The Kermit Gosnell of Colorado

T en years ago this month, Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell was convicted on three counts of murder for killing infants with a pair of scissors moments after they had been born.

In addition to the murder convictions for what Gosnell described as “snippings” and his assistant more accurately called “beheadings,” Gosnell was also convicted on 21 counts of killing babies in utero later than 24 weeks of pregnancy, the legal abortion limit established under Pennsylvania’s 1982 Abortion Control Act.

The state of Colorado, however, has no legal limit on abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, and Dr. Warren Hern, the subject of a new profile in the Atlantic, has acted with impunity over the last 50 years as he killed, and still kills, infants in utero via lethal injection.

Infants born as early as 21 weeks to 22 weeks of pregnancy have survived their stays in the neonatal intensive care unit and grow up to be healthy children. But Hern makes a living by killing preemies “who are 22, 25, even 30 weeks along,” according to the Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey. Most of the time, these babies and their mothers are physically healthy: “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.”

Godfrey reports that Hern “​​believes that the viability of a fetus is determined not by gestational age but by a woman’s willingness to carry it,” and he even admitted that he has killed a baby girl in the womb simply because she was a girl:

I prodded for cracks in Hern’s certainty. At one point, I thought I’d found one: Hern had told me about a woman who’d sought an abortion because she didn’t want to have a baby girl. I thought he had refused. But when I followed up to ask him why, I learned that I had misunderstood. Hern said he had done abortions for sex selection twice: once for this woman; and once for someone who’d desperately wanted a girl. It was their choice to make, he explained.

“So if a pregnant woman with no health issues comes to the clinic, say, at 30 weeks, what would you do?” I asked Hern once. The question irked him. “Every pregnancy is a health issue!” he said. “There’s a certifiable risk of death from being pregnant, period.”

There are certainly rare but real cases before viability when a baby may be delivered early to save the mother from the threat of sepsis or another life-threatening condition, but those cases are almost exclusively treated in hospitals. After viability, most doctors say they can always (or almost always) deliver the baby alive in life-threatening circumstances. Simply inducing labor and a live birth can take hours, while a C-section can take minutes, but Hern’s late-term abortion procedure takes days: “The procedure he uses takes three or four days and goes like this: After performing an ultrasound, he will use a thin needle to inject a medicine called digoxin through the patient’s abdomen to stop the fetus’s heart.” Then he ensures the woman gives birth to a dead baby: “Sometimes, the fetus will be whole, intact. Other times, Hern must remove it in parts.”

If we were talking about a lethal injection of a death-row inmate, the Atlantic surely would not call the poison used to stop his beating heart “medicine.” The article also offers a dehumanizing description of a baby at 13 weeks of pregnancy, telling readers that such a baby looks like an “alienlike ball of flesh.” But the author also relates the tale of how Hern was horrified back in the 1970s when he aborted a baby at 15 or 16 weeks of pregnancy:

The work sometimes got to him. He would often retreat to his office to compose himself after an abortion. Partly, it was the high-stakes nature of the procedure. But he also needed time to process how the dead fetus looked, how removing it felt. Sometimes he’d sit in his office and think, What am I doing?

He had bad dreams too. In the 1970s, physicians did not induce fetal demise during abortion, and 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.

Is the humanity of the unborn child at 15 weeks really so obvious that even an abortionist like Hern was haunted by the baby’s heartbeat, but the appearance of a baby at 13 weeks so unrecognizable as to be “alienlike”?

Despite its flaws, Godfrey’s profile of Hern is a very valuable piece of journalism for exposing the reality of late-term abortions in America. For years, the abortion lobby, the media, and congressional Democrats have falsely claimed abortions later than 20 weeks of pregnancy only occur when there is a severe, potentially fatal, health condition for the baby or the mother. “The only time you really see [late-term abortion] is when it’s a medical emergency,” Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said last fall.

There was already plenty of evidence that that claim wasn’t true. The authors of a 2013 study on late abortions reported that “data suggest that most” abortions performed between weeks 20 and 28 of pregnancy are not performed for “reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” (“Little is known about the relatively few abortions occurring in the third trimester,” the same authors reported.) There was also the example of Gosnell — who, according to testimony, committed hundreds more infanticides beyond the cases for which he was convicted — as well as undercover recordings of other late-term abortionists. The late Dr. LeRoy Carhart once said he’d perform “purely elective” abortions 28 weeks into pregnancy, and another late-term abortionist named James Pendergraft suggested he’d perform even later abortions under Maryland’s health exception if a mother was experiencing “anxiety and stress.” In one recording, Dr. Hern’s office said he was willing to perform an abortion for a woman claiming to seek an abortion at 32 weeks because she was getting divorced.

But those recordings were often dismissed by the media out of hand because they were obtained by undercover activists. Now we have Hern admitting in an on-the-record interview that the majority of the late abortions he performs are not done for reasons of severe fetal disability or when the mother’s physical life is in danger.

That’s a significant revelation, but I still wish Hern would answer at least a few more questions, including the following:

You’ve aborted a baby girl because of her gender; would you be willing to abort a biracial child because of her race?

In your 50-year career, have you ever accidentally failed to kill a baby in utero and delivered a child alive later than 24 weeks’ gestation? If so, what happened to that infant or those infants?

What’s the moral difference between stabbing a 30-week-old baby in the heart with a poison-filled syringe before birth and Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s “snipping” a 30-week-old baby’s neck moments after birth?

That last question is the most important. It’s one that Nancy Pelosi and the former president of Planned Parenthood could not answer in 2013. Can anyone answer it now?