, who are only doing this because they care so much about the health and well-being of (certain) women.

Things had died down on the Stop Family Planning front since then. So much, in fact, that when I looked this past week, their old Web site (www.stopfamilyplanning.org.nz) was gone and the domain name was available. (If you feel brave, you can still look at the site using the Web archive/Wayback Machine.)

Family Planning has always been vulnerable to attack from conservatives, and the attacks always come. So I suppose it’s not surprising that the new year has brought a fresh round of invective being directed at FP, this time from Ken Orr of Right to Life. (The others will no doubt pile on at some point.) RTL just ended a 7-year-court case which it mostly lost aimed at ending abortion in New Zealand, so I suppose they have some time on their hands.

The latest attacks, which so far include a complaint to the Charities Commission about FP’s (and Women’s Health Action’s) charitable status (here’s Red Queen on that), a letter to the Minister of Health demanding FP be defunded (yes, following the U.S. ‘Defund Planned Parenthood’ playbook to the letter), and, on Saturday, one of the most – I don’t think I have the words – vile screeds I’ve had the misfortune to read in a long time. (I’m not linking to all this for various reasons, including its offensive nature, but if you want, you can hop over to the site. Just search “Right to Life New Zealand”. Don’t say you weren’t warned…)

That latest effort is titled, wait for it, “Family Planning Declares War on Women”.

Aside from the usual attacks on abortion and the “culture of death” etc. etc., this piece contains a lot of stuff that, as one person has already suggested, is quite likely defamatory and is most definitely highly offensive and insulting to, well, pretty much everyone. Everyone who isn’t in a heterosexual marriage and only having sex for procreative purposes, which means most straight men and women, and definitely all lesbians, gays, transgender people, questioning, queer… (trigger warning for misogyny, homophobia, transphobia over the jump)