After Ireland voted to change their abortion laws, the death lobby in New Zealand got all excited and decided to push for more dead babies over here too, with Jacinda and her cabinet announcing that might happen next year. Of course, the hapless Simon Bridges had to go on Red Radio and TVNZ to stick his foot in his mouth.
I think what it is is a situation where we want abortions to be rare, safe and legal. I'd put the emphasis, personally, on rare.
Simon goes on to say that he thinks the current law is working well and that he doesn't want to change it. What's wrong with this? Well, Simon is supposed to be a Christian. So that makes him either a liar, because he doesn't actually personally agree with abortion, or it means he's changed his religious affiliation without telling us. He also can't hide behind "party policy", because this would be a conscience issue and my money's on a large segment, if not a majority, of National MPs supporting the new up and coming law change.
We're not quiet at the worst part yet though, some schlub at Newshub wrote that Simon's comments were an "echo of a Republican Party line," except, well: it's a Clinton line. Both Bill and Hillary have used it, the later most recently in her 2008 campaign, down to the "emphasis on rare" part. Everyone knows that this "safe, legal, and rare" line about abortion is some what of a joke, because you simply can't have all three. Around 13,000 abortions are performed in NZ every year, which is hardly rare.
So why is Simon quoting Hillary, almost word for word?
John Key once stated that Barack Obama and the Democrat Party were a little to the right of National, which is probably true enough, but that does not make it a good idea to quote the most hated woman in the world to support your position.
There were of course plenty of things that Simon could have said, for instance: "Personally, I don't agree with abortion and believe it to be a tragic thing, but if there is a vote then we'll see what happens. It's not National Party policy to make any changes to the law." That would have been just as insubstantial, but slightly less evil.
The day after Simon became National Party leader, I remarked that he would never be prime minister and I can stand by that statement more firmly every time he opens his mouth.