Nurse's 'Professional Hell'
Pro-Life News, Spring, 1991, Page 3.
Recently New South Wales Upper House politicians turned their backs on proposals to protect nurses against discrimination if they oppose abortion. The issue could muster only a maximum of nine votes and not a single Liberal vote. In response a Sydney nursing sister has disclosed how her hospital life turned into a professional hell because one day she decided to stop helping to terminate pregnancies.
She believes that a lack of job protection is turning many nurses into slaves to the abortion industry. Hundreds of nurses are being forced to help abortions because if they speak up they will be tagged "a rebel" or "a renegade" and suffer the same professional fate as she has.
Sister Veronica Borham, 32, of Engadine works at a private hospital in Sydney.
She entered nursing in 1977 and completed her training in 1980 and has worked in both Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals and is a qualified theatre sister. Although born a Catholic, she originally did not oppose doing abortions as part of her nursing duties.
But when she realised the full horror of the work and "did a U-turn" she faced discrimination and loss of employment opportunities which ran into thousands of dollars of lost income plus lack of professional satisfaction.
"I am against abortion. Even when I was originally in favour of abortions and assisted with them, I found I could not justify the reasons.
I really started to wonder about the whole subject and I decided my position was against abortion.
"In talking to patients, I found that there weren’t enough alternatives given to them. It seems abortion was what was offered first, instead of alternatives such as adoption."
Sister Veronica estimates she assisted in over a hundred abortions. She remembers her conversion to pro-life. There were a number of operations that seriously disturbed her.
"One I do remember is the doctor I was assisting at the time found that the tubing had got caught. He disconnected the tubing again and what looked like a rib cage and a leg and the doctor turned to me and said, ‘Oh don’t look at this - it’s pretty revolting’".
"The second one after that, I do remember was a woman who came in to have a cervical suture put in, because the baby was threatened to be lost and the husband said, ‘If you can have a look and see if it’s a girl, let it go, but if it is a boy, put the suture in."
"And a third instance - a woman, I think, she was Having her fifth pregnancy. She was fairly advanced in pregnancy and they brought her to theatre to extract the baby. The baby was brought out of the womb vaginally and they decided to put it in a sterile dish. It was a lovely little baby and I just happened to walk in and saw it in the dish, but bright red because it bad been a saline solution that bad been used."