Jill recently posted a link to an Esquire article about Dr. Warren Hern, a late-term abortion provider. Something the article got wrong (and there have been several criticisms leveled at it) was the idea that Dr. Hern is “the last abortion doctor” — meaning, the last late-term abortion provider in the United States.
That is demonstrably false. Though the number of such providers is dangerously small, Dr. Hern is thankfully not alone in the medical care that he provides. One doctor who does similar work to Dr. Hern is Dr. LeRoy Carhart. You may recognize Dr. Carhart’s name from several places — like the Supreme Court decision Gonzales v. Carhart, in which Dr. Carhart challenged the “partial-birth abortion” ban, and sadly lost. Or, more recently, from his plans to return late abortion care to Kansas, after the murder of his good friend Dr. Tiller.
Newsweek recently profiled Dr. Carhart, writing about his beliefs, his job, and his daily struggles to simply do it in the face of those who would rather have him dead. It’s imperfect, as every mainstream article I’ve ever read about abortion is, but it’s a strong and valuable effort.
Leroy Carhart was at his abortion clinic near Omaha when he got the phone call. It was Sunday morning, a little after 10, and the doctor was in surgery. He felt his cell phone vibrate. Carhart ignored it, finishing the abortion before checking his phone. The number for George Tiller’s head nurse in Wichita, Kans., flashed on the screen. The timing was unusual; Carhart didn’t often hear from Tiller on Sunday mornings. He thought it might have to do with a patient, maybe an emergency. But when Carhart called back, Tiller’s nurse was crying. “George is dead,” she told him through sobs, relaying the news that Tiller, the late-term-abortion provider, had been fatally shot at his Lutheran church.
Carhart was scheduled to work in Tiller’s clinic the next day; he was one of three abortion doctors who took turns assisting there. His car was already packed for the five-hour drive from Omaha to Wichita he’d made every third Sunday for the past five years. Carhart decided he would still go, to see Tiller’s family and help figure out what would happen to the clinic. But first he would see the patients at hand. His waiting room, after all, was full of women who’d crossed state lines and waited hours to see him. “I didn’t have any time to sit here and feel sorry for myself,” says Carhart. He hung up the phone, went back into the operating room, performed another abortion. By day’s end, he had seen a dozen women.
Carhart knows there are people who want him dead, too. A few days after Tiller’s murder, Carhart’s daughter received a late-night phone call saying her parents too had been killed. His clinic got suspicious letters, one with white powder. It’s been like this since Carhart started performing abortions in the late 1980s. On the same day Nebraska passed a parental-notification law in 1991, his farm burned down, killing 17 horses, a cat, and a dog (the local fire department was unable to determine the fire’s cause). The next day his clinic received a letter justifying the murder of abortion providers. His -clinic’s sidewalks have been smeared with manure. Protesters sometimes stalk him in airports. The threats, the violence, now the assassination of his close friend—all of it has left Carhart undaunted, and the billboard-size sign over his parking garage still reads, in foot-high block letters, ABORTION & CONTRACEPTION CLINIC OF NEBRASKA. “They’re at war with us,” says Carhart of the anti–abortion activist who killed Tiller. “We have to realize this isn’t a difference of opinions. We need to fight back.”
It’s about time that the general public is getting a better idea of what these brave health care providers face every day. Finish reading here.
via Jen