Dr. Warren Hern retires from abortion practice

Longtime champion of reproductive rights risked his life for nearly six decades.

After decades of risking his life to help women in need, Dr. Warren Hern has decided to retire and close his abortion clinic.

“I want to thank everyone in this country who has worked for the rights of women to have safe abortions since before Roe v. Wade until now, and I want to thank those who are dedicated to continue this struggle until reproductive freedom is secure for all,” Hern said.

Hern was one of a handful of doctors in the country willing and able to provide an abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy. Countless times, he had his life threatened, and numerous attempts were made on his life. Right-wing pundits have mischaracterized and demonized him for his choice to help women in situations when that care was needed or wanted.

Hern recently wrote and released a new book, Abortion in the Age of Unreason: A Doctor’s Account of Caring for Women Before and After Roe v. Wade. The book shows a man at the intersection of many landmarks in reproductive rights history and reveals some of the sources of conflict he’s had with people within and outside the abortion rights movement. I profiled that work in a previous newsletter.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he was at the center of a wave of violence against doctors and clinics that did abortions. Four of his colleagues–Dr. David Gunn, Dr. John Britton, Dr. Barnett Slepian, and Dr. George Tiller–were murdered during that time. Hundreds of arson incidents, butyric acid attacks, and bombings hit clinics as well.

Hern installed bulletproof windows at his clinic in Boulder, Colorado, and wore a bulletproof vest. Despite that, he maintained a high profile within the media and championed reproductive rights on television and in print.

One of the things that Hern told me was that the abortion rights movement would defend doctors who performed abortions later in pregnancy in theory. But in practice, they didn’t want to associate with them. As a movement, we must be better at standing with those willing to do the things Hern did. Even if the Democratic Party doesn’t want to acknowledge them directly, we as movement leaders must explicitly praise these courageous doctors with their names in speeches, materials, political message-making, and debates we have with the other side. They deserve the same full-throated defense that everyone else in the movement does.

I wish Warren a happy retirement and a life of travel and adventure. We should all learn from his example.