Prominent Colorado abortion provider calls Dobbs decision 'throwback to another century'

This story is part of a series on the fallout of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the federal constitutional right to abortion.

For nearly five decades, Dr. Warren Hern has specialized in providing abortions to people who need them in the late stages of pregnancy. He says he is unwavering in his commitment to helping people obtain abortion care.

Hern tells the American Independent Foundation that pregnant people travel to his Boulder, Colorado, office because they know he will provide abortions in the first, second, or third trimester if needed.

“Many of my patients have catastrophic fetal abnormalities that end a desired pregnancy. They don’t want to have an abortion, they want to have a baby,” Hern says. “We have situations with very young women who may not even be adolescents yet, 10 years old, 11, 12, who have a very advanced pregnancy because they didn’t understand or know that they were pregnant or they’ve been victims of sexual abuse within the family.”

When Hern learned that the U.S. Supreme Court had with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, he says, he was “horrified but not surprised.”

“The anti-abortion movement and the Christians and the Republicans have been after this result for 50 years, and they have been extremely effective. … The Dobbs decision is a throwback to another century. I mean, it’s not just the 20th, we’re talking about the 19th or before. [Justice Samuel] Alito, even in his draft opinion, I think in the final one, quoted a 17th-century magistrate who believed in witches and believes in burning them at the stake. I mean, to say this decision came out of the Dark Ages is sort of an insult to the Dark Ages.”

Since Roe was overturned, 15 states have severely restricted the ability of people to obtain an abortion. Hern believes that those laws are “madness.”

“The madness among the Republicans to decide whether they’re going to ban it at six weeks or 15 weeks or 20 weeks, or 23 and a half weeks, is, first of all, fiddling with the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s absurd,” Hern says. “It reveals the utterly cynical approach they have to this. It’s about winning elections. This has had nothing to do with women’s health care.”

Hern says he’s had an influx of patients from Texas since a state law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy took effect on Sept. 1, 2021.

“You can’t do a delivery and give the woman the best care you can under these circumstances. And the Texas law, of course, is designed to avoid any state responsibility for a state decision by putting in the hands of this hideous law, where anybody can sue somebody for $10,000 if they even help you get an abortion. I mean, it’s turning into a police state,” Hern says.

Hern talks about a call he received recently from a pregnant woman in Texas who he says was desperate. Her membranes had ruptured prematurely, meaning fluid was leaking from the amniotic sac. If this happens before a pregnancy is full-term, it can cause deadly infections to the pregnant person and it becomes very unlikely the fetus will survive.

The woman went to a local hospital and was admitted.

“And the doctor and the nurse were in the room; the nurse left the room, and the doctor said, I can’t tell you this while the nurse is present, but you are going to have to go to another state to have treatment for this because we can’t do it here,” Hern says:

The woman has an emergency. She wasn’t able to get care. She wasn’t able to travel right away. I wound up getting her an appointment at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, where, because it was the weekend, we were closed. And she needed attention immediately, and she got there and they treated her, but then she got septic, because it’s now five days following the ruptured membranes. And she was in the intensive care unit, she almost died.

“The Republican Party has been taken over by the radical white Christian evangelical nationalist movement, and so they completely ignore the health issues for women in pregnancy,” Hern says. “Pregnancy is a potentially fatal condition. It has all the cognitive elements of an illness, condition. And abortion should be the treatment of choice for pregnancy unless the woman wants to have a baby. And in that case, she should have the best medical care available to help her survive the pregnancy and delivery and have a healthy baby.”

Hern mentions a Florida woman by the name of Deborah Dorbert. The Washington Post reported that about halfway through Dorbert’s pregnancy, the fetus was diagnosed with Potter syndrome, a rare and fatal condition in which insufficient amniotic fluid prevents the kidneys from forming and also results in a child born with it having severe difficulty breathing for a life span that is usually less than an hour. Due to Florida’s abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Dorbert was told she would have to carry the pregnancy to full term.

“They were forced to carry this pregnancy to term and watch the baby die. I mean, it’s cruel. It’s cruel and sadistic and stupid,” Hern says.

Hern was close friends with the late Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, an abortion provider who was assassinated on May 31, 2009, by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder.

He says that protesters continue to harass patients and threaten him and his family outside of his own office.

We have lots of security issues and a lot of measures to protect me and the staff, but I can’t wear a tank, you know. There’s always a threat to staff and patients, and my family, and that’s true, really, for any doctor or any other health professional that works in the United States because we have a violent, fascist terrorist movement that now controls one of the two main political parties in the United States, and they will stop at nothing to impose their views on other people. They will accept any level of violence, up to and including assassination and bombing. These are people who are opposed to basic principles of American society and American democracy, constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the embodiment of that was obviously when Donald Trump was elected 2016.

Hern, who turns 85 years old in June, says he has no intention of retiring any time soon. But he is concerned about the many doctors of obstetrics leaving the field and hospitals closing maternity wards.

In mid-March, Bonner General Health in Sandpoint, Idaho, announced it would be closing its labor and delivery services because “highly respected, talented physicians are leaving” and because “the Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care,” according to a press release.

Hern says he is working on a book on the politics of abortion and that one of its chapters will focus on the voices of women: “I talked to all these patients, and each one of them has a story that’s very touching, and they’re in desperate situations, and they have to make this choice for their own life. This is not a casual decision. And I think that it’s very hard to get all that out to people,” Hern says.

He says his greatest fear is a “fascist takeover of the American government in 2024. And I think that’s a realistic possibility.”

“I think that this is the worst situation I’ve seen in this country in my life, and I’m very conscious of what was going on during McCarthyism and all that. And I think that we’re in an extremely dangerous state,” he says.

He adds: “My patients inspire me. When patients tell me their stories, most of them don’t have any real sense of the political controversy. They’re concerned about their situation. But I think that there are a lot of young people who are concerned, and they have to get to the polls and vote.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.