A recent feature at the anti-Life website Jezebel told the tragic story of a woman, “Elizabeth,” who chose to undergo an abortion just eight weeks shy of her due date because she was led to believe that doing so would be merciful to her child, who was diagnosed in utero with a host of developmental anomalies and given a bleak prognosis for life outside the womb.
There are only four abortionists in the United States who will commit the gruesome abortion procedure so late in pregnancy. They are Shelly Sella and Susan Robinson in New Mexico, LeRoy Carhart in Nebraska and Maryland, and Warren Hern in Colorado.
Elizabeth traveled to Boulder, Colorado, to late-term abortionist Warren Hern. Her account provides a rare glimpse into the dilapidated world of the late-term abortion industry. Elizabeth discusses the Hern’s abortion facility:
Inside, it feels very much like the ‘70s. There’s wood paneling, wicker furniture, a super-old sonogram machine. They don’t have a lot. The clinic is clean, but it’s old. They try to stretch the money as much as they can. I made friends with a nurse who was from Brooklyn, and she told me that the reason that the procedure is so expensive is because, first, their insurance is so crazy high, and second, the whole staff—the nurses, the front desk—is paid really well because they’re risking their lives to be there.
Just how expensive? A late-term abortion costs $25,000 cash. Elizabeth planned to undergo the injection which would kill her baby in Boulder, but then return to New York to deliver the dead child. She still had to pay $10,000 cash. Whether or not Hern is turning a profit from committing $25,000 abortions, we know that profit is historically motivating to abortionists – and that’s an understatement. Sarah Terzo of ClinicQuotes.com has compiled statements by abortionists who, over the decades, have revealed the influence of profit on their businesses.
A former abortion worker described working in a similar financial environment to the one Elizabeth described. “Every single transaction that we did was cash money,” she said. “We wouldn’t take a check, or even a credit card. If you didn’t have the money, forget it.” [emphasis added] Likewise, former abortionist Robert Siudmack said in a video series about abortion:
I worked at the [Planned Parenthood] Margaret Sanger Center in downtown Manhattan for about a year before moving to South Florida, and it was all about the money, and how many abortions we could do in a short period of time. There was a set price, and obviously the more abortions one did, the more money they would make…. Abortion is big business.
Siudmack’s mention of “how many abortions” the mill could commit aligns with more recent evidence that Planned Parenthood imposes “abortion quotas” on affiliates, and awards abortion mills which meet or exceed these budgetary quotas. Abortion is not about altruism or guaranteeing a so-called “right” to abortion. Abortion marketing is a thin veil behind which the industry attempts to hide a voracious appetite for profit: no matter what.
