This story by Sofia Resnick appeared on Colorado Newsline on June 21, 2023. It’s part of a special States Newsroom series on abortion access one year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion. We are sharing it in three parts.
For the many years that Roe v. Wade protected abortion rights, the vast majority of abortions happened in the earliest stages of embryonic and fetal development. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 93% of abortions took place before 13 weeks, less than 6% performed between 14 and 20 weeks, and less than 1% after 21 weeks’ gestation.
That 1% represents the most expensive, complex, and controversial abortion cases. They are multi-day procedures that involve on-call care and are performed by a vanishingly small number of providers. The physician who pioneered this work, Dr. George Tiller, was villainized by Fox News years before an anti-abortion activist assassinated him in 2009.
At 84, Dr. Warren Hern, a former colleague of Tiller’s, is the oldest doctor doing this work, in Colorado. Another Tiller colleague, Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who provided later abortions in Maryland, died this past April at 81.
Shortly after Dobbs, Hern said his Boulder Abortion Clinic was seeing an uptick of 50% more patients but has been unable to sustain the demand. Hern told States Newsroom that his small clinic sees a weekly average of six to 12 cases from around the country, which is still more than before Dobbs. Whereas before his clinic would coordinate aftercare with patients’ regular doctors, now Hern said he rarely communicates with OB-GYNs in banned states and sends patients with generic letters hoping they will receive necessary aftercare.
“This is a national catastrophe,” Hern said. “The details are in our face every single day, every week. It has unfolding complications and consequences across the country for women, many of whom are not wanting an abortion, but they can’t get medical care for the pregnancy because the doctors are afraid.”
Slowly a younger crop of third-trimester abortion providers is emerging. Morgan Nuzzo, an advanced practice clinician nurse-midwife, started an all-trimester abortion clinic Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland, seven months ago with her partner Dr. Diane Horvath, an OB-GYN who specializes in complex family planning and has provided abortion for almost two decades.
Nuzzo says colleagues refer to this clinic as the “end of the line,” the last place in the country they can go for a safe and legal abortion. They see people on the spectrum of disability, from the very rich to the very poor. The oldest patient Nuzzo has seen is 53; the youngest is 10. Children over-represent Partners in Abortion Care’s patient population, Nuzzo said. As research shows, many people seek abortions into the later stages of pregnancy because they found out new information about the pregnancy (such as a fatal fetal anomaly or a new health risk) or their life circumstances, or because they didn’t know they were pregnant.
What her patients and their parents do share in common these days is confusion and anger, Nuzzo said.
“Even people who are dismayed by grief, by this horrible fetal diagnosis they might have received later in pregnancy, are still angry and frustrated at the chaos that they have to navigate in their times of greatest need,” Nuzzo told States Newsroom. “It is confusing, it is constantly changing, and it is chaotic. And sometimes you start to believe that that’s on purpose.”
Partners in Abortion Care treats an average of 10 to 12 patients weekly, Nuzzo said, prioritizing abortions after 20 weeks, with growing wait lists. They have to turn away at least one patient a week, she said, often because the patient is too far along, or has complicating health factors. Then it’s time to talk to patients about other options: carrying to term, or adoption. Partners requires patients to secure an ultrasound in advance to confirm how far along they are, but she said patients in states with bans are often too scared or unable to obtain an ultrasound outside of religious anti-abortion pregnancy centers, which are typically unregulated and offer non-diagnostic ultrasounds.
“The number of fetal genital pictures that people are given with no accurate dating associated with it has been astronomical since we opened,” Nuzzo said. “So, ‘I’m a girl,’ ‘I’m a boy,’ and a picture of a penis or a vagina. And a lot of times, that’s the only picture they’ll give to a patient. And I’m like, What am I supposed to do with this? This gives me no information.”
In 2015, North Carolina Rep. Tricia Cotham made national headlines when she told her colleagues on the House floor about the painful and heartbreaking “induced miscarriage” she once had for a wanted but doomed and dangerous pregnancy. “This decision was up to me, my husband, my doctor, and my God,” she testified. “It was not up to any of you in this chamber.”
Then a Democrat, Cotham was testifying against a 72-hour abortion waiting period, which opponents argued would exacerbate abortion delays and which ultimately became law. Cotham told Time magazine she’d wanted to quell later-abortion stigma.
But in April, Cotham, who campaigned on abortion rights, switched parties. Soon after, she helped state Republicans override the governor’s veto of a new 12-week abortion ban, which has limited exceptions for fetal anomalies. She also switched her own abortion narrative, now calling it a spontaneous miscarriage, contradicting her own words.
More GOP-led states (and presidential candidates) are leaning away from radioactive total abortion bans, and into these so-called gestational compromises. Like North Carolina, Nebraska recently prohibited abortions after 12 weeks. Florida’s new 6-week ban is on hold while courts litigate the state’s 15-week abortion ban.
A few Democratic-led states, meanwhile, are working on efforts to lift or relax their third-trimester gestational limits, like in Maine and Minnesota. But many others still ban abortion by or before 24 weeks’ gestation, with some exceptions. And many of the state abortion-rights amendment initiatives underway also maintain this Roe-era standard.
Like Cotham, Erika Christensen is a white woman with enough privilege to have accessed a later abortion because of fetal anomalies. Because even in 2016, the abortion-access landscape and policies already made it incredibly difficult to access and, for her, emotionally harrowing. But Christensen’s pregnancy experience took her in a different professional direction than Cotham.
“We were radicalized by the plane,” said Christensen, who was turned away in New York City and flew to Colorado for a multi-day procedure that cost thousands of dollars out of pocket. She and her husband soon after started Patient Forward, a later abortion advocacy group that successfully lobbied New York to relax its abortion law. Christensen said Roe-era gestational limits are too restrictive for this current landscape, and she criticizes Democratic-led initiatives that attempt to compromise on later abortion.
“There used to be a path where you could care for your patients up to a point, and then you sent them out of state,” Christensen said. “And you wouldn’t really have to put yourself out on the limb because there was somebody else who would take care of your patient. That path is gone. It’s dead, and it’s never coming back, not while we have what we have. So when we compromise on this population, we are really condemning them to forced pregnancy and birth.”
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