LJWorld.com

Boulder, Colo. — Behind the bulletproof glass and drawn blinds, Warren Hern tends to his patients in the lower level of his clinic.

There are no protesters outside, no white crosses lining the clinic’s grounds.

There is also no doubt about what happens in this sandy brick building across from Boulder Community Hospital: The Boulder Abortion Clinic is clearly marked.

Downstairs is a woman who chose to terminate her pregnancy because of a fetal abnormality, Hern tells a visitor in an upstairs room. The woman was scheduled to have a late abortion at George Tiller’s Women’s Health Care Services clinic but came to Hern after Tiller’s clinic closed following his May 31 shooting death.

Hern, 70, has thick gray hair, glasses and a rapid-fire cadence to his speech. He has seen more patients since Tiller’s death and expects that to continue.

Late abortion specialist

Hern specializes in late abortions, which he defined as 20 weeks and more in a March letter to area medical colleagues. He says about 95 percent of his practice is late abortions.

Since Tiller’s death, Hern — a pallbearer at the funeral — is guarded 24 hours a day by federal marshals. A sign inside his clinic’s lobby door cautions, “For your safety, do not open this door for anyone who has not accompanied you.”

Hern would not disclose how many abortions he performs in an average week. In the March letter to fellow medical professionals, Hern said his clinic, which opened in 1975, had performed about 15,000 abortions from 15 through 26 weeks of pregnancy and about 2,000 beyond 26 weeks.

He said that patients whose pregnancies are beyond 26 weeks are evaluated “to determine specific indications for pregnancy termination.”

What has been lost in all the rhetoric of the abortion debate, all the protests, all the violence, Hern says, is the rights of women. “This is not about abortion,” Hern says. “This is about power.”

And the abortion debate, he says, is not a debate at all.

“This is a civil war,” he says. “These people are using bullets and bombs. That is not a debate.”

After he was shot in both arms in 1993, Tiller largely kept a low profile, declining requests for interviews. In contrast, Hern speaks out openly. On June 10, he wrote a letter to President Obama saying it was “past time for this continuing anti-abortion terrorism and violence to end.”

In it, Hern wrote about the “thousands of death threats” he has endured and what he describes as attempts to end his life.

Protests in Boulder

Hern said that he did not perform as many abortions as Tiller. He also said Boulder is a much different place from Wichita and is more tolerant of a woman’s right to choose.

Protesters, he said, come and go at his clinic. In his office, he motions to the parking lot and says a protester once tried to run him over there. In 1988, his clinic was riddled with five bullets from what he says was a high-powered rifle.

When asked how long he will continue his practice, Hern shrugged. His mother, Edna Hern, said she thinks her son would like to retire.

But he feels an obligation to women, especially now that there is one fewer doctor willing to perform late abortions, she said.

The National Abortion Federation in 2007 said that Tiller, Hern and the Atlanta SurgiCenter were its only members to perform late abortions. After Tiller was killed, the federation would not say how many doctors perform late abortions other than it’s a “small handful” of its 400 members.

National Abortion Federation president Vicki Saporta said she didn’t want to publicly name any other doctors or clinics that offer late abortions “because of legitimate security concerns.”

“Doctors are now stepping up to fill the void,” she said. “We’re determined to ensure women have access.”

Women who seek late abortions usually want their pregnancies, but their fetuses have anomalies “incompatible with life,” said Saporta of the National Abortion Federation.

Anti-abortion groups disagree. Late abortions are “never necessary,” said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue. Advances in medicine have made it possible for fetuses to be viable outside the womb earlier and could be delivered if the mother’s health is at risk, he said.

Abortions due to fetus abnormalities or predicted short life are also unnecessary and based on doctors’ opinions, which aren’t always right, Newman said.

“We do not kill someone because of life expectancy,” he said.

About 3 percent of abortions in Kansas in 2008 were done after 21 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.