By Dave Andrusko
All pro-life writers, including me, have written stories (in my case, many stories) about the King of late-term abortions, Warren Hern. For whatever reason, Hern has been the subject of a number of profiles of late: the New Yorker, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times.
The explanation may actually be quite simple: Hern has just written a book titled Abortion in the Age of Unreason and no doubt gave a heads-up to sympathetic reporters. Medpage Today just published an attention-grabbing excerpt titled “The Disease of Nine Months: Caring for Women Before and After Roe.”
MedPage Today adds an innocuous sounding introduction: “Hern is a physician specializing in abortion services.” Specializing in the kind of “abortions services” that few men (they are mostly men) could stomach.
To be fair, this is just an excerpt, but a very revealing excerpt. What does Hern have to say for himself?
Hern sees himself as a hero, a lone warrior fighting for women. We shouldn’t be surprised that he is obsessed with polishing his image, a necessary enterprise when you are killing huge unborn babies
For starters, in the excerpt he writes about three women with “wanted pregnancies” but whose medical condition is dire, to put it mildly. He also quotes David Garrow, a pro-abortion author who has written sympathetic books and articles about abortion.
Hern quotes Garrow who quotes a woman who said to him, “My feeling about the pregnancy was that a horrible cancer was growing in my body that would ruin my life.” Hern adds, “She had serious medical issues that were exacerbated by the pregnancy.”
That’s the lone example of a woman who is not carrying a “wanted pregnancy.”
By this time, Hern has, without saying so explicitly, made his (deceptive)point, one that pro-abortionists make incessantly: only a “few” abortions take place after the 21st week and most, if not almost all, of these abortion are for severe medical issues.
National Right to Life has written extensively, rebutting this canard. More about this in a moment.
So what are Hern’s requirements, so to speak, for late, late abortions? In an interview for The Atlantic he says he performs abortions for any reason because he has said it’s up to the woman!
Check out this quote from The Atlantic story written by Elaine Godfrey. Hern “believes that the viability of a fetus is determined not by gestational age but by a woman’s willingness to carry it.”
Godfrey asked Hern if he would commit a late-term abortion on a healthy woman:
‘So, if a pregnant woman with no health issues comes to the clinic, say, at 30 weeks, what would you do?’ I asked Hern once.
The question irked him. ‘Every pregnancy is a health issue!’ he said. ‘There’s a certifiable risk of death from being pregnant, period.’
As Hern grudgingly told Godrey, at least half of the late term abortions he performed were on babies who did not have devastating diagnoses—AT LEAST HALF!
“The majority of abortions done late in pregnancy are performed for the same reasons as any other abortion,” writes Laura Echevarria, Director of Communications and Press Secretary for NRLC. “Sadly, we have limited information because there are no reporting requirements so we only know what abortionists like Warren Hern reveal.”
What can we say about numbers, bearing in mind some huge states don’t report at all and the human temptation to fudge the number of weeks so that the total is smaller than it is in reality.
John McCormack of National Review, wrote this:
NBC’s Dasha Burns pointed to the fact that 1.3 percent of abortions happen at 21 weeks or later, but 1.3 percent of 930,000 total abortions still equals 12,000 unique human beings killed each year at 21 weeks or later, when babies are capable of feeling pain and sometimes capable of surviving outside of the womb. There are fewer than 12,000 total gun homicides in the United States each year. Burns, in an attempt to minimize the horror of late-term abortion, actually ended up agreeing that late-term abortions do in fact happen in the United States.
The numbers are slightly smaller for the past couple of years but that doesn’t minimize the horror.
“Pregnancy is not a benign condition,” he writes. “It can kill you.” Hern cites approvingly the 17th century French physician François Mauriceau’s description of pregnancy as a “disease of nine months.”
Finally, every time I write about Hern inevitably a quote from a speech he delivered at the Associations of Planned Parenthood Physicians meeting in 1978 leaps into my mind:
“The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current.”
