Contributor: ATTWN Staff
If walls could walk, they would weep at this Boulder abortion clinic that Dr. Warren Hern operated for more than 50 years. Hern is one of the last late-term abortion doctors in the country and retired earlier this year. He had been trying to train the next generation of late-term abortionists and was hoping to find someone to take over the grisly procedures in order to keep his clinic open but was not able to find someone. His clinic is closing after 50+ years.
Julie’s Story
One of the Quitters that And Then There Were None has helped, Julie Wilkinson, worked for Dr. Hern as a nurse. Hern’s clinic did abortions up to 32 weeks gestation, just shy of birth. The horrors that happened inside that clinic are unimaginable.
The defining moment for Julie was when a well-off, young couple came into Dr. Hern’s clinic. They were married and obviously in love. The woman was pregnant with twins and her and her husband had come into the Boulder clinic to learn about termination. They had not made a decision yet and were looking at their options.
The woman was 16-weeks pregnant and the couple was pragmatic, not at all like most of the patients who came through the doors.
Julie remembers this couple because they were so different. They weren’t struggling financially or emotionally. They weren’t concerned with fetal anomalies.
“They just weren’t sure that twins would fit their lifestyle,” Julie recalls. “They were quite open about that issue and they wanted to look at all their options, which included visiting people they knew who had twins to see what life was like with twins.”
Julie remembers that her and the other staff at the clinic were secretly hoping never to see this couple again. They had healthy babies and plenty of money to care for the twins.
But the couple did return. In the end, they decided that twins weren’t going to fit their lifestyle and aborted both of them in the second trimester.
“My co-workers and I were kind of shaking our heads,” Julie said, “because we thought, oh, they’re fine. They can afford this, and they decided not to.”
~10,000 Late-Term Abortions in the U.S. Every Year and They Aren’t Done For Fetal Anomalies
About 1% of abortions occur 21 weeks or later, which equals nearly 10,000 a year in the United States. This is a conservative estimate since the exact number of abortions is not easy to attain. And late-term abortions are brutal. They often take at least a couple days to complete as the woman’s cervix needs to be softened and opened while a lethal drug is injected into the baby’s heart to cause death. Then the woman either delivers her dead baby or the baby is torn apart in the womb and extracted.
While the media loves to focus on tragic stories of fetal anomalies as the reason most women will choose to abort their babies so late in pregnancy, these reasons do not make up the majority of decisions for abortions past the point of viability. Data shows that around 80 percent of abortions after 21 weeks are not done for reasons of fetal anomalies or life of the mother.1
In interviews, Dr. Hern has estimated that at least half, if not more, of the women who came to him to abort their babies in the second and third trimester were not doing so because their baby had a fetal anomaly or their own life was at risk. Hern has stated he has done sex-selective abortions and has no problems performing abortions late in pregnancy for any reason.
When asked once if he would do an abortion for a woman with no health issues at 30 weeks pregnant, he answered: “Every pregnancy is a health issue! There’s a certifiable risk of death from being pregnant, period.”
Abortion is what Dr. Hern believes he was meant to do. In an interview with PBS News Hour 49 years after Roe was decided, he said: “I became convinced that performing abortions was the most important thing I could do in medicine”
If a woman came to Dr. Hern wanting a late term abortion, that’s what she got – for any or no reason.
Finally, the Clinic is Closed
Julie is immensely relieved her former employer has retired and his clinic has closed:
“I’m very happy he is retiring from his career of death,” Julie said. “It’s hard to imagine any other medical/surgical specialty where people would be comfortable with a doctor operating on them at age 86. Abortion is a mission field for him, the closest thing to a religious belief he has.”
The pro-abortion lobby certainly operates like a cult. They are all for women speaking out about abortion but not those women who have been hurt by abortion or the women who regret their abortions. And the former abortion workers, people with detailed knowledge of how things work – or don’t – at clinics, where the money goes, what quotas need to be reached? The pro-abortion lobby and their friends in the media never want to hear from them.
To listen to Julie’s story about her time working at Dr. Hern’s abortion clinic, see her interview on the Sick & Twisted podcast series on Politely Rude.