As U.S. abortion bans take midterm centre stage, a clinic helping Canadians faces a crunch

With next week's midterms shaping up to be a referendum on abortion rights, Hern says the outcome will be 'critical' — both for U.S. women, and Canadian women, too.

Dr. Warren Hern has clear memories from the years before Roe v. Wade granted women the right to an abortion.

He and his medical school classmates would stay up all night caring for sick women. At first, he said he didn’t understand why they were so ill. Then he learned the women had all tried to get illegal, unsafe abortions — and many were dying as a result.

“We were trying to help them and keep them alive,” Hern told Global News in an interview.

It was a dark time for women facing unwanted pregnancies.

What struck Hern most was the “desperation.” One woman drove up to a hospital in Denver to plead for an abortion, but was turned away.

“She went home and shot herself in the uterus, and then drove herself to the hospital,” he said.

“That’s how desperate she was.”

Hern, who has spent decades providing what he describes as “late” abortions at his Boulder-based clinic, said he never thought he’d see Roe v. Wade overturned. But in June of this year, when the U.S. Supreme Court did exactly that, he said it was a “catastrophe for women across the country.”