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Women forced to have traumatic births overseas late last year, without any family support, say it is abhorrent officials thought Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) wasn't justified at that time.
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It follows an internal Ministry of Health memo from November, revealed yesterday by RNZ, that shows the Director General of Health and Director of Public Health agreed it was time to shift to home isolation.
They found international arrivals no longer posed a higher risk of spreading Covid-19 than locals.
At the same time Dr Ashley Bloomfield and Dr Caroline McElnay signed off on the memo, a New Zealand woman in Australia was fighting to get home for her birth.
The woman, who RNZ has agreed not to name, had been told her pregnancy was high risk.
She had 10 unsuccessful MIQ voucher lotteries and two rejected bids for emergency allocation, having asked to travel on a date outside the 14-day window for emergency spots.
She gave birth alone in Australia, prematurely, on 30 December and describes the experience as "awful" and "traumatising".
Knowing about the public health assessment added "insult to injury", she said.
"It's disgraceful. So many people desperately needed to get home for whatever reason and it wasn't even justified. It's insane. It's really upsetting. It just makes me angry," she said.
"They [the government] need to answer to this and be held accountable."
The government has dismissed suggestions it acted too slowly to scrap MIQ, explaining the health advice in the memo had to be peer reviewed.
Documents released today show it was also concerned about "the cumulative risks of changing from one system to another too quickly".
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins refuted his government had ignored any health advice and told Checkpoint: "The memo in question didn't actually come to the government ... the advice that came to the government was that we should start to remove restrictions. And we set out a timetable to do exactly that in a way that was proportionate to the level of risk."
Hipkins said the Omicron outbreak delayed the staged and managed removal of MIQ requirements, as it became apparent that two doses of the vaccine weren't going to be sufficient to combat the variant.
But a lawyer who represented pregnant women shut out of MIQ said it was wrong for the government to keep suggesting its tough decisions around border management were keeping Kiwis safe.
Tudor Clee took on 35 cases of people who either wanted to return to New Zealand to give birth, or were trying to bring a loved one home from overseas, for support.
Not all them were successful, he said.
"Five high court cases were filed the day after that document. Three of those cases resulted in two women being told they should give birth overseas, and one partner being rejected [trying] to come back and help his partner have a baby. We were still going through the court proceedings being told MIQ was the only possible option to bring them back because of the health implication to New Zealand - which is plainly wrong," he said.
The government never created a specific emergency MIQ allocation for pregnancy.
Tudor Clee said there'd been lasting impacts for his pregnant women who couldn't get an MIQ voucher.
"At least three of our women had traumatic births meaning that they have permanent physical scarring from that. And they had those births without their partners supporting them. They were often in situations during lockdown where they didn't have family support, trying to look after themselves while in a lot of pain or distress," he said.
One of Clee's clients who made it back via MIQ, before giving birth, was Charlotte Bellis.
The New Zealand journalist's attempts to return from Afghanistan in January garnered an international following.
Bellis said MIQ was painful and gruelling for a lot of vulnerable women, and it was disappointing the Ministry of Health tried to keep its health advice secret.
"That's simply not good enough. If you're a government official you're accountable to the public. Particularly something this sensitive and important, you need to be transparent and the public needs to understand how these decisions are made," she said.
"It shouldn't take journalists appealing to the Ombudsman to understand these decisions."
The woman in Australia wanted the government to recognise what people like her experienced.
"There's never been an apology. There's never been an acknowledgement it was unjustified. That's the least they could do," she said.
Her message was echoed by Roshni Sami - who spent seven months fighting to have the support of her husband for her birth, before he was eventually granted an emergency allocation in October.
That was before the Ministry of Health memo - but Sami said nobody else should have had to go through the same stress.
"The stress was incredible. Some women had complications and gave birth overseas without family support ... and it's all down to the heartlessness of how this policy was implemented. I don't think it had to be implemented in this way," she said.
"Yes we didn't have a high death rate, but MIQ was implemented at a huge cost to people and it's just not been acknowledged in any way."
Hipkins said the government had been sympathetic to the difficult circumstances New Zealanders experienced during the global pandemic.
"Border restrictions have had a significant impact on New Zealand and that is something the government has always been mindful of. It was a trade off that we made, because ultimately it resulted in New Zealanders, as a whole, being better off," he said.
