We must begin this column with the fact that I was in a Calgary courtroom last week, unsuccessfully fighting an injunction brought by the Calgary Regional Health Authority. To protect abortionists from dangerous people like you, and possibly from Criminal Code charges if the news keeps spreading, the health authority now denies us the right to repeat that three of its XXXXes have alleg ed to us that XXXXXs are sometimes XXXX alive and left to XXX instead of receiving medical care. If you want to know what the Xes stand for, you'll have to read last week' s cover story. It was not injuncted because we got it to the post office before the CRHA could get to a judge.

Now if my approach seems cute, consider what we are up against. When we asked officials at the XXXXXXXXX Hospital if these allegations were true, they denied that any abortions took place there. Only after further information was divulged by the XXXXXs did we know to ask whether "genetic terminations" occurred there. And yes, an official begrudgingly admitted, at least one baby had been born alive, lived briefly and died. She did not confirm that one XXXX had lasted XX hours prior to XXXXXX from lack of attention. Nor did she deny it.

Indeed, semantics aside, the CRHA has never denied a single fact in our two stories on this subject, in the editions dated April 12 and May 3. Eventually, officials admitted that they performed 40 such abortions at the XXXXXXXXX Hospital last year. The term they use is "induction." However, because "induction" is simply one method of aborting a pregnancy (by chemically stimulating premature labour in hopes the baby will die on the way out), "abortion" i s the correct term. And because the usual motive is that an unreliable test has indicated the baby might be handicapped- and because these decisions are made in the late second and third trimester and the baby sometimes survives only to be killed later by a policy of deliberate neglect- the best term for what is going on in the CRHA's hospitals is " late-term eugenic abortion and infanticide." (Similarly, in British Columbia, on 16 officially reported occasions since 1995, the baby has emerged alive and been left to die.) The CRHA may apply all the euphemisms it likes, that is the reality.

It's interesting how often "health" officialdom obfuscates about this sort of thing, or simply lies. Jason Kenney, MP for Calgary Southeast, wrote the CRHA on April 13, citing reports that " abortions as late as 35 weeks' gestation have recently been performed at Calgary Foothills Hospital." How many such "inductions" have been performed? asked Mr. Kenney. And are " [nursing] practitioners being forced to participate in these abortion procedures contrary to their conscientious objection?" On April 22 two CRHA officials, Nora Kirkham and Dr. Ian Lange, replied, " Therapeutic abortions are not carried out at the Foothills Hospital," and proceeded then to answer neither of Mr. Kenney's questions.

Last October Alberta Health Minister Halvar Jonson told MacLeod MP Dr. Grant Hill that in the '96-'97 fiscal year "there were six therapeutic abortions performed later than 20 weeks' gestation." Yet we have it from the CRHA that the Foothills Hospital alone did 40 in 1998, of which all or most will have been over 20 weeks. Was Mr. Jonson lying? No, Foothills labels its eugenic abortions "inductions."

Likewise, this magazine asked the CRHA two weeks ago how they reconciled their eugenic aborti on and infanticide practice with Section 223 of the Criminal Code (which criminalizes the injury of a child before or during birth in such a way that it succumbs to its injury after being born). The health authority replied by sending us the 1991 "surgical termination of pregnancy" policy of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, which doesn't answer the criminal question. Their answer was to go to court for an injunction.

Only one thing will shine a light into this dark, rat-infested corner of our health system. A nurse or doctor will have to provide eyewitness details to Alberta's chief medical examiner in Edmonton. His office can guarantee anonymity.

If that doesn't work-if no doctors are charged under the Criminal Code- then the whistle-blower will have to go public with the details, and risk the wrath of a large, vicious and exceedingly complicit government. Being a hero is never easy. You could lose your job, your family might be harassed and you might even go to jail. But ask yourself, which matters more: your job or the lives of all the people you might save?

In 1955, a black woman named Rosa Parks broke the law. She refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white man. She was charged under the segregation laws, and was harassed for one long year. But in 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court said she was right, and Mrs. Parks became the mother of the racial equality movement in the United States.

Anyone who thinks these victories can be won painlessly doesn't understand the power of evil. But anyone who thinks they aren't worth winning doesn't understand the power of good.