Anniversary of Safe Areas Bill’s Passage Passes with No Safe Areas

Last Saturday 18 March, Aotearoa New Zealand marked the
first anniversary of the passage of the Contraception,
Sterilisation, and Abortion (Safe Areas) Amendment Act 2022.
ALRANZ Abortion Rights Aotearoa notes that in spite of the
act, New Zealand has
no safe areas.

The process to create a safe area
is cumbersome and time-consuming. It requires months of work
by the Ministry of Health to plot out the safe area and get
it approved. After all that, the fate of a safe area is in
the hands of Cabinet, which can move it forward or ignore
it.

There are currently about a dozen safe area
applications in the pipeline. Half are ready for Cabinet to
consider.

People who receive or provide abortion care
need safe areas yesterday. Every day, people have to walk by
judgemental anti-abortion protesters with huge, misleading,
gory signs in order to access safe, legal health
care.

ALRANZ president Dr Tracy Morison said,
“Parliament passed the Safe Areas Bill because they saw
the need for it. If there’s a need, and there definitely
is, then the process for creating safe areas isn’t fit for
purpose because not one safe area has been created to
date.”

ALRANZ believes Cabinet needs to approve the
safe areas applications as a matter of urgency, or admit the
government got it wrong when they set out the requirements
for creating safe
areas.

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