Foothills Hospital nurse "Chapman" (not her real name), a 30-something RN, believes technology is abused when fetal examinations lead to a disregard for the sanctity of life in the quest for the perfect baby. "Technology is good for some things," she says, "but these genetic terminations are based only on probabilities, not guarantees." She is just one nurse out of many at Foothills hospital forced to violate her conscience with abortions. The RN says doctors frequently discover they were wrong after they have decided a baby will be born with a serious mental or physical defect. But even when a baby is born apparently healthy, they often choose to hide their mistakes. She describes one instance when "a perfectly healthy looking baby did not present the lethal defect the neonatologist had expected. The baby unexpectedly emerged alive, but not breathing. The doctor performed resuscitation and kept the baby alive with life support." Then he spent two hours running tests to confirm that the baby had an "internal anomaly incompatible with life." With the parent's co-operation, life support was pulled.

She says one of the worst late-term abortions she witnessed had nothing to do with the baby. A mother came in 22 weeks pregnant "irate because she had a missed abortion at 11 weeks and was still pregnant." The baby would have been her third child. "The mother of this pregnant woman is saying, 'we're going to sue the hospital and the doctor if we don't get this abortion now,'" she reports. "And we're supposed to be inducing labour, even though she hadn't been to counselling and there was nothing wrong with the baby. I told the head nurse, 'this is out-and-out killing.' But we couldn't send her away. We're supposed to be compassionate, but I hated her."

Foothills Hospital spokesman Nora Kirkham insists "no terminations are being done over 24 weeks." But nurse Chapman says this is news in her unit. Ms. Kirkham "obviously doesn't work on our floor," says the nurse. She adds that despite the hospital's claim that only the "rare infant" survives genetic termination, "Lots of babies are surviving abortions. Babies are born alive, they're breathing, and lots of them have heart rates. Basically we wait for them to die."

One woman was brought in leaking amniotic fluid from a tiny tear in her placenta, a condition that often heals naturally. "We guessed she was 22 weeks along when she came in," nurse Chapman says. "She didn't know when she got pregnant and she didn't know how far along she was. She had been leaking, but she had received several ultrasounds and had been told there was nothing wrong with the baby's development." But doctors had told her that there could be problems, so she decided to abort her baby.

"The patient knew there was nothing wrong with her baby when she did it," Mrs. Chapman says with a sigh, "but she already had two other kids and didn't know if she could deal with a possibly handicapped baby."