Dr Warren Hern, one of the few physicians who openly performs late abortions, has been receiving death threats since 1973. He thinks women are worse off today than they were back then.
Dr Warren Hern is a physician whose career in reproductive medicine began before Roe v. Wade and continues today, after Roe’s fall. Hern, who is eighty-six, founded the Boulder Abortion Clinic in the state of Colorado, and is one of the most high-profile abortion doctors in the country. For a long time, he has been one of the very few physicians who openly perform abortions in the second and third trimester. At the time of the 2013 documentary “After Tiller,” which followed Hern and other abortion providers, there were only four such physicians; one has since died and the other two are retired. More clinics offering late abortion, procedures done at 21 weeks or later, including the DuPont Clinic and Partners in Abortion Care, have opened in recent years. Late abortion is wildly misrepresented by politicians and misunderstood by the public; it is rare, but the need for it has increased as state bans make it harder for pregnant people to seek care.
Dr Hern has written a memoir, Abortion in the Age of Unreason: A Doctor’s Account of Caring for Women Before and After Roe v. Wade. The book demonstrates the radical commitment necessary to sustain a career under unique duress. Hern received his first death threat two weeks after his clinic opened, in 1973, and has spent 50 years under constant harassment from people who view him as a mass murderer. His op-eds from the past several decades, republished exhaustively in the memoir, show Hern hitting the same notes over and over, warning of a future of draconian abortion regulation and pregnancy criminalization that has now come to pass…..
I wanted to talk to Hern in part because I’d seen the profound impact his work had for just one of his patients—a woman named Erika Christensen, whom I interviewed, in 2016, about her third-trimester abortion, and who became an activist, instrumental to the passage of New York’s Reproductive Health Act. I also found his candor in the book to be remarkable. The memoir begins with a description of a pregnant patient whose placenta had separated from the wall of the uterus, causing the swift death of the fetus and a coagulation syndrome that caused the patient to start “bleeding everywhere within her body and from all orifices.”
Hern methodically walks the reader through what late abortions can entail: dismemberment of the fetus; intentional cranial collapse. In the early years of his practice, knowing that he had to personally prove that abortions could be performed safely, he would, after a dilation-and-evacuation procedure, “empty the cotton sock in the suction bottle of its contents, spread the tissue out on a glass plate, and look at it carefully over a light box” in order to insure that no parts of the embryo remained within the patient to cause infection. Even after reading the memoir, it is hard for me to fathom what it might have been like to confront life and death at this scale for fifty years….
Hern and the New Yorker journalist spoke on Zoom….[Here is part of that conversation:]
Journo: I want to talk about what late abortion is and is not. The anti-abortion movement has created a false image: as if late abortions involve the death of a nearly full-term baby, the size and age and shape of a newborn. Even the phrase “late-term abortion” implies this. For the sake of clarity, do abortions ever take place close to or at full term?
No. There are situations where, in a desired pregnancy, a catastrophic event occurs in the middle of the third trimester. For example, a woman came to me and she was over thirty-five weeks. Her doctor sent her to me because the fetus had a stroke that destroyed the brain. The fetus was not going to be able to survive, and if it did it would not have a life.
She was terribly grieved about this. She came to me. I did the injection [that stops the heart of the fetus in utero]. Her fetus was delivered in her hospital with her doctor and her husband present. Do you want to call that an abortion? I don’t call that an abortion. It was an interruption of a pregnancy that was hopelessly complicated. There was no point in forcing her to carry for another month, and then have a dead baby. That is cruel. It may have been necessary two hundred years ago, but it is not necessary now.
Journo: What you’re describing, though, is abortion care. To me, that story illuminates something people are learning at great cost now: that abortion is often procedurally indistinguishable from miscarriage management, stillbirth management.
It is a fundamental, essential part of reproductive health care for women.
Journo: But, in discussing late abortion, we’re talking about very rare cases. About 1.3 per cent of abortions take place at or after 21 weeks, which is halfway through the second trimester. Still, this is the type of abortion your clinic specializes in and performs almost exclusively.
Right after Texas passed S.B. 8, and then after the Dobbs decision, we were flooded with patients who needed late abortions because they were being turned down everywhere else. We couldn’t see patients who were earlier in their pregnancies, because we were just too busy taking care of the more difficult patients. We have seen some earlier patients now, but our special interest is in helping women who are having abortions later in pregnancy because they have the most difficult circumstances. They’re at the end of the line. They can’t find anyone else to do this.
Journo: What other misperceptions about late abortion have you encountered in your career?
People have the idea that a woman just decides she doesn’t want to be pregnant. She wants to get a new dress, or she wants to go to prom next week, so she decides to end the pregnancy. But women take this decision very seriously.
[The conversation continues for another several pages…it is well worth reading every word until the end of the article. Editor]
SOURCE: The New Yorker, Interview by Jia Tolentino. 29 September 2024.
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Anguish, gratitude and fear of violence at the Colorado clinic for late abortions
This is an equally moving article that describes Dr Hern’s clinic and his support for women needing abortions, reported from the point of view of his patients:
Behind bullet-proof doors in a generic office park is one of only five clinics in the country where women can access the rarest — and most controversial — abortion procedures.
Women come here desperate, says Dr Warren Hern, who has run the Boulder Abortion Clinic since 1975. “It ranges from the 12-year-old kid who’s pregnant from her stepfather to the 45-year-old woman who desperately wants to have a baby and finds out that she has a fatal illness that is incompatible with being pregnant.”
Hern and his team specialize in second- and third-trimester abortions, a practice that sparks fierce political debate around an already charged topic. Those opposed say abortion after the point of fetal viability — about 24 weeks — is simply too late in a pregnancy to terminate….
In reality, only about 1% of abortions are performed after 21 weeks, according to a Centers for Disease Control study. More than 80% occur at or before nine weeks of pregnancy, and just 6% occur from 14 to 20 weeks, which is during the second trimester.
Hern says he doesn’t perform abortions in the eighth or ninth month at all, and that such a procedure would only occur in an extreme medical emergency and only in a hospital setting. He says he wishes he didn’t have to perform abortions beyond the first trimester, but unforeseen circumstances — increasingly from patients coming from red states with strict abortion bans — have created a need for it. “There’s great distress and anguish,” Hern said, adding that women are increasingly showing up at the clinic when their life or health are in grave danger. The week NBC News visited Hern, his clinic saw 10 patients, all with vastly different circumstances — from a woman who was pregnant with conjoined twins, to a surrogate carrying a fetus that had stopped moving in the womb.
Others test the limits of exceptions on abortion bans, like provisions for rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies and life of the mother, he says. “We have a patient who is 15 years old, who is 25 weeks pregnant, and was the victim of sexual abuse,” Hern said. Hern then described a fetus at 28 weeks with “terrible malformations of the brain”.
Many of the patients who come to Hern’s clinic are dealing with wanted pregnancies that have gone wrong. Last year, Emma and Stuart tried to expand their family and conceived a daughter. But 24 weeks into the pregnancy, they received a diagnosis of a severe fetal anomaly, and possible consequences for Emma’s future fertility….After performing Emma’s abortion, Hern’s staff wrapped the fetal remains in a blanket and photographed her for the family. They took her footprints and cremated the body. The framed set of footprints and the baby’s ashes are on display in their home. “Thank you, Dr Hern, for hugging me after delivery and for photographing our daughter and for your sacrifice and dedication to women’s reproductive rights,” Emma wrote in her letter to Hern. “ Thank you to the staff for providing us a beautiful way to preserve our daughter’s ashes.”
“My heart and mind have been forever changed about this issue in the worst way,” Emma said. “Abortion is essential health care.”
“The criminalization of abortion in this country is not just a health crisis for women, it’s a national catastrophe for women,” Hern said. He and other abortion rights advocates say the political climate surrounding abortion is actually making late abortions more common because it’s taking patients longer to get care. “I mean, one-third of my patients come from Texas, and more than 50% of my patients come from red states where they can get no help,” he said.
According to the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, there’s been a rise in harassment and violence against abortion providers in recent years, including arson, burglaries, death threats, and invasions.
Five shots were fired through the clinic’s front windows in 1988. Hern has experienced attempts on his life and his colleagues’ lives, and he had a friend, Dr George Tiller, who was gunned down by an anti-abortion extremist in the lobby of his church in 2009. “If I stopped doing abortion, it would never go away. I’m a marked man. That’s the deal,” he says.
As abortion remains a top political issue in 2024, Hern, too, vows to keep going. “It matters for the health of the woman,” he said. “It matters for their families. It matters for our society, and now it matters for freedom.”
SOURCE: NBC News, by Dasha Burns, Abigail Brooks, Jason Kane. 10 September 2024. PHOTO ABOVE from this live report.