City lawyer Mary Lamont submitted the following article on behalf of one of her clients. The writer wishes to remain anonymous fearing repercussions with her family should they find out she assisted with abortions. The Sun has interviewed the writer and Lamont. Feeling that “Mary Jones” story if a side of the abortion issue seldom seen and worth printing, we agreed to publish the article under a fictitious name.

I’m a registered nurse; I’ll call myself Mary Jones...that is not my name.

I believe that Canadians (especially women) have the right to know more than what they do what abortion actually means.

At least five years ago I joined the staff of the Gynecological Ward at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. I knew that this would involve assisting with abortions.

At that time I took it for granted that abortions were necessary to help girls in trouble. As a trained professional I was confident that I knew what it was all about: it never occurred to me that it really means the killing of human beings.

I enjoyed my new job for about a year. I was not involved in the suction abortions (done up to 12 weeks of development).

The patients’ charts did refer to “products of conception” and of course I knew there are the baby and the placenta, but I never stopped to think what that must mean.

I did assist with second trimester abortions, done after 12 weeks, but we only did five or six a week of these. Because the baby is too big to go through the suction tube, it has to be killed by saline injection.

I truly believed I was helping girls in trouble and I never thought about whether this was the best help we could give them. The abortions were done mostly for economic or social reasons, because girls wanted to finish university, or because she was unmarried and wanted to avoid embarrassment. I can’t recall even one that was done for rape.

Though the doctor did the saline injection which started the abortion, he did not stay around to help the patient through the subsequent labor.

It was the nurses who helped her, and it was the nurse who put the baby in a milkshake carton after it was delivered, and sent it down to the pathology department for examination.

In the “Pre-op instruction” we did not tell the prospective patient how painful the labor and delivery can be. All that was said was “You’ll have the injection and shortly after that you’ll abort.”

We never told the mother what her baby looks like in the second trimester, or how big it might be.

The rule was that no babies can be aborted after 20 weeks of development but nevertheless some babies were so big that we couldn’t put the lid on the milkshake carton.

Occasionally a doctor would have to confront what he was actually doing. I remember one doctor who happened to come on the scene just as his patient, a 15-year-old girl, delivered her baby.

The baby, close to 16 weeks of development, was born in a toilet; but its head was left behind. The doctor turned white.

“My God,” he said, “I didn’t know it was like that.” And he never did another saline abortion.

One case still haunts me: A mother in her mid-20’s who already had two children and felt she couldn’t afford another.

She was down on her chart as four months pregnant but she was so visibly pregnant that we on the staff suspected she was further than she admitted.

When the doctor arrived to do the abortion, none of us wanted to assist him. But then one of the new shift coming on agreed to assist and the doctor did the saline injection.

Two and a half hours later, the mother delivered a baby boy who was crying pitifully. He seemed 22 to 24 weeks old and was much too big to go in the milkshake carton.

The assisting nurse was very upset: in fact, all the staff were weeping - the head nurse, the practical nurses and the nurse’s aide.

They called the evening supervisor, who took the tiny boy to the intensive care nursery (they despised us because of the work we were doing). The intensive care people said nothing could be done to save the baby.

They told her: “If you people want to murder babies, that’s your problem; you keep him.” They didn’t want to listen to him crying, you see.

The supervisor wrapped the baby in a blanket and carried him with her, soothing him and loving him; she was crying. He died in her arms about two hours later.

Some time after that I went down with a new graduate to see a film on the development of life. This was a wonderful film; modern techniques have enabled researchers to film right inside the uterus at eight to twelve weeks.

This film crystallized for me the feelings that had been building up for a number of months. I felt that I could not go on doing the work I was doing. And not long after that I told the supervisor that I was quitting.

But I can see it is not enough for nurses who become anti-abortion merely to avoid the whole area. The abortions still go on, and have increased since then. The annual abortion rate in Canada is now over 60,000 a year.

We would have never reached this point if the nurses had been “telling it like it is” all along.

It hasn’t been merely that we fear jeopardizing our jobs (that is partly it, perhaps). The major reason is our basic conditioning, that everything about our work is absolutely confidential; and above all, that the patient must not be upset.

These attitudes have combined to conceal the truth about abortion. Even many nurses (and doctors too) don’t realize the truth, unless they have actually been involved. Perhaps it is only the callous ones who can stay involved.

I believe it is essential for nurses to start speaking out.