Left-leaning, pro-abortion media outlets often downplay abortions performed late in pregnancy and babies who are born alive in botched abortions, sometimes by outright denial.
But occasionally, the truth slips through, tucked into the paragraphs of sweeping and sympathetic articles on abortions in the last weeks of pregnancy. On Tuesday — the same day former President Donald Trump cornered Vice President Kamala Harris on whether she supports abortions in the seventh, eighth, and even ninth month of pregnancy — NBC News published an article interviewing a late pregnancy abortionist who has admitted to performing abortions at, and even beyond, 32 weeks, which is around eight months.
The abortionist featured in the piece is Dr. Warren Hern, who has run the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado since 1975 and specializes in second-and-third trimester abortions. The report notes that while many of his cases allegedly involved some sort of fetal anomaly, some are simply “unwanted.”
“But not all of Hern’s patients are in Emma’s shoes. Some are pushed too late into unwanted pregnancies due to abortion bans or long wait times at clinics in the post-Roeera,” the article reads.
In the NBC News article, Hern allegedly claimed he does not perform abortions in the eighth and ninth month. But in an extensive interview with The Atlantic published in May of 2023, he admitted to going up to 32 weeks and beyond.
One woman the reporter spoke with recalled getting an abortion from him at 35 weeks after her baby was diagnosed with brain anomalies that would have led to her child living with disabilities. The woman described the late abortion as “euthanasia” and said: “I put my baby down.”
Different to the NBC News article, Hern said in The Atlantic interview that many late-term abortions are unwanted for other reasons besides fetal anomalies.
“Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses. He and his staff are just as sympathetic to other circumstances,” the article reads.
The article continues:
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. Hern, though, believes that the viability of a fetus is determined not by gestational age but by a woman’s willingness to carry it. He applies the same principle to all of his prospective patients: If he thinks it’s safer for them to have an abortion than to carry and deliver the baby, he’ll take the case—usually up until around 32 weeks, with some rare later exceptions, because of the increased risk of hemorrhage and other life-threatening conditions beyond that point.
Hern further admitted to doing abortions for sex selection twice, “once for this woman, and once for someone who’d desperately wanted a girl” and said, “It was their choice to make.”
He had also aborted babies at 15 or 16 weeks in the 1970s who still had beating hearts when they were removed from the mothers before dying outside the womb, according to the report.
NBC News found that only five abortion clinics in the country abort unborn babies after 28 weeks. Abortion Finder, a pro-abortion resource backed by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, estimates that there are as many as eight, including one in Maryland that allegedly performs abortions at up to 35 weeks and six days — approximately a day short of being considered the beginning of the ninth month of pregnancy.
Thousands of unborn babies are killed in abortions after 21 weeks of pregnancy every year. The media frames the loss of thousands of unborn lives as rare because late-term abortions make up a small percentage of abortions overall.
For example, there were 625,978 legal induced abortions recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2021. One percent of those were after 21 weeks, which is more than 6,000 post-viability babies killed in abortions. The pro-abortion Guttmacher institute estimated that more than one million abortions were performed in 2023, which by CDC estimates could mean at least 10,000 late-term abortions were performed that year.
There is disagreement on what the term “late-term abortion” actually means. Pro-abortion organizations often reject the term and say the official medical definition of “late-term” would mean 41 weeks, or past full-term. The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute has calledthe definition of late-term abortion “imprecise and shifting,” but has generally defined it as abortion later in pregnancy, typically when babies can survive outside of the womb, “with instances of survival occurring at 22 weeks gestation or slightly earlier.”
The Atlantic article describes Hern’s late-term abortion method in brutal detail, noting that “sometimes, the fetus will be whole, intact,” and other times he “must remove it in parts.”
Nine states and Washington, DC, have no limits on abortion, according to Abortion Finder. Those states are Alaska, Vermont, Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, Maryland, and New Jersey. Under Roe v. Wade, a now-defunct 1973 Supreme Court decision which had invented a constitutional right to abortion, most states allowed abortions up to viability, which is often considered to be between 20 and 24 weeks. Some states allowed abortions after that point, sometimes under certain health exceptions.
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