Brazil Peace Corps Physician Warren Hern is Director of Boulder Abortion Clinic
Warren M. Hern, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Director, Boulder Abortion Clinic
Dr. Warren Hern, Director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, is a public health physician with over 30 years of experience with women's health issues. His awareness of the need for safe abortion services and advocacy of reproductive choice began during his experience as a medical student in Colorado and during his service as a Peace Corps physician in Brazil (1966-68). He was especially moved by the suffering of large numbers of Latin American women who were dying of illegal abortion. Their dilemma was similar to those Dr. Hern observed in American women as a medical student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine (M.D., 1965), during his work in the Peruvian Amazon as a third-year medical student (1964), and during his internship at Gorgas Hospital in the Canal Zone (1965-66).
After returning to the United States from Brazil in 1968, Dr. Hern studied epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, during which time he concentrated on the relationships between fertility, health, and reproductive decisions. He was especially interested in the epidemiology of induced abortion in Latin America.
Following course work for his Master of Public Health degree at the University of North Carolina (1968-70), Dr. Hern was invited to become an official in the U.S. government's first family planning program for the poor, administered within the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) - The "War On Poverty" as it had been called by the Johnson Administration. His official title was Chief, Program Development and Evaluation Branch, Family Planning Division, Office of Health Affairs, OEO, Executive Office of the President. His job was to help set priorities for the family planning program (annual budget: $24 million), design programs, and evaluate them. Among the policy issues addressed by Dr. Hern and his colleagues were the use of US government funds for abortion and voluntary sterilization programs. Dr. Hern was instrumental in changing the government policies to permit the use of funds for voluntary sterilization services for those who wanted and needed them but could not afford them. He also prepared and fought for regulations that would protect poor people from sterilization abuse. White House suppression of his sterilization guidelines resulted in his conscientious resignation from his government office in June, 1972.
During his time in Washington, Dr. Hern was keenly interested in the developing efforts for the legalization of abortion. He attended oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Vuitch (the first abortion case to reach the Supreme Court), and the first oral arguments for Roe vs. Wade and its companion case, Doe vs. Bolton. He was active in citizen's groups such as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) working for the legalization of abortion. His writings in national publications were reprinted and used by organizations such the Association for the Study of Abortion. It was during this time (1971-72) that he learned to perform abortions at PRETERM Clinic, the first non-profit abortion clinic in the nation's capitol. Before leaving Washington, Dr. Hern performed abortions while conducting a management study at PRETERM.
After working as a consultant briefly in Washington, D.C. and Latin America, Dr. Hern returned home to Colorado in the summer of 1972. That fall, in November, 1972, Dr. Hern's article, "Abortion Politics" appeared in The Progressive magazine. This followed several of Dr. Hern's articles on abortion, sterilization, and family planning that had appeared in the American Journal of Public Health, Family Planning Perspectives, and The New Republic.
Shortly after the Roe vs. Wade decision was handed down, an editor of The Denver Post asked Dr. Hern to prepare a lengthy article interpreting the Roe decision and its implications for Colorado citizens. Partly as a consequence of these writings, he was asked in the spring of 1973 to help start a non-profit abortion clinic in Boulder, Colorado. This clinic became Colorado's first free-standing abortion facility and came under attack by anti-abortion fanatics and by some members of the medical community.
Within weeks after the clinic was opened with Dr. Hern as Medical Director, he became one of the chief defenders of abortion rights and reproductive freedom in Colorado. He defended these freedoms not only with his own day-to-day work but in many public speeches, debates, lectures, and media appearances. In November, 1974, he presented his first clinical paper on abortion services, a series of over 1000 first-trimester abortions without a single uterine perforation, at the American Public Health Association meeting. The series emphasized the use of laminaria, a medically-prepared seaweed, which added safety in dilation of the cervix prior to abortion.
In January, 1975, Dr. Hern founded his own private medical practice, specializing in outpatient abortion, in Boulder - the Boulder Abortion Clinic. Since that time, he has concentrated on providing the highest quality abortion services possible, with primary emphasis on patient safety and on individual emotional and social support. In numerous clinical studies conducted by Dr. Hern and published in the best peer-review journals, including Obstetrics and Gynecology and American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the major complication rates are in the range of 0.1 - 0.3% (1-3 per 1000) - the lowest in the medical literature concerning abortion statistics and complication rates.
In 1976, Dr. Hern organized and co-chaired the Western Regional Conference on Abortion. This national meeting, with leading experts on abortion from various fields, was the first national meeting on the subject held since 1971. The proceedings of this historic meeting, including not only presentations, photographs, and discussions, were published in 1977 as Abortion In The Seventies, with Dr. Hern as senior editor.
In subsequent years, Dr. Hern's publications included dozens of scientific and professional papers concerning abortion and other aspects of fertility control, including those concerning his research among the Shipibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon Basin which he began in 1964. That research was the basis for his Ph.D. in Epidemiology, which he received from the University of North Carolina in 1988.
In 1984, J.B. Lippincott Company published Dr. Hern's medical textbook, Abortion Practice. This was the first single-author medical textbook on the subject of abortion, and it has remained a standard work in the field since that date. Because of anti-abortion threats and harassment, Lippincott took the book out of print in 1989 and destroyed several hundred copies of the hardcover book. Dr. Hern subsequently obtained the copyright, formed a publishing company (Alpenglo Graphics), and published a softcover edition of Abortion Practice in order to keep the book in print and available to those who need it. Instructions for ordering this valuable text are included elsewhere in this website.
In 1975, Dr. Hern began developing a technique for performing early second trimester abortions on an outpatient basis - an important innovation. His first paper on this subject, "Multiple laminaria treatment in early midtrimester outpatient suction abortion," was the first paper on this subject in the American literature. It was published in Advances in Planned Parenthood in 1977. Since then, the serial multiple laminaria technique described by Dr. Hern has become the procedure of choice in second trimester abortion.
In 1976, Dr. Hern was one of the founding institutional members of the National Abortion Federation and served on its Board of Directors for four years. For the first two years of the organization's existence, Dr. Hern served on the Standards Committee and then chaired that Committee for two years. He prepared for publication the first version of the National Abortion Federation Program Standards for Abortion Services, released in 1981.
Following publication of Abortion Practice in 1984, Dr. Hern became a favorite target of anti-abortion fanatics such as Randall Terry, who prayed for Dr. Hern's "execution" during a demonstration in front of Boulder Abortion Clinic, and who publicly invited his followers to assassinate Dr. Hern during a radio broadcast in August, 1993.
In October, 1985, just prior to a visit by Chicago anti-abortion fanatic Joseph Scheidler, a large stone was thrown through the front window of Dr. Hern's waiting room. Scheidler, a defrocked monk who heads the "Chicago Pro-Life [sic] Action League," was scheduled to speak at the University of Colorado and to demonstrate in front of the Boulder Abortion Clinic for several days. Author of Closed: 99 Ways To Close An Abortion Clinic, and advocate of anti-abortion harassment, he had stated several times on national television programs that he had "yet to shed a tear over the smoldering remains of an abortion clinic."
Dr. Hern had just returned from a medical meeting in Berlin, where he had presented two papers on second trimester abortion. After the conference, he was invited by a colleague to visit East Berlin. The tour included a brief stop at the Jewish Synagogue and Community House, which still showed the flame marks and other signs of Kristallnacht, the infamous September night when Nazi goons broke out the windows of Jewish merchants and conducted a general assault on the Jewish community.
Three days after the stone came crashing through his window, and just prior to Mr. Scheidler's unwelcome visit, Dr. Hern placed a large, hand-written sign over the plywood covering the broken window - "THIS WINDOW WAS BROKEN BY THOSE WHO HATE FREEDOM." The sign was at Scheidler's back as he met the press that afternoon in front of Dr. Hern's office.
In February, 1988, following years of death threats, demonstrations, vandalism, and other forms of harassment, five shots were fired through the front window Dr. Hern's office. His response, the next morning, was to hold a press conference on the front lawn in front of the windows showing the bullet holes, and to offer a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons who committed this crime. One employee of Boulder Abortion Clinic was narrowly missed by a second round of bullets.
The front of Boulder Abortion Clinic - and Dr. Hern's staff and patients - is now protected by four layers of bullet-proof windows.
Dr. Hern obtained a restraining order in January, 1995 against an anti-abortion fanatic who was stalking Dr. Hern to his home and issuing numerous death threats.
On January 22, 1995, the American Coalition of Life [sic] Activists held a press conference and announced a hit list of the first thirteen doctors they wanted eliminated. Dr. Hern was one of the thirteen abortion doctors targeted for elimination.
That afternoon, the US government put Dr. Hern under 24-hour armed guard by US federal marshals. This federal protection remained in place until July, 1995, when appropriations for the program protecting physicians were withdrawn by the new anti-abortion Republican majority in Congress.
During this time, Dr. Hern continued to conduct and publish clinical research on abortion services. His research paper on late abortion, "Outpatient abortion for fetal anomaly and fetal death from 15-34 menstrual weeks' gestation: Techniques and clinical management," was published in Obstetrics and Gynecology in February, 1993 (Vol. 81, pp. 301-306). A paper comparing two methods of cervical dilation in 1000 late abortion patients received the prize for "Best Scientific Paper" at 1993 and 1994 meetings, respectively, of the National Abortion Federation and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. The paper was published in American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (Vol. 171:1324-28) in November, 1994.
During the controversy surrounding the so-called "Partial Birth Abortion" debate, Dr. Hern was one of the experts in late abortion sought out by the national media for comment on this political strategy. He submitted testimony to the US Senate Judiciary Committee in November, 1995. His editorials on the subject have appeared in The Washington Post (1996) and The New York Times (1997). In June, 1996, he appeared on a special 60 Minutes program on the late abortion controversy. The next year, he was the target of Republican legislators and unsuccessful anti-abortion legislation in the 1997 session of the Colorado General Assembly.
Dr. Hern's efforts in behalf of reproductive freedom have been recognized and honored by the National Organization for Women, the Colorado chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League, the Colorado Coalition for Choice, and the Colorado Women's Political Caucus. He was a featured speaker at a special event observing the 25th Anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision held in Denver and sponsored by the Colorado Coalition for Choice on January 22, 1998.
