The Abortion Absolutist
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T
he sky above Boulder was dark when the abortion doctor picked me up for dinner. I had to squint to recognize Warren Hern in his thick aviator glasses and fur-trapper hat.
At the restaurant—a kitschy Italian spot along a pedestrian mall—Hern ignored the table the waiter offered us, pointed at one in the corner, and clomped over in his heavy hiking boots. He’d like to order right away, he said: the osso buco and a glass of Spanish red. How long will that take?
Hern spent the next two and a half hours of our dinner correcting me. A baby is a fetus until it is “born alive,” he told me as I chewed my bucatini. His dear friend, the Kansas physician George Tiller, was not “murdered” in 2009, he was assassinated. The activists who scream outside his clinic are not “pro-life,” they are fascists.
Pausing, Hern sighed. He is very busy, he said, and there are many things he’d rather be doing than talking to me. “But I can’t complain that the pro-choice movement has completely failed” at communicating, he said, “and then turn down an opportunity to communicate.”
[Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement]
I’d met Hern before, so I wasn’t surprised by his gruffness. The 84-year-old can be a curmudgeon—he’s obstinate, utterly certain of his position, and intolerant of criticism even as he dishes it out. Useful qualities, perhaps, for someone in his line of work.
Hern is now nearing his fifth decade of practice at his Boulder clinic; he has persisted through the entire arc of Roe v. Wade, its nearly 50-year rise and fall. He specializes in abortions late in pregnancy—the rarest, and most controversial, form of abortion. This means that Hern ends the pregnancies of women who are 22, 25, even 30 weeks along. Although 14 states now ban abortion in most or all circumstances, Colorado has no gestational limits on the procedure. Patients come to him from all over the country because he is one of only a handful of physicians who can, and will, perform an abortion so late.
During the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, when about of abortions in America are carried out, the fetus’s appearance ranges from a small clot of phlegm to an alienlike ball of flesh. At 22 weeks, though, a human fetus has grown to about the size of a small melon. The procedures that Hern performs result in the removal of a body that, if you saw it, would inspire a sharp pang of recognition. These are the abortions that provide fodder for the gruesome images
