What's Happening in Hamilton?

What’s happening in Hamilton?

The Waikato Times has been buzzing with letters to the editor over Family Planning’s application to provide early medical abortions at its clinic in Hamilton, with a view to eventually expanding the service to other clinics. And on Saturday, the paper reported on a protest outside the FP clinic. (Rather sloppily, the Times report doesn’t say how big, or small, the protest was. Do any of our readers know?)

[UPDATE: Right to Life has photos of the protest on its Web site which appear to show about a dozen protesters. Voice for Life, according to the Times, organised the Hamilton protest, and it has also issued a statement.]

Hamilton, it seems, has become the new front line in the struggle to ensure all New Zealand women have access to abortion services. Right to Life has mounted a media campaign to make sure that doesn’t happen, attacking Family Planning as  “strongly pro-abortion”, “promoting a culture of death”, being "peddlers of death", and threatening to take High Court action if the Abortion Supervisory Committee approves FP’s application. (As followers of the abortion rights struggle in New Zealand know, Right to Life is already engaged in a now 4-year-long court case aimed at banning abortion in New Zealand. You can find information about that court battle here.)

Right to Life’s spokesman Ken Orr, together with other anti-abortion advocates, have kept up a steady flow of letters and press releases to local media, MPs, government officials, the hospital board and so on. Pro-choice voices have weighed in, too, though of course we think never enough.

This is an important issue for the pro-choice community to get behind, and we urge readers to write letters of support to local Waikato papers, MPs and others.  It’s particularly important to counter the misinformation about early medical abortion that’s being promulgated by anti-abortion advocates. For information about medical abortion, you can read our factsheet, but while we’re here, let’s briefly address some of the issues that keep cropping up:

(1.) FP is not seeking to introduce anything new here. Medical abortions using the abortion pill Mifegyne have been carried out in New Zealand since April 2002. Rather, it simply wants to make this option available to more women – this is particularly important considering the access problems many New Zealand women face.

In a paper last year in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, Martha Silva and Rob McNeill (available here) found that women who live in regions that don’t offer local abortion services have to travel about 220 kilometres to access those services. Making early medical abortions available in FP clinics would go a long way to easing that access.

Better access is better for women because of the lower risk associated with earlier, rather than later abortions. New Zealand lags in this respect with fewer than 10% of abortions carried out at less than 8 weeks. In the Netherlands more than 75% are done at this early stage. The availability of early medical abortion services in clinics would help improve this statistic. If anti-abortion advocates do care about women’s health, as they frequently say they do, this initiative should be supported. And speaking of that “caring about health” claim…

(2.) Right to Life asserts that Mifegyne is a “dangerous and lethal drug,” and is “dangerous for women’s health”.

Mifegyne is a very safe drug when used correctly. As a measure of its usefulness, The World Health Organisation in 2005 put the drug on its list of essential medicines for developing countries because of its role in preventing unsafe abortions.

Mr. Orr states that there have been 12 reported deaths in the United States following the use of Mifegyne, but there have also been deaths associated with spontaneous miscarriage and childbirth. The common factor in all these tragic cases was pregnancy, rather than abortion per se. The organism responsible for the fatal toxic shock syndrome appears to be peculiar to North America as there have been no deaths in Europe, Scandinavia or Australasia.

Finally, compare the death rate of approximately 0.8 per 100,000 medical abortions in the U.S. with a rate of five male deaths for every 100,000 Viagra prescriptions and 150 accidental fatal overdoses of the painkiller paracetamol each year. Indeed, having an early, safe medical abortion is roughly ten times safer than giving birth.

All of which only serves to prove that fights over statistics aren’t really about the statistics. These “safety” arguments are made to scare, not to inform.

(3.) Opponents of the proposal also claim that it will lead to an increase in abortions, but this is not borne out by experience in other countries, or New Zealand for that matter. In Sweden, France and Great Britain, availability of medication abortion when abortion was already legal did not increase the number of abortions.

And since the introduction of medical abortion in New Zealand, the numbers of abortions have not increased but have actually decreased. (Source: Statistics NZ)

2003 18,511 (Total number of abortions)

2004 18,211

2005 17,531

2006 17,934

2007 18,382

2008 17,940

(4.) Interestingly, Right to Life also complains that if FP gets the licence the “accountability and scrutiny” provided by having abortions performed in public hospitals will cease. Could this mean the group prefers that abortions be performed in public hospitals? But Right to Life has also been campaigning against tax-payer dollars being spent on abortion services. It recently wrote to the Minister of Health to “express concern at taxpayers being required to pay for abortions in New Zealand.”  Which is it?

It’s worth noting here that abortion opponents in the United States have been very successful with the tactic of encouraging taxpayers to object to state funded abortions, starting with the Hyde Amendment in 1976 that barred federal funds being spent on abortions.  Anti-abortion groups here will have to decide at some point which they prefer (aside from neither): oversight in public hospitals or private abortion clinics. Either way, this is sure to be an ongoing issue, and you can find some of our recent posts on taxes and abortion here and here.

There are many more anti-choice claims about the Family Planning initiative out there and most of them are addressed on Alranz’s medical abortion fact sheet.

But please, if you come across others, or have ideas about how we can support this excellent programme, please leave a comment. This blog is moderated, so your views may take some time to appear. We appreciate your patience.