I’m the only doctor in America who performs abortions after eight months – now I’m doing more than ever
Dr. Warren Hern has been performing late-stage abortions for decades.
In 1988, someone tried to shoot him, and his clinic in Boulder, Colorado, is regularly bombed by protesters who accuse him of being a “killer.”
But Dr. Hern, now 86 years old, says he will continue to perform abortions after 32 weeks — the only doctor to publicly admit this — to protect women’s health.
He says that since Roe V Wade was overturned, he’s conducting more late terminations than ever before. This is likely because abortion bans in many states lead women to seek abortion care elsewhere.
Next week’s presidential election will be the first since Roe was overturned and access to abortion has been a top issue among voters, especially women.
In a series of interviews in recent months, Dr. Hern said he is not an “abortion machine” and never offers an abortion after 32 weeks because a woman “simply doesn’t want a child.”
He said he only performs the procedure when there are complex medical problems, highlighting the case of a woman who was 35 weeks pregnant but discovered that her fetus had suffered a stroke and its brain had died.
The CDC and states do not provide reliable data on the number of abortions performed 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 their fetus has a serious defect
Colorado is an outlier. Figures show that last year 137 abortions took place at 28 weeks or later. In other states where figures are available, the numbers are smaller.
The state also has no restrictions on when an abortion can be performed.
In MinnesotaFor example, where there are no abortion restrictions, only two late-stage abortions were performed in 2022: one at 25 to 30 weeks and one at 31 to 36 weeks.
In Michigan, which bans abortions beyond 24 weeks, data shows in 2023, only two have been carried out after this period. One between 25 and 28 weeks and one after 28 weeks.
The lack of reliable data adds to the political confusion.
Kamala Harris told Trump during 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 that these abortions occur in rare cases.
And since Roe was struck down in 2022, Dr. Hern is now treating about 50 percent more patients than usual as women from states that have banned the practice travel to Colorado to terminate their pregnancies.
Abortions at his clinic cost about $6,000, and he says the high price tag is due to the complexity of the procedure.
Many women receive support from non-profit organizations and state funds to cover the costs, while insurance companies are unwilling to cover the costs.
It can take three to four days to abort a fetus in the third trimester, he said.
If a patient requests it, the clinic will give them the fetus wrapped in a blanket to hold or a set of handprints or footprints that he or she can take home.
Dr Hern de New York Times on late-term abortions: ‘These are tough calls, and I’m here to help people, but I’m not an abortion machine.
“I’m not going to give it to anyone who comes in.”
Abortion has divided America, although polls show most voters favor at least some access to abortion
He told the New Yorkerin a September interview: ‘I’m a doctor, and there are things I will and won’t do.
‘I will perform a late abortion on someone with a serious fetal abnormality, or on a twelve-year-old child who has been raped, but without that indication I would not do it.’
Dr. Hern has been running his clinic for decades
More than 94 percent of abortions performed in the U.S. are performed within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, CDC statistics show.
And less than one percent are performed after 21 weeks or after 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.
They all said they wanted the child, but had been given a serious diagnosis late in the pregnancy – leading some to consider abortion a “mercy killing.”
“I put my baby to sleep,” one woman said The Atlantic Ocean. ‘It’s euthanasia. That’s the kind of murder this is. But I would do it a million more times if I had to.”
She was 35 weeks pregnant before she was told her daughter had multiple complications.
Doctors said that if the baby were to be carried to term, she would have difficulty walking, talking, holding her head up and swallowing.
Another woman who ended her pregnancy at 24 weeks said her baby’s diagnosis meant the child would not survive. She said Dr. Hern assured her that she “shouldn’t carry the pregnancy to term.”
There are a number of rare fetal conditions that may not be discovered until the second trimester of pregnancy.
These include the Dandy-Walker deformity, which is not normally diagnosed until week 20, where the area of the brain responsible for movement and balance fails to develop.
It leaves infants with lifelong problems with cognition, vision and hearing, but rarely occurs in one in 35,000 live births.
Others include agenesis of the corpus callosum, where the structure that connects the two sides of the brain is missing, which is normally discovered in weeks 18 to 20 and causes babies to struggle with cognitive impairment and movement problems.
And trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome, which may not be discovered until week 26 and is a genetic abnormality caused by an extra chromosome 13. This causes babies to have severe intellectual disability and in many cases the pregnancy can fail during the third trimester .
There are also cases when a fetus in the third trimester of pregnancy may develop other complications and become no longer viable.
Dr. Hern revealed a situation in which a woman who was 35 weeks pregnant was referred to him with a fetus that had suffered a stroke that destroyed the brain. This is a perinatal stroke, a complication that occurs in about one in 3,500 live births.
He said he avoids performing an abortion after 32 weeks because there is a risk of bleeding for the mother.
He added: ‘The basic fact is that if you are pregnant, you are at risk of dying from that pregnancy.
‘It doesn’t matter if you’re happy that you’re pregnant. If having an abortion at any point in the 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 if she does not want to ?’