KEY POINTS:
This week's High Court victory by the anti-abortion group Right to Life will cause many to fear that a battle won long ago must be fought again.
The Christchurch-based organisation had sought a judicial review of the workings of the Abortion Supervisory Committee, claiming that, contrary to the intention of Parliament when it passed the current legislation in 1977, women are getting abortion on demand.
In a decision in the High Court at Wellington this week, Justice Forrest Miller expressed concern that doctors who are too liberal in permitting women to have abortions were not being adequately supervised by the committee, which is required, among other things, to "keep under review all the provisions of the abortion law, and the operation and effect of those provisions in practice".
The judge said that the committee had the power to dismiss doctors who are too liberal in permitting women to have abortions but had never used it: New Zealand's abortion statistics, he added, "gave rise to powerful misgivings about the lawfulness of many abortions".
Right to Life's victory is, at present, a technical one and the first stage in what will certainly be a protracted legal process. The judge is seeking further submissions from interested parties before making any declarations. Crown Law, which represented the committee in court, has not decided how it will proceed.
It will be many months before anything more will happen and until then, the committee, consultants and doctors will be proceeding as they have done.
Meanwhile, politicians on both sides of the House are "studying the decision". That's no surprise: abortion is traditionally a conscience vote and the issue has no potential as a vote-winner and plenty as a vote-loser. Politicians are as likely to express an election-year view on this as they are to suggest that the ban on nuclear-armed ships will be gone by lunchtime.
But sooner or later - and sooner would be a lot better than later - the matter calls for some serious political leadership. The law as it stands may have been implemented more liberally than a strict reading of its letter demands but it goes too far to say, as the judge does, that the act creates a "moral claim" by the unborn child "on the conscience of the community". More than 30 years after the Act was passed, it is more than questionable that the community - meaning the prevailing weight of public opinion - wants women to face more restrictions on access to abortion.
Of the four grounds on which an abortion may be granted, the most commonly used is that, in the opinion of the certifying consultant, proceeding with the pregnancy would pose a serious danger to the mother's physical or mental health. Right to Life and groups of its ilk are concerned that the words "serious danger" are treated too lightly. Others argue that if the continuation of an unwanted pregnancy disrupts a woman's family life, happiness or realistic chances of economic self-fulfillment, it is indeed a serious danger.
Do New Zealanders really believe the foetus' right to life includes the right to be born unwanted?
Few women seek an abortion lightly and those who do are already - and properly - reminded that abortion is not a form of contraception for the careless. The idea that a woman should have to face the virtual certainty of severe mental illness before she can have access to a safe termination has no place in a civilised secular society.
Whatever Government is in place after the election owes it to New Zealand women not to erode gains made a generation ago.
