Dr. Warren Hern discusses new book
Boulder-based physician performed abortions later in pregnancy for decades while enduring never-ending harassment.
Few people have witnessed, experienced, or endured what Dr. Warren Hern has in being a champion of reproductive rights and a physician who performs abortions.
For decades, Hern has been targeted with harassment and murder attempts. Much of it has to do with his willingness to help women who need abortions later in pregnancy. He’s watched many of his friends, who provided the same services, be assassinated as the political fervor around abortion became extreme. He told me his thoughts as to why we’re in this dire situation where abortions, even early in pregnancy, are not being performed in nearly half the country.
“People made serious, grave mistakes in understanding what was going on,” Hern said.
Hern recently wrote and will release a new book, Abortion in the Age of Unreason: A Doctor’s Account of Caring for Women Before and After Roe v. Wade. It shows a man at the intersections of many landmarks in reproductive rights history. It also reveals some of the sources of conflict he’s had with people within and outside the abortion rights movement.
Hern attended the Supreme Court hearings in the Vuitch case, which was a significant Supreme Court decision that preceded Roe involving a doctor who performed abortions in Washington, D.C.
Later, he attended the hearing for Roe v. Wade, and he recalled sitting in a cafeteria with Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued for abortion rights, and Harry Blackmun, the judge who later wrote the opinion. He was awed to be sitting next to a Supreme Court justice.
That kind of unique detail distinguishes the book from other histories I’ve read recently. Small anecdotes about what it was like to experience history first-hand separate certain books from others. While some works that detail events from a century ago may be challenging to construct due to a lack of oral history, researchers of this topic have ample opportunities to track down key players and get primary sources to tell them what happened. There’s no excuse not to do so.
Thankfully, Hern preserved his memories in this soon-to-be-released book.
Few people have been mischaracterized or demonized to the extent that Hern has. He’s been subject to the “Help Wanted” type of posters that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s. In those flyers, there was usually a doctor whose photo was included along with demonizing rhetoric accompanying it. In one of his books, there’s a $5,000 reward for a group of doctors known as the “Deadly Dozen,” who were “Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity.”
Hern was one of the doctors. George Tiller, who survived one assassination attempt and perished in a later one, was another name listed in the ad.
In 1988, bullets shattered the front window of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, where Hern works in Colorado.
Hern said that antiabortion extremism operates at several levels. First, they are angry, and then they hear the rhetoric coming from Christian theologians who are staunchly antiabortion and who call doctors all sorts of terms. After reading or seeing those people called baby killers, they feel morally obliged to murder to stop what they perceive as a mass form of it.
“This is about exerting power,” Hern said. “When you try to kill somebody, that's the ultimate exercise of power.”
An inability to see nuance within the abortion debate is perhaps the fairest criticism of the antiabortion movement. There’s a perceived dichotomy of us versus them, good versus evil, and wrong versus right. That fills them with righteousness and certainty of the justness of their cause, no matter whatever means are used to fulfill their desired ends.
Hern has always seen nuance. There’s one intriguing chapter in which he details how he argued for the First Amendment rights of antiabortion activists while later saying that those very people tested the limits of its protections.
Later, he said that the abortion rights movement needs to include more doctors and elevate them to positions of leadership. I saw this while traveling in Ohio, where physicians played the most crucial role in organizing the successful ballot initiative. However, he disagrees with many of the efforts to pass ballot initiatives that protect abortion rights only up to the point of viability.
Even among doctors, there are tendencies to want to associate with people who may be less controversial, like someone who does abortion later in pregnancy, as Hern does.
“A lot of the pro-choice people don't want to get caught standing next to a doctor who actually does that,” Hern said.
The book is a must-read for people who want to understand abortion history. At the moment, Hern thinks the movement must push for protection beyond restoring Roe’s legal framework.
“It leads to moving back toward where we were allegedly before,” Hern said. “But what we need is a constitutional amendment that says a woman's right to have safe medical care will not be abridged.”