One of the last US clinics for later abortions closes just as it’s needed most: ‘There’s a lack of understanding of what people go through’

Dr Warren Hern in an exam room inside his clinic in Boulder, Colorado, in 2022. He has been performing abortions since the 1970s. Photograph: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

One Tuesday morning in April, Alicia Moreno and the rest of the staff at Boulder abortion clinic learned that the clinic’s owner, Dr Warren Hern, was closing the clinic on Friday. One of the few abortion clinics in the US that performed abortions past the second trimester would, after 50 years, shutter its doors.

They sprang into action. Suddenly, multiple patients who had been scheduled for abortions had to go somewhere else.