When Patricia Ommerli took her garbage out from her apartment blockhouse, she always made sure she timed it carefully. She didn’t want to meet a corpse in her elevator.

Ms. Ommerli is not an actor in a B horror movie. According to the July 13 issue of the UK paper, The Guardian, she was one of many residents unhappy about sharing living quarters with Dignitas, an assisted-suicide organization in Zurich, Switzerland. “Because the lift is too small for coffins, the bodies are transported in bags, which are then propped up in the corner of the elevator...It’s horrid,” complained another resident to the British Medical Journal last month. Fed up with their ghoulish neighbours and chance encounters with body bags, tenants filed complaints, and authorities have since ordered Dignitas to move its grisly business elsewhere.

When Brenda Pratt Shafer, a registered nurse, was asked to work at the Dayton, Ohio Women’s Medical Center assisting abortions in 1993, she readily agreed. After all, she considered herself “very pro-choice” and figured it would be no problem. She was wrong.

After an initial interview, she was hired to assist abortionist Dr. Martin Haskell. Her first two days on the job were rattling. She hadn’t expected that Dr. Haskell would use ultrasound during his Dilation & Evacuation (D&E) abortions and that she would actually see the baby being torn apart. But nothing could have prepared her for what she saw on her third day at the abortion clinic—a partial-birth abortion.