Voice for Life

Voice for Life is New Zealand's oldest pro-life group. It advocates for restrictive abortion laws and opposes legalized euthanasia. The organisation publishes the newsletter "Pro-Life Times", which in 2001 replaced the larger newsletter, "Humanity". "Pro-Life Times" is edited by past Voice for Life President Josephine Reeves. Voice for Life's current President Annetta Moran is a long-time pro-life activist, who led the defunct New Zealand pro-life group Women For Life for many years, and was also high on the party list of the now-defunct Christian Coalition in 1996. Her husband, Bernard Moran, is President of Auckland Voice for Life.

Voice for Life was founded in 1970, as the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC), by pioneering New Zealand fetal surgeon Dr. William Liley, who became the organisation's first president. The organization was initially successful in lobbying the Parliament of New Zealand to introduce a restrictive abortion law in the 1977 Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act, but in subsequent years large numbers of abortions were performed on mental health grounds. According to its official historian, late former president Marilyn Pryor, the New Zealand pro-life movement suffered a devastating defeat in the 1983 case "Wall v. Livingstone", in which a pro-life doctor tried to legally challenge an abortion approved by two certifying consultants. Wall lost the case, with the court ruling that the fetus could not be represented, and that the decisions of certifying consultants were beyond judicial review. Since the 1970s, its membership has aged, died off, and diminished. In recent years, it has tried to alter the composition of Abortion Supervisory Committee in order to prevent mental health grounds being used to allow abortion on demand, and introduce pro-life legislation within the New Zealand Parliament, but so far no such bills have passed their first parliamentary reading.

Voice for Life is a separate organisation to Right to Life New Zealand, which seems to favour the total prohibition of abortion in New Zealand, as it has more recently espoused incremental pro-life laws, like advocating for a parental consent requirement for girls under 16 years of age to have abortions in 2004, and 'informed consent' pro-life laws, which require women to be given information about the fetus, including pictures of the fetus, prior to deciding whether or not to have an abortion, within parliamentary private members bills.

However, in New Zealand, abortion access has become increasingly easy to obtain, although access usually occurs within abortion clinics in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington, within the public sector.fact|date=September 2008

References

*Marilyn Pryor, "The Right to Live: The Abortion Battle of New Zealand" Auckland: Haelen Books (1985) ISBN 0-908630-23-9

External links

* [http://www.voiceforlife.org.nz Voice for Life]