DENVER — The Boulder Abortion Clinic, one of the relatively few options for third-trimester pregnancy terminations and a frequent target of anti-abortion demonstrators, has closed after 50 years.

Dr. Warren Hern, the clinic’s outspoken director, said Wednesday that he’d run the practice for 50 years as of January, and saw his final patient last week. The clinic’s website has been replaced by a message that it would no longer accept patients, though a staff member still answered the phone as of mid-week.

“I’ve done my best to do this well,” Hern said in an interview. “It’s time.”

Most states have a limit on how far into pregnancy doctors can perform an abortion. Colorado is one of nine states without a limit, according to the Guttmacher Institute. A ballot initiative to add a 22-week limit in 2020 failed, with 59% of voters rejecting it.

Third-trimester abortions account for a small percentage of all terminations. Of the 14,691 abortions in Colorado in 2023, the most recent year with data, 73% happened at eight weeks or earlier. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reported 137 abortions, or just under 1% of the total, at 28 weeks or later.

Most early abortions involve pills to block hormones that support a developing pregnancy and to force the uterus to expel the embryo. Later abortions can involve suction or scooping out tissue from the uterus.

Hern said his procedure, if he determined it was safer for the woman to end the pregnancy than to continue carrying it, was to stop the fetus’s heart with an injection. The woman would then deliver the fetus, as if she’d had a stillbirth.

Some patients traveled to see Hern from as far as the East Coast, Australia and Europe after discovering severe birth defects late in their pregnancies. Women at average risk generally receive an ultrasound to check for anomalies 20 weeks into a roughly 40-week pregnancy.

As one of the relatively few places that perform third-trimester abortions, the clinic became a regular target for mostly peaceful, but sometimes violent, opposition to abortion. It had bullet-resistant windows since 1988, after a gunman fired five shots into the clinic. Hern said he and multiple staff members narrowly escaped death.

The Boulder Abortion Clinic saw about 45,000 patients over 50 years, mostly women who lacked other options, many of whom couldn’t afford the relatively expensive procedure, Hern said.

While Boulder is generally supportive of abortion rights, the national political climate, the financial realities of running a practice and the frequent death threats providers receive make it unlikely that someone else will start a similar clinic, he said.

“No reasonable person would do what I’ve done, and most people are reasonable,” he said. “But I’m proud of what I’ve done.”

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