Hawaii Right to Life, a non-profit pro-life advocacy and educational organization, is seeking volunteer nurses and others to teach an instructional class to junior and senior high school students on the development of a baby in the womb.

Marie Kuhn, who is coordinating the project, said the class will be about a half hour long and will start with an 18-minute DVD video presentation followed by a question and answer session.

Kuhn would like to offer the class to Catholic and public schools seventh grade and up beginning in the fall. She has already been asked to do presentations during the summer at Calvary Chapel Christian School in Aiea.

She would like each session to be run by a presenter and a nurse who could answer health-related questions.

Although Hawaii Right to Life is an anti-abortion group, these classes will not discuss abortion, Kuhn said. The main purpose is to demonstrate that a child in utero is a living person “whose heart starts beating in 22-24 days” after conception, she said.

“We would like to have children understand that this is a baby, a person,” she said.

“We are going to start off small,” she said, “but we have high hopes.”

Kuhn, a newly appointed board member of Hawaii Right to Life, has already had experience teaching sexual respect and values education in Hawaii schools. From 1999 to 2005, she and three other volunteers from the Pearson Foundation developed and taught sexual abstinence classes in 25-30 public and private schools.

Catholic Charities took over and expanded those classes in 2005 when federal funding for them was offered.

Nurses and others who would like to volunteer one day a month to present these classes are asked to call Marie Kuhn at 545-1899, or e-mail her at cmarie1131@cs.com.