The entire saga of the C.S. and A Act from the establishment of the Royal Commision by the Labour Government in 1975 to the recent refusal by the Abortion Supervisory Committee to grant the Aotea Abortion Clinic a licence to operate is a series of completely undemocratic and arbitary actions by Government. The members of the Royal Commision were chosen for their anti-abortion views. The only doctor on the Commission was a Catholic. Consequently the report of the Royal Commission read like a SPUC publication with continual reference to the rights of the "unborn child" and "women who play must pay" attitude to women and sex. The New-Zealand report stands in stark contrast to a recent report by the Austrailian Royal Commission on abortion which recognised that women both need and will go to great lengths to obtain abortions

The law passed in November 1977 was extremely repressive. An indication of the M.P's determination to stop women from having abortions was the Wall amendment which ensured that physical or mental harm are only grounds for an abortion if the danger cannot be averted by any other means, an amendment making rape grounds was decisively lost, and a clause ensuring that foetal abnormality could not be grounds for abortion was included in the Act. The law was passed in haste and confusion. The Prime Minister, admitted the next day that he didn't know which way he had voted on some of the amendments.

Not content at severly restricting the grounds for abortion the new law established a very elaborate administrative procedure to ensure the law wasn't interpreted liberally.