DUR: Ordinary buildings, extraordinary consequences — inside Calgary’s abortion industry

Richard Dur is the volunteer Executive Director of Prolife Alberta and an award-winning political consultant with experience on campaigns across Canada.The building doesn’t look like much. They never do, buildings like this.A freestanding facility set back from the road, brick and glass, practical landscaping — the sort of place you could pass a hundred times and never really see. The exterior is a neutral grey. There is no sign that announces what happens inside in language plain enough to disturb you. Not even listed business hours. Just a nondescript name.And a door that is locked to the outside.Buildings like this are designed to pass unnoticed.Inside, the lights are soft and professional. The floors are easy to clean. The air smells faintly of disinfectant, paper, and something else you can’t quite identify — something that the disinfectant never quite manages to erase.Nothing here is meant to draw attention to itself.It is a place built for procedures that must appear orderly, routine, and entirely ordinary.Not far away, in another part of the city, another kind of building stands with the same unremarkable quality about it..Glass doors. Neutral carpeting. A reception desk where voices stay low and measured. The faint scent of coffee and printer toner. Shelves lined with binders and thick volumes of legislation no one reads for pleasure.The work here is careful work. Orderly work. Numbers moving across columns. It is precise, technical work; work that requires discipline and attention to detail.Outside, traffic moves along the street without noticing either building.Inside, decisions are made that alter, and even end, the course of things.One of these buildings is the Kensington Clinic, Calgary’s free-standing abortion facility. The other is a corporate tax law office. Between them runs the quiet geography of Shaira Nanji’s professional life.The Kensington Clinic belongs to a numbered company whose ownership has long been tied to Dr. Mohamed Nanji and his family.Dr. Nanji is an anesthesiologist in Calgary, a physician practicing within Alberta’s system of privately delivered but publicly funded health services (like abortion). He is also a past donor to the UCP.Through the G. Mohamed Nanji Professional Corporation, he holds interests in Outpatient Anaesthesia Clinic Ltd., Surgical Centres Inc., and — cloaked behind the numbered companies 483024 Alberta Ltd. and 492246 Alberta Ltd. — the Kensington Clinic itself..His wife, Shenaaz Nanji, is known publicly for her past work with the Writers Guild of Alberta and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. She is the author of numerous children’s books, including the 2008 novel Child of Dandelions, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, as well as titles like Grandma’s Heart, An Alien in My House, and Teeny Weeny Penny.Children’s books. Stories about belonging. About resilience. Stories about the dignity of the small and the overlooked: stories written for children.Yet she sat on the board of an abortion clinic that ends such lives before they can ever read a word. Books she wrote in part for her own children — one of whom now continues her work on that board.In time, the corporate records changed. Today, behind the numbered companies, the names listed are Dr. Mohamed Nanji and his daughter, Shaira Nanji. Father and daughter. Like mother, like daughter. A physician, a children’s author, a tax lawyer: a family affair.But the clinic itself remains what it has always been: a place where babies are killed in the womb every weekday, 8:00 am to 4:30 pm. To be clear, Shaira Nanji does not perform the procedures that end a life. By profession, she is a corporate tax lawyer, a professional whose work revolves around helping individuals and companies keep more of what they earn from the taxman. Yet she sits on the governing board of a clinic sustained by those very taxpayer dollars..Tax law asks you to detach outcome from feeling — to reduce the messy sprawl of human life into numbers that fit neatly into columns. You determine what is owed. What is permitted. Whether the rules have been followed. Not whether the rule itself is good. To make sure the trains run on time.Outside, life goes on.Traffic passes. Children play at the park across the street. Neighbours water lawns. The building gives nothing away.Inside, the machinery continues to hum.And somewhere beneath the fluorescent lights, under the discipline of policy and the comfort of legality, something irreplaceable ends.The meeting minutes will record nothing unusual. The reports will show compliance. The filings will remain in order. And the building will continue to look like any other building you might pass without noticing. But in the procedure rooms of that building, on an ordinary weekday between 8:00 am and 4:30 pm, a child will exist for the last time. No birthday. No photograph. No story like Grandma’s Heart or Teeny Weeny Penny is read aloud at bedtime. No dandelion pinned in dark hair. Only a room, a procedure, and a silence that settles as quickly as the disinfectant smell returns, trying once again to erase something it never quite can.Richard Dur is the volunteer Executive Director of Prolife Alberta and an award-winning political consultant with experience on campaigns across Canada.

DUR: Ordinary buildings, extraordinary consequences — inside Calgary’s abortion industry

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