By Gretchen Keiser

With a tremendous amount of support from backers, a 25-year-old registered nurse has started in Georgia a new branch of the pro-life movement aimed at the needs of people who assist in performing abortions.

“With every abortion, four people at minimum are involved,” says Melanie Kernekin, a former labor and delivery nurse at Grady Hospital in Atlanta.

“The mother and baby are two” and there are many pro-life agencies trying to assist the pregnant woman, Ms. Kernekin observed. “The other two are the doctor and nurse, and specifically the nurse.”

“The nurse is there to hold that woman’s hand and listen to her cry. The nurse has to listen to the story of a 25-year-old in for her fifth abortion,” she said.

Ms. Kernekin, who quit her job last fall in order to work full-time in pro-life education for medical professionals, said, “We’ve got to have a resource group to reach out to them. Somebody has got to start helping them.”

Soft-spoken and admittedly new to the work she has undertaken, Ms. Kernekin has already won significant support, particularly from backers who have chosen to remain anonymous.

Having quit her job last September, she made it through the first two months using her savings to tide her over, but quickly reached “the end” financially. During one week when the survival of the new organization, Georgia Nurses for Life, was in question, she received a grant from an unspecified “Christian foundation” that paid her salary for the first year. The same week, another individual provided the financial backing for the organization to move into highly professional and attractive offices on Holcomb Bridge Road in Norcross. Two other people provide funds to buy a computer package at cost that enabled her to computerize their mailing list of 2,500 names.

“At the end of the week, I had my salary, I had my office and I had my computer. Basically, we were set up,” she said, adding that the people involved want their names omitted because “the story glorified God so much more when you keep names out of it.”

A member of Perimeter Presbyterian Church who acknowledges that she felt “a call” to become involved in pro-life work for medical professionals, Ms. Kernekin says that her own attitude developed during her work as a nurse.

After graduating from Emory University with a bachelor of science degree in nursing in 1985, she worked at two hospitals as a labor and delivery nurse. One was a private hospital in which she was sheltered from the reality of abortion, she said. In her second position, at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, she worked in close proximity to the abortion section.

The physical location of the two units – one for birth and the other for abortions – emphasized the irony and what she sees as the conflicting position of medical ethics for doctors, nurses and other professionals.

The training of a labor and delivery nurse emphasizes her responsibility for the “unseen patient” – the unborn child in the womb whose well-being must be constantly monitored during labor. Any sign of fetal distress brings immediate action to try and relive it and save the life of the child, she said.

“On the other side of the hall, a lowing heartbeat (of a fetus), a deceleration was good,” she observed. “On my side of the hall doctors were working so hard trying to save a premature baby’s life.”

While she never had to take part in an abortion. Ms. Kernekin said, “I witnessed people taking the life of the patient I was taught to protect.”

Doctors and nurses, because of their training and daily work, are largely unaffected by the “emotionalism and sensationalism of pro-life groups,” she says. While those who oppose abortion may continue to focus on the reality that abortion is more than an operation to remove “tissue,” to a practicing medical professional who has been desensitized, the fetus can become “tissue,” she said.

Instead, Georgia Nurses for Life is attempting to emphasize “hard, cold facts” about abortion and particularly that abortion is “very, very much a medical ethical issue.”

The focus needs to be upon the fetus as, very much, human life in the womb, she says, despite the controversy about whether or not the life of the fetus is somehow “potential” rather than actual. “The fetus is not a potential human being,” says Ms. Kernekin. “It is a human being with great potential.”

In addition to mailing out a newsletter, the organization is sponsoring workshops which examine the medical and legal aspects of abortion, euthanasia, infanticide and other disputed areas. A Feb. 8 workshop focuses on the legal questions surrounding those three topics.

A full-page advertisement will also appear in the Georgia edition of TIME magazine this month encouraging readers to support or join the mailing list of the organization. Designed by the Atlanta firm of Kent Puckett and Associates, the ad appeals to young women facing pregnancy to make courageous decisions and not to be frightened into having an abortion. The ad cites examples of women living courageously, including Mother Teresa and Corrie ten Boom, whose faith carried her through suffering in a Nazi concentration camp.

While the organization’s mailing list includes people other than nurses, approximately 80 have come to workshops that have been held so far, Ms. Kernekin said. She has also received mail attacking the organization and her work.

While she was in the midst of the interview, a nurse called twice from a hospital to talk about the stress she was experiencing relating to abortions.

In Georgia it is lawful for a nurse to refuse to take part in abortions by placing a statement to that effect in her record, the director said. However, many nurses are unaware of the fact, she said, and others find it difficult to refuse to do certain work when everyone is busy and the refusal is interpreted as an unwillingness to help. “You get caught between your peers and your moral standards,” she observed.

For Ms. Kernekin, a decisive moment came on a Sunday when she went into the closed abortion unit for some supplies and was suddenly struck by a detail she had not noticed before. All of the operating room windows were sealed and covered with paper. That barrier, which is not present in any other unit, hit her forcefully as a closed door that needed to be opened. “I stood there and it was like God had a finger right on my heart and said, “You’re going to do something about this,” she recalled.

But her emphasis is upon the need for medical professionals to come to an awareness that so far has not hit home.

“We want to create a very scientific approach,” she said. “We want to talk their language, go to them on their ground and see what we can do.”

Thirteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark abortion decisions of Jan. 22, 1973, one of which originated from a lawsuit involving Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, the focus is again on the medical community. “If anything is going to change, it’s going to be from the medical community,” the nurse said, “and that’s my bias. We’ve tried everything else.”