Last summer, the clanging sound of empty bottles being wheeled into the morgue made Amanda (not her real name), a registered nurse, curious to enter the hospital room.

Amanda was on her way to the laboratory to submit blood for testing.

As she tiptoed in, she saw hundreds of bottles on the shelves, with fetuses of all sizes in formaline, and on the floor buckets with baby parts.

“On my left as I entered I thought, ‘Look at those fresh babies, baby parts and organs, some heads decapitated, babies heads looking up looking down.’” She believes these can be sold to pharmaceuticals and laboratories. Amanda decided to keep the incident to herself. She asked a few friends to pray the rosary with her before a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe which she brought with her.

The signs and sound of the empty bottles brought back vivid unpleasant memories of her days as a student nurse in England in the 1960s. She decided then never to work in the operating room again after hearing a tiny cry and seeing an aborted baby. She witnessed three kinds of abortion: by saline solution, by D & C suction, and by hysterotomy.

Amanda recalled that the mother undergoing saline abortion has the caustic saline solution running through the veins for more than 20 hours.

“Just before the mother was put under general anaesthesia, you could feel the fetal movement and hear the fetal heart. When the fetal movement stopped, they induced the mother to labor, and broke the water. The baby had no skin, a swollen, dead fetus. It was in a terrible shape, the skin was all excoriated. The baby had lots of holes. There were pockets of flesh missing, eyeballs bulging. It looked horrible. It left a bad impression in my mind,” she said.

“D & C powerful suction catheter disintegrates the fetus and it comes out as blobs of flesh into the bucket,” she said. “The noise is so loud like the sound of drilling on the road. The baby is beaten up into a fluffy flesh. The flesh goes into buckets.”

Amanda says the procedure is a mini-caesarean where the baby, over 30 weeks, is taken out of the mother. She witnessed these horrors when she was assigned to the operating room as part of her training to help the scrub nurse.

She heard a tiny cry of a baby, like a kitten mewing. “I nearly screamed when I saw them take out the baby. What are you doing? I thought to myself. You are killing the baby. They put it in a jar. It turned me off completely. I pulled out my mask and walked out.

“The next morning, I nearly fainted. I went to see the matron. I told her. ‘If this is part of my training, don’t put me in the operating room again. If you’re going to ask me to help kill, I’m not going back there.’ I heard from the nurses that abortion was being done in other hospitals.

“Abortion is very, very evil. It is the murder of helpless human beings,” she said. Therapeutic abortion is done in the hospital where she works. She recalled slipping quietly into a hospital room when she saw a lady clasping a rosary in her hand. She asked the mother gently, “Have you ever considered letting the baby live instead of going for this abortion? It is very wrong. You really have to think of the baby.”

More than a decade ago, she was one of more than 40 people, including, pro-lifers and pro-choice supporters who were asked to give their views on life issues in a TV program. There were Members of Parliament present.

She was randomly chosen as a representative of an ethnic group. The TV channel contacted her by phone. She recalled “I said prayers, I suddenly plucked up courage. I drove myself to the station. I asked the Holy Spirit to be my driver. With no problem at all I found the place. When I gave my witnessing, I shared it without stopping.

The next morning when she went to the bank, a lady pointed out to her and said they saw her on TV the night before talking about abortion. “When I went back to the hospital, some patients said, ‘You were on TV. It was played again and again.’”

Amanda said somebody should stand up for parents and children. “It is incomprehensible to participate in these murderous acts. A lot of people do not want to hear that. When I recognize this, I went to confession.”

As a means of coming to terms with the atrocities she has seen, Amanda resorts to a spiritual solution, offering Masses and praying with friends to stop abortion.