Colorado clinic touts third-trimester abortions for ‘any reason’

Former staffers at abortionist Warren Hern’s shuttered Boulder Abortion Clinic, which was renowned for performing third-trimester abortions, have launched a new facility that will perform abortions beyond the point of viability, for “any reason.” 

RISE Collective, which stands for “Reproductive Health, Inclusive Care, Support and Empowerment,” released a promotional video earlier this month, announcing that the clinic has started seeing clients and scheduling late-term abortions. 

“At RISE Collective, we believe that any reason you have for needing abortion care is yours, and it is the right one,” the video states. “In Colorado, there are no restrictions on when you can receive care. But while the law is clear, access is not.” 

The promotional video advertises RISE as one of the few abortion facilities in the country that performs abortions throughout “all trimesters,” which the Boulder Abortion Clinic did for over 50 years before closing earlier this year after Hern retired. 

While RISE Collective did not respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment, Kelsey Pritchard, the political communications director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told CP the endeavor is “disappointing.”

“It’s disappointing but not surprising that late-term abortionist Warren Hern’s staff have simply set up shop again, aborting babies as late as 34 weeks — old enough to learn, have preferences and fight for life and survive in the NICU,” Pritchard told CP. 

Pritchard noted that Colorado, along with eight other states and the District of Columbia, have no gestational limits on abortion. RISE Collective is also not the first all-trimester abortion clinic to open in the United States, as similar facilities have opened in Illinois and Maryland in the years following the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling.

“Warren Hern’s position that any abortion, any time, is always justified is the stance of today’s Democratic Party,” Pritchard asserted. “With at least 1.1 million abortions a year in America, this underscores the need for national leadership to protect unborn babies.”

In a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, Hern said that a baby’s viability is determined by whether a woman wants the pregnancy and not by gestational age. The late-term abortionist also admitted that he had performed two sex-selective abortions.

Tessa Cox, senior research associate at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, SBA Pro-Life America’s research arm, cited research by Hern that analyzed 1,040 pregnant women with gestations ranging from 18 to 38 weeks who underwent abortions between 2000 and 2004. The research found that one-fifth of these abortions were performed due to a diagnosed fetal disorder. 

“Late-term abortions performed very late in pregnancy are not quick procedures and often take place over several days. A woman in a pregnancy emergency should be delivered in a hospital with available emergency equipment, rather than an abortion facility,” Cox told CP. 

“Induction or C-section gives the baby a chance — even if slim — to live, while addressing the mother’s health risks,” the pro-life researcher added. “This is far more compassionate than a late-term abortion that gives the unborn child no opportunity to survive.”

Monica Snyder, the executive director of Secular Pro-Life, empathized with pro-choice advocates who are concerned about pregnant women facing a dire medical or social situation. 

“This is an understandable concern,” the pro-life atheist told CP. “We all want to build a society where heartbreaking or dangerous situations are as uncommon as possible.”

“That same thinking should apply to the very American phenomenon of aborting otherwise healthy, viable babies. We are shamefully one of only a handful of countries in the entire world that tolerate this atrocity,” Snyder stated. “Ironically, the concept is so horrifying that most Americans refuse to believe it actually happens.”

Snyder noted that the procedure for a late-term abortion, which many pro-choice activists describe as “inclusive care,” typically involves stopping the unborn child’s heart with an injection. After stopping the heart, the abortionist usually induces a stillbirth delivery and often removes parts of the child’s body limb by limb, torso and head.

“[Pro-choice activists] argue [that] later abortion is very rare, widely citing the (dubious) statistic that abortions after 21 weeks are less than 1% of all abortions,” Snyder stated, citing an October 2024 article on Secular Pro-Life about late-term abortions. “But in the United States, there are over a million abortions every year. What’s 1 percent of a million?”

In its 2021 abortion surveillance report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 1% of abortions in the U.S. are performed after 21 weeks of gestation. 

Snyder’s article highlighted several factors that the CDC’s data might not have accounted for, including the fact that not all states report their abortion data to the CDC.

The pro-life atheist noted that states where abortions are legal after 21 weeks that do report their data to the CDC generally have higher percentages of later abortions. If this is true for states that do report their data to the CDC, then Snyder questioned what the data looks like for states that also allow abortions after 21 weeks but don’t report their data. 

Due to multiple states not reporting their abortion data, the CDC’s 1% late-term abortion statistic excludes about 33% of the U.S. population. 

Snyder also asserted that the 1% statistic doesn’t account for an all-trimester abortion clinic like Partners in Abortion Care in Maryland or the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey, which conducts abortions up to 28 weeks of pregnancy. Maryland and New Jersey are among several states that don’t report their abortion data to the CDC.

“It’s safe to expect that in states which don’t report abortion data to the CDC, the proportion of abortions after 21 weeks is higher than 1 percent (though unclear by how much),” she wrote. “It’s therefore safe to expect that if the CDC had the data on these locations, the national statistics on abortions after 21 weeks would be higher.”