SpeechDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei) (remote): Kia ora Madam Speaker. I'm rising to speak to this bill tonight with gratitude. I was not a member of this House when the primary legislation was passed making abortion a legal medical treatment that women and pregnant people were free to seek over their own bodies. Nor was I a member of the select committee. I have watched your work my sister Louisa Wall from afar with gratitude and a very clear awareness of how difficult it is to operate in a space like this one to take on board all of the very intense emotions that are generated by talk of pregnancy of termination and of the right of women to choose how they operate within their own bodies and their own spaces and our control over our reproductive rights.I am lucky in that I am someone who has never faced the choice between a pregnancy and a situation where I was not able to raise a baby. All of my four babies I was able to welcome into a family that was capable of coping with them and loving them and joying in them. I was raised in a family also where babies were joyous and welcomed. But I was also raised by feminist parents and a mother who was a registered nurse in the 1960s so I was raised with a very clear awareness that the choice to have a baby can be one that is intolerable for some women. I vividly remember the stories from my mother of nursing a young mum who after three children and a very happy marriage she and her husband simply could not afford a fourth child and after much travail they chose a backstreet abortion which was all that was available to them and as a result that woman contracted a most terrible infection and died horribly in hospital. That is what you people have done: in making the abortion act legal you have avoided any young women like that young woman her young husband and her three children going through that trauma.To be pregnant is just such an intensely vulnerable time. So it is so important that we take this step of protecting women who are in the appalling situation of having to make a decision about their bodies from the pressure and harassment of those who have very strong and sometimes ill-considered ways of expressing their opposition to the personal choice of a woman or a pregnant person over her own body.When we look at the Attorney-General's report we consider the advice that he gave to the select committee as to the scope of what should be prohibited or what it was lawful to prohibit under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. He was alarmed by the word communicating". He felt that that was too wide a term and that that could not be used in the context of prohibiting free speech. Let us remind ourselves of the words of section 5 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act that our rights and freedoms are "subject only to such reasonable limits [as] prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." Rights are never absolute. Finding the boundary between where one's own rights of expression unjustifiably infringe upon the freedoms and liberties of another is a difficult job.So I commend the select committee for the work that they did and the way in which they came down on a careful considered and I think eminently reasonable approach to this. So rather than a person being prohibited from merely communicating we now have the clear advice in new section 13A inserted by clause 5 that it is prohibited to obstruct a person from trying to access abortion services; to visually record that person in a way that is likely to cause them distress; to try to interfere with their decision without their consent; or to engage in protest. And that as my friend Dr Craig has said also is ameliorated by the fact that the 150-metre rule and exclusion zone is negotiable depending on the circumstances. This is a sensible straightforward regime that is going to protect people at an incredibly vulnerable point in their lives.I sometimes wonder whether those who protest including outside my local hospital quite realise the level of vulnerability and indeed shame there still is around women and pregnant people accessing what is a perfectly legal service in control of their own destinies and their own lives. I sometimes wonder whether their efforts would in fact be better served—if indeed they have such aroha for women and for children—in perhaps going out and supporting our young mums who struggle to raise babies; maybe it would be better served by an effort to volunteer at your local after-school care programme or perhaps to donate food or offer practical support rather than to harass and bully—however well intentioned you may be—women at such a vulnerable point in their lives.But I can understand why people feel that right to interfere with women at that point in their lives because we are used to being allowed to interfere with women's rights over our bodies. To be born into a typically female body is to be born knowing that society will never leave you in any doubt as to your choices over how to use that body whether it is what you wear who you associate with or whether you have or have not children. To be born into an apparently female body is to be born into a society which assumes it can tell you exactly what it likes about that body. That is not OK. Our women need—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! My apologies to the member. This debate is interrupted. We will resume after dinner at 7 p.m. Kia ora.Sitting suspended from 6.01 p.m. to 7 p.m."