r care that could not be delivered at the moment of need by anyone other than the professional nurse confronting the situation. The conflict in this situation arose from that fact that the care required by the patient was in conjunction with an abortion procedure.
Law, as well as ethics, affects the role of the professional nurse with respect to abortion (Bayer, 1990, pp. 564-569). The directive issued by Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan in the Bush Administration as an example prohibited nurses from providing counsel to clients regarding abortion. Further, attempts to legally define the point at which at fetus will be viable outside the womb hold the potential to make a mockery of both law and medicine (Beller, 1992, pp. 537-540).
The role of nursing in cases of abortion is especially difficult for many individual nurses. While some individual nurses approach the issue in the context that the delivery of care in abortion cases is all a part of the nursing process, many other individual nurses are ambivalent both toward abortion and the role of nursing in cases of abortion. Many anti-choice nurses feel it is their duty to refuse to deliver care to patients when abortion procedures are involved (Salladay, 1992, pp. 18-21).
The moral stance adopted by the professional nurse interviewed as a part of this research is that abortion is murderùmost of the time, and that she should not participate in murder even to deliver care to a patient. The phr
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