Warren Hern is as intense as you'd expect from someone who's been threatened with death for most of his career.
The 86-year-old doctor, one of the few Americans who performs late-term abortions, is perhaps the one who has been most on the front lines of the war for reproductive rights.
He has been shot at, spit on, insulted 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 constant fear of being assassinated by political terrorists. That’s what happened to his dear friend, late-term abortion specialist George Tiller, who was murdered in his church in Wichita, Kansas, by a Christian extremist in 2009. I ran into Hern at the Denver airport as we were both on our way to Tiller’s funeral. I didn’t realize he was traveling with a protective detail until I saw two men in suits standing tensely as I approached him to say hello.
“George was a wonderful guy, a normal person, unlike me, kind, understanding, Christian and all that,” she told me Monday from Boulder, Colorado, her wry humor evident. Her voice softened: “We were great friends and I miss him.”
It's no surprise that Hern wears his contempt for abortion opponents on display.
“The criminalization of abortion under Republicans and Trump is a catastrophe for women,” she said. “It has become a collective psychosis. Why does 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 her life and times, an insider’s account of the internal struggles in the abortion rights movement and a 350-page declaration of her ongoing commitment to much-needed health care despite the danger she faces daily.
Early in his career, Hern had no intention of becoming a famous abortion provider. He aspired to be an epidemiologist in academia and public health before landing 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 seeing how Latin American hospital wards were filled with women suffering the consequences of unsafe abortions.
He was later recruited by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity — an outgrowth of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty — to open family planning clinics across the country, giving him his first exposure to the vitriolic politics surrounding reproductive rights.
In January 1975, two years after Roe v. Wade, Hern opened her own abortion clinic in Boulder. Two weeks later, at her home in the middle of the night, she received her first death threat.
“I received so many death threats that I thought I would create a death threat hotline,” Hern writes. “'Want to threaten Dr. Hern with death? Easy. Give the operator your name, address, phone number, and credit card number for quick relief. Only $5 per minute, talk as long as you want!'”
Nearly all of her procedures are performed in the late stages of pregnancy, usually because the fetus has a catastrophic medical condition or the pregnancy endangers the woman's health. Abortion in late pregnancy is difficult for everyone involved: patients, families, doctors, nurses and the rest of the clinic staff. Hern doesn't shy away from the tough stuff.
“Our entire evolutionary experience is about caring for tiny, helpless creatures, including human babies,” she said. “That’s the central biocultural problem in all of this.”
Recently, she told me, a younger doctor she is training felt she had to leave the operating room during surgery on a woman who was 34 weeks pregnant. “She was quite taken aback by that,” she said, “and I told her there was nothing wrong with feeling that way.”
There were times when she had to collect herself in private after a procedure.
For decades, Hern has held the iconoclastic position that pregnancy is no different from illness. In almost all cases, childbirth is far more dangerous than abortion.
“Pregnancy is not a benign disease,” she writes. “It can kill you.” She cites the 17th-century French physician François Mauriceau’s description of pregnancy as a “nine-month illness.”
“The treatment of choice for pregnancy is abortion, unless the woman wants to carry the pregnancy to term and have a baby,” she concludes. “It is a view that is abhorrent to those who believe that the purpose of women, in addition to giving pleasure to men and performing household chores, is to have as many babies as possible.”
In this post-Roe moment, abortion rights are expected to play a major role in the November election, which pits staunchly 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 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 near death and suffered a miscarriage at 18 weeks before performing an abortion.
“I was in pain and bleeding so much that my husband feared for my life,” said Kaitlyn Joshua, who was denied abortion services in Louisiana when she suffered a miscarriage at 11 weeks.
Hadley Duvall, 22, who became pregnant at age 12 by her stepfather, cited Trump's boast that state abortion bans are “a beautiful thing.”
“What is so beautiful,” he asked, “about a girl having to carry her parents’ child in her womb?”
Considering his half-century of working in the face of scorn and danger, I asked Dr. Hern if he still found joy in his work.
“I love it,” he said.
Hern recalls one of her first patients who had undergone an illegal abortion: a terrifying and humiliating experience.
“Please never stop doing this,” he told her.
“So I didn’t do it,” he writes.
