Anguish, gratitude and fear of violence at a Colorado clinic for late abortions
At a Colorado clinic that specializes in second- and third-trimester procedures, women arrive in “distress and anguish” and increasingly when their lives are in danger.
BOULDER, Colo. — Behind bullet-proof doors in a generic office park is one of only five clinics in the country where women can access the rarest — and most controversial — abortion procedures.
Women come here desperate, says Dr. Warren Hern, who has run the Boulder Abortion Clinic since 1975.
“It ranges from the 12-year-old kid who’s pregnant from her stepfather to the 45-year-old woman who desperately wants to have a baby and finds out that she has a fatal illness that is incompatible with being pregnant,” he says.
Hern and his team specialize in second- and third-trimester abortions, a practice that sparks fierce political debate around an already charged topic.
Dr. Warren Hern speaks with Willow in one of the procedure rooms at the Boulder Abortion Clinic.NBC NewsThose opposed say abortion after the point of fetal viability — about 24 weeks — is simply too late in a pregnancy to terminate. In recent weeks, when asked if he’d vote to lift Florida’s six-week abortion ban in November, former President Donald Trump said he’d vote against it and expressed discomfort with later-term abortions, telling Fox News that “the Democrats are radical because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation, where you can do an abortion in the ninth month.” During the 2024 presidential debate against President Joe Biden in June, Trump also claimed, “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”
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