Dr Warren Hern has been carrying out late stage abortions for decades.
In 1988 someone tried to shoot him, and his clinic in Boulder, Colorado, is regularly bombarded by protesters accusing him of being a ‘murderer.’
But Dr Hern, who is now 86 years old, says he will keep carrying out abortions after 32 weeks — the only physician who publicly admits to doing so — to protect women’s health.
He says that since Roe V Wade was overturned, he’s performing more late-term terminations than ever before. It is likely that this is because abortion bans in many states are leading women to seek abortion care elsewhere.
The presidential election next week is the first since the reversal of Roe and access to abortion is a top issue among voters, especially women.
In a series of interviews over recent months, Dr Hern said he was not an ‘abortion dispensing machine’ and never provides a termination after 32 weeks because a woman ‘just doesn’t want a child.’
He said he only performs the procedure if there are complex medical problems, highlighting the case of a woman who was 35 weeks pregnant but found out her fetus had a stroke and its brain had died.
The CDC and states don’t reliably provide data on the number of abortions carried out after 21 weeks (five months).
Dr Hern says he offers the abortions to women who normally say they really want children but have been warned that their fetus has a serious defect
Colorado is an outlier. Figures show there were 137 abortions at 28 weeks or later last year. In other states where figures are available, the numbers are smaller.
The state also has no restrictions on when an abortion can be carried out.
In Minnesota, for example, where there are no abortion restrictions, just two late-stage abortions were carried out in 2022 — one at 25 to 30 weeks and one at 31 to 36 weeks.
In Michigan, where abortions are restricted beyond 24 weeks, data shows only two were carried out after this period in 2023. There was one between 25 and 28 weeks and one after 28 weeks.
The lack of reliable data adds to confusion politically.
Kamala Harris told Trump at their debate in September that it was ‘not true’ that Roe vs Wade allowed abortions in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months of a pregnancy.
But Dr Hern’s clinic shows these abortions do happen in rare cases.
And since 2022 when Roe was axed, Dr Hern is now handling about 50 percent more patients than normal because women from states that have banned the practice are traveling to Colorado to terminate their pregnancies.
Abortions at his clinic cost around $6,000, and he says the high price tag is because of the complexity of the procedure.
Many women get support to cover the costs from non-profits and state funds when insurance companies won’t front the cost.
It can take three to four days to abort a fetus in the third trimester, he said.
If a patient asks, the clinic will provide them with the fetus wrapped in a blanket to hold or a set of handprints or footprints for them to take home.
Dr Hern the New York Times of late abortions: ‘These are tough calls, and I’m here to help people, but I’m not an abortion dispensing machine.
‘I’m not going to give it to anybody who walks in the door.’
Abortion has divided America, although polls suggest that most voters are in favor of at least some access to abortion
He told the New Yorker, in an interview in September: ‘I’m a physician, and there are things I will do and things I will not.
‘I will do a late abortion for someone who has a serious fetal abnormality, or a twelve-year-old kid who’s been raped, but I would not do it without that indication.’
Dr Hern has been operating his clinic for decades
More than 94 percent of abortions carried out in the US are done within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, CDC statistics show.
And less than one percent are carried out after 21 weeks, or beyond the fifth month (about 4,000 out of a total of 476,000 abortions in 2021).
Half a dozen patients who had late stage abortions with Dr Hern previously spoke to reporters about their decision.
All said they wanted the child, but had received a serious diagnosis late in pregnancy — which had led some to consider having an abortion as a ‘mercy killing’.
‘I put my baby down,’ one woman told The Atlantic. ‘It’s euthanasia. That’s the kind of killing this is. But I would do it again a million times if I had to.’
She had been 35 weeks pregnant, before she was told that her daughter had multiple complications.
Doctors said that if the baby was carried to term she would have trouble walking, talking, holding her head up and swallowing.
Another woman who terminated her pregnancy at 24 weeks said her baby’s diagnosis meant the infant would not survive. She said Dr Hern reassured her she ‘shouldn’t be made to carry the pregnancy’.
There are a number of rare fetal conditions that may not be detected until at least the second trimester of pregnancy.
These include Dandy-Walker malformation, normally not diagnosed until week 20, where the area of the brain responsible for movement and balance does not develop.
It leaves infants with lifelong problems with cognition, vision and hearing, but is rare only affecting one in 35,000 live births.
Others are agenesis of the corpus callosum, where the structure connecting the two sides of the brain is missing, normally detected at weeks 18 to 20 and leaving infants struggling with cognitive impairment and difficulties with movement.
And trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome, which may not be detected until week 26 and is a genetic abnormality caused by an extra chromosome 13. It leaves babies with severe intellectual disability and, in many cases, the pregnancy may miscarry during the third trimester.
There are also cases where a fetus may develop other complications in the third trimester of a pregnancy and no longer be viable.
Dr Hern revealed one situation where a woman who was 35 weeks pregnant was referred to him with a fetus that had a stroke that destroyed its brain. This is a perinatal stroke, a complication that occurs in about one in 3,500 live births.
He said he avoids performing terminations beyond 32 weeks, saying there is a risk of hemorrhaging for the mother.
He added: ‘The basic fact is that if you’re pregnant, you’re at risk of dying from that pregnancy.
‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re happy about being pregnant. If having the abortion at any point in pregnancy is between fifteen and twenty times safer than carrying the pregnancy to term, what is the possible justification for forcing a woman to continue the pregnancy is she doesn’t want to?’
