Since Our Launch in September 2024, We’ve Already Achieved …
10
CITIES REACHED
36
TRAINING EVENTS
71
ACTIVISM SHIFTS
125+
CONVERSATIONS
Explore Our Projects!
Street Outreach
Engaging passers-by in a public area in conversations about abortion, while also achieving sign views and distributing brochures
Door Knocking
Systematically knocking on every door on a street and striving to engage the inhabitants in compassionate and compelling conversations about abortion
Roadside Display
Setting up a visual display of signs on a busy roadside, that generates hundreds of views of both abortion victim photography and images of life in the womb
Dialogue Training
Equipping pro-lifers to confidently have conversations about abortion that change hearts and minds!
Meet Our Team
Ellie Whitaker
National Coordinator
About Ellie
Early on in her teen years, Ellie became passionate about the sanctity of life message, and got involved in a variety of pro-life efforts, including Voice for Life, March for Life, 40 Days for Life, Activ8, and crisis pregnancy centres. While studying Speech and Language Pathology at the University of Canterbury, she helped lead a pro-life club on campus. Following graduation, Ellie took a leap and completed a four-month internship with the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, engaging in daily pro-life activism. From this experience, she then became involved in launching and working for the New Zealand Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.
She loves to see everyday people feel confident and equipped to stand for life, to witness hearts and minds changed, men and women healed, and babies saved!
Outside of pro-life endeavors, Ellie enjoys learning theology and apologetics, making quilts, and reading books of all kinds, preferably accompanied by a cup of tea and cat snuggles.
Tony Sumner
Outreach Leader
About Tony
Tony is dedicated to ending the killing of the preborn in NZ and working to make Rotorua a sanctuary city for the pre-born. Guided by his favourite quote, “When courage shows up, fear disappears,” he brings determination, courage, and energy to the mission.
Based in Rotorua, Tony works in the lubricants industry and actively serves his local church. He and his wife are blessed with two children, two grandchildren, and a lively pack of pet dogs. He loves sailing and spending time on the lake.
Martin Brown
Pastoral Care
About Marty
Marty has been part of the team from its early days, motivated by faith in Jesus Christ and a desire to see life protected in New Zealand. Grieved by NZ’s oppressive abortion laws and a love for God, he wants to be on the front line of this battle for righteousness and justice, to end the killing in NZ.
He lives in Rotorua with his wife Fiona; they have two children, three grandchildren, and one on the way. By day, he works in sales for a lubricants and services business, and he also serves as pastor for Church Without Walls. In his free time, he enjoys mountain biking and fly fishing.
BJ Whitaker
Legal Advisor
About BJ
BJ has been involved in the pro-life movement for almost 40 years. What began as casual interest turned into deep conviction after watching The Silent Scream. Since then, he has served as President of Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child Wellington, started Kapiti Voice for Life, and helped drive countless initiatives—prayer at Parkview Clinic, regional training days, Life Chain, the Sandcastle Sunday Memorial, Christmas tree fundraisers, radio ads, and more. He co-founded “Staying Alive” (which became Activ8) and was part of the founding team for the Wellington March for Life.
In light of New Zealand’s 2020 abortion legislation, BJ is convinced of the need for innovative edgy change. Having witnessed the success of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, he is convinced of the need to utilize their strategy of abortion victim photography and cutting edge apologetics.
BJ lives on the Kapiti Coast with his wife Christine. They are blessed with seven children (including two adopted from the Philippines) and six grandchildren. A self-employed property valuer, BJ also enjoys church life, politics, tackling injustice, and the occasional game of soccer—though his knees don’t always agree.
Learn Our Strategy: End the Killing
“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” – William Wilberforce
Currently in New Zealand 49 preborn babies are killed every single day by abortion, making it a leading cause of death. This is not just a statistic, it is a tragedy that profoundly impacts families, communities, and our society.
Our strategy — and all of our actions — are aimed towards this goal: to End the Killing.
The claim that abortion is permanent and unchangeable is historically false. History shows that deeply entrenched injustices CAN be overturned. Movements like the British abolitionists, the fight against child labour, and the civil rights movement changed the unchangeable, by exposing injustice through visual evidence and confronting culture head-on. We can apply the lessons from successful social reform movements of the past, to the injustice of abortion in New Zealand today.
As an educational organization, we aim to make abortion unthinkable in New Zealand — like slavery, child labour or segregation. We must change hearts and minds on abortion in order to save lives. Unless people recognise abortion as an injustice, they are unlikely to seek life-affirming alternatives or support pro-life policies. Political and pastoral efforts matter—but they cannot succeed without a transformed culture.
Effective Education: Abortion Victim Photography and Apologetics
What must we do to make abortion unthinkable? There are two essential pillars to the End the Killing strategy, we must reach all mature New Zealanders with: (1) Abortion Victim Photography (AVP) and (2) human rights apologetics.
Our strategy and all of our projects are centered around this goal — to reach all of New Zealand with abortion victim photography and human rights apologetics.
To change hearts and minds, we must present compelling evidence and clear reasoning. Our goal is not to attract people to our organization, but to repel people from abortion. Social reform is not marketing – Marketing attempts to attract people to something, but social reform is about repelling people away from something
Effective social reformers are rarely popular, and popular reformers are rarely effective — the history of successful social reform movements reveals societies getting angry at peaceful but persistent activists who communicated what was right, albeit unpopular. While we always show respect and empathy towards everyone we engage with, especially those who have personal experience with the trauma of abortion, our primary goal is not to be popular or to be liked, but to repel people from abortion — to make abortion unthinkable in their hearts and minds by reaching them with the truth that abortion kills an innocent human being.
We don’t use abortion victim photography because we like it. We use it because it works — and it works better than anything else. Victim photography and visual evidence has been essential to the success of social reform movements in the past, and we can see that AVP is the most effective educational tool to change hearts and minds on abortion today.
Over in Canada, our counterparts at the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform commissioned an independent statistical analysis on the effectiveness of abortion victim photography in 2015. This found that 67% of people felt more negatively toward abortion after seeing abortion victim photography.
In addition to this statistical evidence, there is plentiful anecdotal evidence from individuals who chose to keep their babies after seeing an abortion photo or video. Countless individuals— including many pro-life leaders—trace their change of heart to encountering this evidence.
Consider leading pro-abortion advocates, such as Bernard Nathanson and Abby Johnson, who completely turned their lives around after seeing abortion victims.
Abortion victim photography saves lives — that’s why we use it.
While AVP is core to the End the Killing plan, apologetics are also important to reach the hearts and minds of New Zealanders. Most New Zealanders believe in human rights for all human beings, but have never considered how that applies to abortion. Since we know from science that human life begins at fertilization, shouldn’t human rights start when the human being starts?
We recognize that many New Zealanders have been wounded by personal experience with the trauma of abortion, so it’s essential to engage on the abortion issue with empathy and understanding, to communicate the truth in love, and to inspire people to do the right thing even when it’s the hard thing.
Our apologetics have been street-tested through thousands of conversations, first in Canada, and now in NZ and beyond, bringing together science, human rights, and empathy in order to have fruitful and effective conversations about abortion — to win the person, not just the argument.
Defy the Culture of Death
Every day in New Zealand, 49 children are killed by abortion, and the shockwaves ripple throughout our culture as mothers, fathers, siblings and grandparents live with the wounds of abortion. Our strategy is an act of defiance against a culture of death that denies human beings in the womb their right to life, normalizes the killing of vulnerable and defenseless children, and fails to support mothers and families.
The pro-life movement must work backwards from the goal of an abortion-free New Zealand, and ask ourselves what must we do to bring about that vision. We need to employ the most effective educational tools to make abortion unthinkable — and the End the Killing plan sets out to do just that.
Join us today to End the Killing!