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Nurse Clashes With Hospitals On Abortion

Back in 1982, a young nursing student at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore accidentally walked into the wrong room.

On a back table lay a small dead baby – the victim of a second trimester, prostaglandin abortion.

The reality of the bloody, mutilated baby, whose head looked as if it had been collapsed by the abortion, was much worse than the pictures of aborted babies displayed in Face the Truth tours, says the former student nurse.

“That’s the only time I ever saw an aborted baby, and I don’t ever want to see another one.  It was just awful!” she exclaims.

Today, Mary White is a veteran registered nurse, with 22 years of nursing experience under her belt – “twenty-five, if you count nursing school,” she says with a grin.

An Evangelical Christian, she is strongly pro-life – a trait that has caused problems on the job, almost from the beginning.

“In my second year in nursing school, I got in trouble in ethics class because of my pro-life stance, which was the total opposite of my teacher and most of the people in my class,” Mary recalls.

Her nurses’ training called for 12-week rotations in the various hospital units.  When she did her rotation in obstetrics, one of the instructors, who was vehemently “pro-choice,” assigned White to a young woman who was going to have a saline abortion.

“I was supposed to be present before the abortion, in the operating room, and afterwards,” says Mary.  “I refused.

“That’s the first time I realized how bigoted pro-abortionists are:  the instructor tried to get me kicked out of nursing school.”

Mary’s next serious confrontation over abortion came at a personal level.

A few months after graduation from nursing school in 1983, she was married, and not long afterwards, was discovered to have thyroid cancer.

She underwent two surgeries and treatment with radioactive iodine and other potent drugs.  It was only after this treatment that she was given a pregnancy test and found to be pregnant.

The doctors involved launched a campaign to get her to have an abortion.

“Radioactive iodine is not something you play with, and going under anesthesia twice early in pregnancy is dangerous too,” says White.

“They wanted to cover their butts – they didn’t want to get sued.”

The pressure exerted on her to get an abortion was tremendous, she says.

“They told me that the possibility that he could be born mentally retarded and with all kinds of deformities was very high.  They lied about the percentages, which were actually kind of low.”

Mary resisted the pressure.

Her son, now 22, “has some problems, but nothing catastrophic,” she says.

White went on to work at various hospitals in Baltimore where, because of her pro-life views, she was labeled “intolerant” and “bigoted.”

“One nurse told me I was an intellectual pygmy if I believed a fetus was a baby,” she says.

She estimates that approximately 75 percent of the nurses she has worked with were pro-abortion.

Of the remainder who are pro-life, she guesses that perhaps only 2 percent are staunch pro-lifers – that is, firm enough in their beliefs to speak out against abortion and refuse to take part in it.

In the late 1980s White was working the night shift on the surgical floor at Maryland General Hospital when, she says, “We got an OB admit because it was the only empty bed in the hospital.”

The patient was scheduled for a prostaglandin-induced abortion.

“We barred the door – myself, another Evangelical Protestant woman, a nursing supervisor, an agnostic Jew and a pro-choice nurse.  We wouldn’t let them give her the prostaglandin.”

Why did the agnostic and the pro-choicer join in?

“You have to remember the pack mentality,” says White.

“The other three of us - Rebecca, myself and Jeannie – were so firm and adamant that we weren’t going to do it, they went along.

“It caused a big stink!  We didn’t lose our jobs, but we all got written up; it went into our personnel files.  Our nurse manager made our lives miserable because we said we had two patients – mother and baby.”

After Maryland General, White worked for several years at Greater Baltimore Medical Center.

“GBMC was one of the few places where they did late-term abortions,” she remembers.

“Nurses from OB would talk about third trimester abortions.  But I don’t know if they do them there now.”

In 2000, Mary applied for a position in the operating room at Union Memorial.  She had never worked in OR before, and they were going to train her.

During her job interview, White declared that she was vehemently pro-life and would not participate in an abortion.  The director of the OR assured her she would never be asked to violate her moral stance on the issue.

OR nurses are given assignments to a specific room.  “They know ahead of time what procedures will be done in that room,” White explains.

“Six weeks after I was hired, they assigned me in a room for a doctor who was the abortion king!  Every Tuesday and Thursday, he came in and did eight straight hours of abortions.”

White went to the director’s office, put her badge on the table, and declared that she had to quit without notice.

“They switched my assignment that time,” she says.

“But the manager, the educator and the clinical nurse specialist would assert this continual, subtle pressure on me to participate in abortions.

“At least twice a month, they put me in a room where they were going to do abortions.”

White was pressured to just compromise a little.  She stood them down.

“I said, ‘I will not touch the death machine; I will not even open the surgical pack.’”

The pressure continued until 2004, when she took a $12,000 pay cut and transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital, “so I wouldn’t be pressured to either participate in abortions or keep silent.”

At Good Samaritan, she says, “The climate of death is not pervasive.  They don’t do abortions because it is a Catholic hospital.”

Nevertheless, says White, many of the people there are pro-abortion.

Mary is currently on short-term disability, in treatment for CIDP, a chronic form of Gullain-Barre Syndrome, which is an auto-immune neuromuscular disorder.

“They’re trying to get it under control so I can go back and be what God designed me to be – a nurse,” she says cheerfully.

White, 46, says that in the 25 years since she entered nursing school, the climate in the nursing profession has changed.

“I have watched the pervasive callousness toward life that has developed,” she reflects.

“Part of the reason for that is, how can you kill a baby one day and have to count his body parts, and then be kind and compassionate to a combative old lady in for a procedure the next day?  You can’t, because you have to harden yourself to life.”

Nurses are patient advocates, she points out:  a nurse stands up for what is the best interests of her patient.  But how can she be an advocate for the patient and have that kind of empathy when she kills one of her patients?

“When you work with medical people who do abortions, their lack of respect for life bleeds over into their relations with their colleagues and with other patients,” she asserts.

Mary says she can usually spot doctors or nurses who have been involved in abortion professionally or personally, because they are the most vehement and callous.

“People, when they hurt at the very basic level of who they are, usually go on the attack; that way, they don’t have to deal with their pain and guilt,” she observes.

“There’s this huge shell they put over their heart and their emotions, knowing that they participate in abortion.”