Warren Hern has been aborting viable, third-trimester babies for five decades at his late-term abortion facility in Boulder, Colorado.
Exactly how many have died by his hands, God only knows. But, in a new interview this week at The Atlantic, Hern insisted that none of the aborted babies were really babies yet.
“A baby is a fetus until it is ‘born alive,’” he told reporter Elaine Godfrey.
Hern said he only does second- and third-trimester abortions now, and estimated more than half of the cases involve healthy mothers carrying healthy babies – contradicting the popular claim that late-term unborn babies only are aborted for serious health reasons.
The whole interview is deeply disturbing, even though the reporter went out of her way to soften the image of Hern’s killing practice.
For example, Hern confirmed that some of the babies who he has aborted have been born alive.
He also admitted to doing sex-selection abortions simply because the babies’ mothers wanted a boy instead of a girl, or vice versa. He attempted to justify it all to The Atlantic.
“So if a pregnant woman with no health issues comes to the clinic, say, at 30 weeks, what would you do?” Godfrey asked.
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She said the question obviously annoyed him, and he replied: “Every pregnancy is a health issue! There’s a certifiable risk of death from being pregnant, period.”
But this was just an excuse. At another point in the interview, he admitted third-trimester abortions carry a high risk of “hemorrhage and other life-threatening conditions” for the mother.
In his mind, it’s the mother’s wishes – and ending the “cancer” of humanity on the planet – that are paramount. So much so that he can justify killing babies in the womb as late as 35 weeks by stabbing them through the heart with poison and then inducing labor to expel them from their mothers’ wombs.
“Regardless of the circumstances of pregnancy, in Hern’s view, a woman’s life—her humanity, her wishes—isn’t just more important than her fetus’s. It is virtually the only thing that matters,” the Atlantic reporter wrote.
She continued:
Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have [medical] diagnoses. He and his staff are just as sympathetic to other circumstances. Many of the clinic’s teenage patients receive later abortions because they had no idea they were pregnant. Some sexual-assault victims ignore their pregnancies or feel too ashamed to see a doctor. Once, a staffer named Catherine told me, a patient opted for a later abortion because her husband had killed himself and she was suddenly broke. …
The reason doesn’t really matter to Hern. Medical viability for a fetus—or its ability to survive outside the uterus—is generally considered to be somewhere from 24 to 28 weeks [LifeNews note: Viability actually is about 22 weeks now, thanks to modern medical technology. Premature babies have survived as early as 21 weeks]. Hern, though, believes that the viability of a fetus is determined not by gestational age but by a woman’s willingness to carry it.
Interestingly, Hern admitted that aborting late-term, fully-formed unborn babies used to bother him. He even had nightmares about the babies he killed – a couple of whom were born alive.
According to the interview: “… once or twice, during a procedure at 15 or 16 weeks, he used forceps to remove a fetus with a still-beating heart. The heart thumped for only a few seconds before stopping. But for a long while after, a vision of that fetus would wake Hern from sleep. He could see it in his mind, the inches-long body and its heart: beating, beating, beating. In one dream, Hern angled his own body to shield his staff from catching a glimpse.”
But the 84-year-old – who, despite The Atlantic’s best attempts to portray him in a positive light, appears to be a spiteful, nasty old man – kept aborting babies for so long that it seared his conscience. He said he does not have nightmares anymore and abortions no longer bother him.
What does bother him is pro-life advocates and Christians who defend unborn babies’ lives. He told The Atlantic several times that Christianity “is now the face of fascism in America.”
It’s clear that Hern thinks extremely highly of himself, too, bragging about his many talents (photography, poetry, etc.) and his intelligence, and repeatedly correcting the journalist who was interviewing him. He is elitist, too, defending euthanizing third-trimester babies with disabilities and sterilizing poor people.
Once, he justified his work sterilizing poor families in Appalachia because, in his mind, denying poor families the joy of children is better for them than housing, food and clean water. “But one of the most important needs is freedom from the tyranny of their own biology,” Hern wrote in a 1970s article in The New Republic.
How much longer he will be aborting unborn babies is uncertain, though. According to The Atlantic, many question the safety of an 84-year-old continuing to perform any complex surgical procedure. And Hern has two patients in every abortion: a mother and her unborn baby.
Hern’s answer to The Atlantic: “If people don’t agree with me, I don’t really care. I don’t give a s—.”
