The Windowless World Of An Abortionist
I’ve been thinking long and hard this morning on whether or not I would blog the following story, as it is one that can seriously inflame passions on the abortion subject. In the end, I felt that it was worth it. Broken windows into abortion doctor’s life
At the Boulder Abortion Clinic, Dr. Warren Hern leaves no window uncovered.
Full-length blinds shroud the bulletproof entryway; in his office, vinyl shades block a small window.
This is one of the facts of Hern’s life — no windows, ever. That was how Dr. Barnett Slepian’s killer shot him in upstate New York, through a kitchen window. Slepian, like Hern, performed abortions.
“I can’t sit in front of an open window. The shades have to be drawn,” Hern said.
After Slepian’s shooting in 1998, Hern predicted another would follow. “Will I get to live out my life?” he asked in a newspaper column in 2001. “. . . Who’s next?”
Interesting that Dr. Hern should ask that. It is rather ironic, is it not, since his business revolves around death. Now, I’ve said before that I usually do not get involved in the abortion debate, except with late term abortions and parental notification. I find abortions horrible, but, do not take the position that there should be none ever. There are times when they are necessary medically. But, it does say something about what Dr. Hern has chosen his life’s business to be when he has to live a windowless life, be surrounded by body guards, and constantly worry and fear for his life like a mafia don, does it not?
Hern has been familiar with the hazards for decades. After performing abortions for more than half of his life, the 70-year-old doctor has never been injured, but the constant threats with which he has lived since 1973 have transformed his life into a series of security measures: sleeping with a rifle, scanning rooftops for snipers, wearing a protective vest.
“It ruins your life,” Hern said.
At least some have a life to be ruined. And then there is that whole “personal responsibility” issue, which Hern should man up to, since this is the life he chose.
As he studied medicine, Hern said he encountered women ill from botched illegal abortions. In the early 1970s, Hern — who had planned to become an epidemiologist — became convinced that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to legalize abortion would mean nothing if doctors would not perform them.
“I felt doing abortions was the most important thing I could do with my life,” he said.
Scary thought.
Even early on in his practice, Hern did not shy away from confrontation. When people protested outside his office, he stood in the parking lot and wrote down their license plates. When they shouted during his speeches, he shouted louder. When a protester hurled a rock through a clinic window, Hern hung up a sign: “This window was broken by those who hate freedom.”
Violence against these doctors is not the answer. We are a Nation of Law, not a Nation of Men. But, I wonder about this “freedom” he speaks of? Is it the freedom to have casual, unprotected sex with people you do not want to have children with, as Ann Coulter puts it in Godless?
Interestingly, the LA Times forgot one thing: Dr. Hern is one of the few abortion doctors that will perform late term abortions, except in slight passing, late in the story.
In time, he began to focus on more difficult abortions performed in the later weeks of pregnancy — typically, he said, because of medical complications or fetuses with abnormalities. Such abortions now make up the bulk of his practice.
I think it is rather important information to be aware of, eh? This is the same Dr. Hern that said in a 1996 interview on 60 minutes that “there’s no such thing” as partial birth abortion, and that no doctor he knew would perform it.
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove
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Posted by William Teach on June 5, 2009 8:54 am
» Filed Under Abortion, Anti-Americanism, Hypocrisy/Situational Ethics, Infanticide, Medical Malpractice/ethics, Moral Relativism, News
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One Response to “The Windowless World Of An Abortionist”
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I thought it all boiled down to “choice”?
He CHOOSES to perform a procedure – no one forces him to do it. He needs to own his choices and the consequences that go with them.
PS: They get around partial birth abortion, saying it does not exist because the actual medical term for the procedure, “intact dilation and extraction,” lends nothing to the actual nature of the procedure, which DOES actually have an indication for being used, as when a late-term fetus dies in utero and must be removed.