WELLINGTON, May 16, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – New Zealand parents are horrified after discovering that the country’s public schools help young girls obtain secret abortions.
New Zealand’s Star-Times on Sunday published a report, picked up by the Drudge Report, in which mothers expressed anger after learning that their daughters had made the devastating choice to abort their child alone, out of fear of their family’s reaction.
“I was horrified. Horrified that she’d had to go through that on her own, and horrified her friends and counselors had felt that she shouldn’t talk to us,” said one anonymous mother, whose 16-year-old daughter kept her abortion secret, and lied about the cause of her anguish when her mother caught her crying.
The mother said that follow-up counseling for her daughter after the abortion was “nonexistent,” and that she was too upset to confront the school. “Afterwards I was too wild, and I probably still am,” she said.
Another mom said she “hit a brick wall” when trying to gather information from the school about a possible abortion on her 15-year-old daughter.
A lawyer who has written on privacy laws in New Zealand schools explained that counselor confidentiality would apply to abortions.
“When it comes to contraception and abortion, they [counsellors] would need the consent of the person before they could share information with a parent or the school,” said Christchurch lawyer Kathryn Dalziel, who noted that a counselor who broke the confidentiality rule could be fired.
The Star-Times noted that under the law a girl “of any age” may legally obtain an abortion, and that in 2009, 79 of the nearly 4,000 abortions among teenage girls were performed on mothers between the ages of 11 and 14.
The article concluded with the success story of a 14-year-old girl who has been able to continue at school after choosing life for her baby girl, now two years old.