What drives one of America's few late-term abortion doctors

Dr. Warren Hern dressed in scrubs and speaking on a phone in his clinic.

Aug. 21, 2024 3 AM PT

Warren Hern is every bit as intense as you would expect of someone who has been threatened with death for most of his career.

One of the few American physicians who performs late-term abortions, the 86-year-old has perhaps more than any other doctor been on the front lines of the war over reproductive rights.

He has been shot at, spat at, cursed and harassed. He has been protected by federal and local law enforcement. He will not sit with his back to the door of a restaurant.

Hern has lived in perpetual fear of assassination by political terrorists. That is what happened to his dear friend, the late-term abortion specialist George Tiller, who was murdered in his Wichita, Kan., church by a Christian extremist in 2009. I bumped into Hern at the Denver airport when we were both en route to Tiller’s funeral. I didn’t realize he was traveling with a protective detail until I saw two men in suits tense up as I approached him to say hello.

“George was a wonderful guy, a normal person — as distinguished from me — kind and forgiving and a Christian and all that stuff,” he told me Monday from Boulder, Colo., his dry sense of humor evident. His voice softened: “We were great friends, and I miss him.”

It is no wonder that Hern wears his contempt for abortion foes on his sleeve.

“The criminalization of abortion under Republicans and Trump is a catastrophe for women,” he said. “It has become a collective psychosis. Why should a doctor who helps women have to work in secret behind bulletproof windows?”

Hern, a prolific writer, has a forthcoming memoir, “Abortion in the Age of Unreason.” It is a detailed chronicle of his life and times, an insider’s account of internecine struggles in the abortion rights movement, and a 350-page declaration of his enduring commitment to critically needed healthcare despite the danger he faces daily.

At the beginning of his career, Hern had no intention of becoming a famous abortion provider. He aspired to be an epidemiologist in academia and public health before he came to his calling.

As a young man, the Denver native lived for six months with the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon and worked as a Peace Corps doctor in Brazil. He was inspired to specialize in abortion care after witnessing Latin American hospital wards filled with women suffering the consequences of unsafe abortions.

Later, he was recruited by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity — an outgrowth of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty — to open family planning clinics around the country, which gave him his first exposure to the vitriolic politics around reproductive rights.

In January 1975, two years after Roe vs. Wade, Hern opened his own abortion clinic in Boulder. Two weeks later, at home in the middle of the night, he received his first death threat.

“I had so many death threats, I thought about setting up a death threat hotline,” Hern writes. “‘You want to threaten Dr. Hern’s life? Easy. Give the operator your name, address, phone number and credit card number for quick relief. Only $5 a minute, talk as long as you like!’”

Almost all his procedures are in the late stages of pregnancy, usually because the fetus has a catastrophic medical condition or the pregnancy endangers the woman’s health. Late-term abortion is difficult for all involved — patients, families, doctors, nurses and the rest of the clinic staff. Hern does not shy away from the hard stuff.

“Our whole entire evolutionary experience is to take care of small helpless creatures, including human babies,” he said. “That’s the core biocultural problem with this.”

Recently, he told me, a younger doctor he is training felt he had to leave the operating room during a procedure for a woman who was 34 weeks pregnant. “This was rather disconcerting to her,” he said, “and I told her there was nothing wrong with feeling that way.”

There have been times when he had to gather himself privately after a procedure.

For decades, Hern has advanced the iconoclastic position that pregnancy is not different from disease. In almost all cases, childbirth is far more dangerous than abortion.

“Pregnancy is not a benign condition,” he writes. “It can kill you.” He cites the 17th century French physician François Mauriceau’s description of pregnancy as a “disease of nine months.”

“The treatment of choice for pregnancy is abortion unless the woman wants to carry the pregnancy to term and have a baby,” he concludes. “That is a view that is abhorrent to those who believe that the purpose of women, aside from giving men pleasure and doing the housework, is to have as many babies as possible.”

In this post-Roe moment, abortion rights are expected to play an important role in the November election, which pits the adamantly pro-choice Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Trump, whose ultraconservative Supreme Court has wreaked havoc on the lives of American women.

On Monday, three women took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to describe the horrific effects of the abortion bans enacted by more than a dozen states after the court overturned Roe in 2022.

“I was lucky. I lived,” said Amanda Zurawski, whose doctors in Texas waited until she was at death’s door and miscarrying at 18 weeks before they would perform an abortion.

“I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life,” said Kaitlyn Joshua, who was refused abortion care in Louisiana when she miscarried at 11 weeks.

Twenty-two-year-old Hadley Duvall, impregnated at 12 by her stepfather, quoted Trump’s boast that state abortion bans are “a beautiful thing.”

“What is so beautiful,” she asked, “about a child having to carry her parent’s child?”

Given his half a century of work in the face of derision and danger, I asked Dr. Hern if he still found joy in his work.

“I love it,” he said.

Hern remembers one early patient who had obtained an illegal abortion, a frightening, humiliating experience.

“Please don’t ever stop doing this,” she told him.

“So,” he writes, “I didn’t.”

@robinkabcarian