during a 2018 trip to North Korea.

When Hern announced the clinic’s closure in late April, the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America declared the news as a “VICTORY” in a social media post.Hern said the work was always worth it. He recalled one of his first patients who couldn’t believe cleanliness of his operating room; she previously had an illegal abortion that left her humiliated and frightened.

“She looked up at me and said ‘Please, don’t ever stop doing this,’” Hern said. “So I didn’t. Until now.”In the end, financial issues made it almost impossible to operate the clinic. Hern said patients increasingly were having trouble paying for the procedure, which hovers around $10,000 and is often not covered by insurance. Longtime personal donors were also dwindling.Hern worked with physicians over the decades, hopeful that one day they would take over his clinic, but that never worked out.

“I had to make a decision really, you know, sort of on the basis of the situation at the moment that we couldn’t continue,” he said. “It was very, very painful. I see this as my personal failure.”According to the Later Abortion Initiative by Ibis Reproductive Health, fewer than 20 clinics provide abortions after 24 weeks into pregnancy in the U.S. — though that number isn’t considered comprehensive and excludes hospitals and a handful of other clinics for security reasons.

Currently, the group lists three clinics — in New Mexico, Maryland and Washington, D.C. — that provide services after 28 weeks. Five others — in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Washington state — will consider patients depending on physician recommendations or fetal and maternal conditions.

“I think Dr. Hern has been the torchbearer for abortion leaders in pregnancy,” said Jane Armstrong, a licensed therapist in Texas who now helps“Personally, I don’t go on them,” Al Yurman, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, said of helicopter tours. “I feel like the industry doesn’t look after itself the way it should.”

Tourist flights seemed like they might be in jeopardy after a disaster in 2009, when a Liberty Helicopters sightseeing flight carrying Italian visitors collided with a private plane over the Hudson River, killing nine.Flowers rest at the end of a pier, Friday, April 11, 2025, near the site where a sightseeing helicopter crashed a day earlier into the Hudson River in Jersey City, N.J. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Flowers rest at the end of a pier, Friday, April 11, 2025, near the site where a sightseeing helicopter crashed a day earlier into the Hudson River in Jersey City, N.J. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)After that crash, which involved missed radio communications, a distracted air traffic controller and two pilots who didn’t see each other until it was too late, the Federal Aviation Administration created new safety rules for the congested airspace over the city’s rivers.