Dr. Warren Hern has been killing late-term babies in the womb for decades. Many of the children he dismembers could survive outside the womb. In his 1990 book Abortion Practice, Hern noted that destroying the bodies of babies in the womb at 30 weeks — or even 22 or 25 weeks — can be hard work. “(T)he sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current,” he wrote. Life begins at conception; for thousands, it ends at Hern’s clinic in Boulder, Colorado.
Hern is one of the only abortionists willing to do late-term abortions. For this, he has been lionized by the press — especially since the fall of Roe v. Wade. Hern’s business has increased by about 50% since Dobbs, and a late-term abortion at Hern’s clinic costs around $6,000. A glowing 2023 profile for The Atlantic noted that several times babies have come out of the womb alive despite his best efforts:
(O)nce or twice, during a procedure at 15 or 16 weeks, he used forceps to remove a fetus with a still-beating heart. The heart thumped for only a few seconds before stopping. But for a long while after, a vision of that fetus would wake Hern from sleep. He could see it in his mind; the inches-long body and its heart, beating, beating, beating.
None of those details show up in a recent profile, this one published by the Los Angeles Times. The story, by Robin Abcarian, is a puff piece intended to portray late-term abortion — which still horrifies most Americans — as downright charitable work. The title: “Warren Hern is one of the country’s few late-term abortion doctors. This is what drives him.” Hern is now 86, but he is still at it — Abcarian emphasizes the many threats he has faced over the years, as well as the verbal harassment directed his way. She notes his friendship with George Tiller, the late-term abortionist murdered in Wichita in 2009.
“It is no wonder that Hern wears his contempt for abortion foes on his sleeve,” Abcarian writes, without wondering — even briefly — why someone might oppose the difficult, sweaty work of dismembering nearly full-term babies and then piecing their corpses back together like bloody jigsaw puzzles to make sure no limbs are left behind. She notes that he has a memoir coming out — titled unapologetically Abortion in the Age of Unreason — and reviews the now well-known details of his decades in the abortion industry.
She notes, admiringly, that Hern “does not shy away from the hard stuff” — the hard stuff being that late-term abortion involves destroying a child in the womb:
“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 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.”
The logic is profoundly twisted, but it makes a sick sort of sense: If pregnancy is a disease, then abortion is health care. If pregnancy is a disease, then the baby is a tumor to be removed. Most doctors treat infertility as a health issue; in Hern’s view, it is pregnancy that is the disease. This is not hyperbole — as Live Action noted, Hern has written that human beings are a “planetary cancer” that abortion can address: “The human species is an example of a malignant ecotumor, an uncontrolled proliferation of a single species that threatens the existence of other species in their habitats.”
And despite his momentary spasms of conscience at the sight of a baby in pieces, he tells Abcarian that he still finds “joy” in his work. “I love it,” he told her. The point of the profile is to make America love it, too.
