The miscarriage bereavement Bill is a good law mired in monumental hypocrisy

Last week the New Zealand Parliament unanimously passed The Holidays (Bereavement Leave for Miscarriage) Amendment Bill (No 2) into law.

The effect of this new Act is that mothers and fathers who lose their unborn children to miscarriage or stillbirth are now eligible for up to three days bereavement leave.

Make no mistake, this is a very good law and an excellent step forward for Kiwi families.

Although some have critiqued the length of the bereavement leave entitlement, saying it is too short, there is no doubting that this is a very important legal development for unborn children and their families.

This is a law which recognises the humanity of unborn human beings and unequivocally declares that their deaths are a grave and tragic cause of substantial grief that must be recognised in the most serious way possible.

Sadly though, the passing of this law also marked a monumental act of hypocrisy on the part of many of the Parliamentarians who supported it.

You see, many of the same MPs who voted last week to require that NZ employment law recognise the death of an unborn child as a serious loss, also voted in support of Labour’s extreme abortion legislation just one year ago.

Unlike this new law, that Act stripped away all of the legal protections that unborn children formerly had, instituting a new law which has the effect of allowing abortions to be carried out right up until, and even during birth.

With last year’s Abortion Legislation Act, our Parliament all but declared that the unborn child has no meaningful value and is not worthy of any recognition and protection from abortion.

To call the passing of these two very different Bills a schizophrenic act on the part of our Parliament and the media - who championed both events - is an understatement.

This is a moment which has exposed just how philosophically bankrupt things have now become amongst our political and media classes.

One minute they are celebrating and declaring that deliberately ending the life of an unborn child with an abortion is an emancipatory good of such great importance that it must become a legally enshrined ‘right’.

The next, they are declaring that the death of one of those very same same unborn children is such a serious and tragic loss that employers must be legally compelled to give employees several days off work to grieve the loss of that child.

What we are seeing here is the fruition of a new and frightening ideological vision of human rights and moral obligations which departs wildly from that which came before.

This is an ideology which rejects truth in favour of illogical and nonsensical exercises of purely arbitrary power.

This is an ideology which considers the killing of an unwanted unborn child to be good, while also declaring that if that same child were to die of natural causes it is a tragedy so great that it demands serious legal recognition by wider society.

It was interesting to note that, before it was removed, the original version of this Bill included the loss of an unborn to abortion as grounds for bereavement leave.

We can only assume that pro-abortion MPs considered it far too much of a threat to their ideological hegemony to allow the passing of any Bill which would have treated the killing of an unborn children as a tragic event that can lead to serious emotional harm.

Their constant denial of post-abortion grief, which effectively makes sufferers out to be either deluded or liars, is one of the areas where their ‘pro-woman’ claims are exposed as false in a major way.

It would have been very telling to see how many MPs would have suddenly withdrawn their support for The Holidays (Bereavement Leave for Miscarriage) Amendment Bill (No 2) had that clause remained present.

Based on what we’ve heard, it would have struggled to have been passed into law, and if it had, it certainly would not have enjoyed unanimous support.

The grave inconsistency of ethical standards on display here is truly shocking.

When all is said and done however, this new law is testament to a truth that pro-lifers have been declaring for decades - that the lives of unborn children matter, a lot, and their deaths are no less important, no less tragic than the deaths of already-born human beings are.

Being unwanted has no bearing on the magnitude or the tragedy of your death - any ideology which says otherwise is a cruel thing lacking in all humanity.

So, when future generations pass judgment on the 52nd and 53rd Parliament of New Zealand, the results won’t be kind.

The very act of supporting both of these Bills will condemn many MPs to the fate of being viewed as the people who supported a cruelly schizophrenic ideology which legally recognised the great worth and importance of the very same people that it also celebrated and protected the killing of.