Dr. LeRoy H. Carhart, the lead plaintiff in Gonzales v. Carhart, has been a surgeon and general medical practitioner for more than 30 years. He obtained his medical degree at Hahnemann Medical College in Pennsylvania, interned at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and completed his surgery residency at Hahnemann and Atlantic City Medical Center in the 1970s. As a medical student and resident during the era before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision Roe v. Wade, he witnessed countless women brought to the hospital near death after receiving illegal abortions.

For the next 20 years, Dr. Carhart served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, providing medical and surgical services to the women and men of the armed services and their dependents. Upon his retirement, he opened his own medical practice in Bellevue, Nebraska. It was soon thereafter that he made the decision to become an abortion provider and his fifteen-year battle against the anti-choice movement began.

In February 1988, Dr. Carhart performed his first abortion since providing services as a medical student. A short three years later, on September 6, 1991, an anti-choice arsonist set fire to and completely destroyed virtually everything his family owned—including their home, horse barn, camper, and two horse trailers. Seventeen horses and their pet cat and dog were also killed in the fire. In 2000, the Nebraska Republican Party and a state anti-choice group pressured the University of Nebraska into firing Dr. Carhart from his position as a volunteer assistant medical professor. He was only reinstated after the Center for Reproductive Rights filed suit in federal court. Later in the year, members of the anti-choice movement, including a state senator, attempted to buy the building that housed Dr. Carhart’s medical clinic with the intention of evicting him. But he fought back, successfully arguing in court that the building should be offered to him before anyone else.

In 2000, Dr. Carhart headed to the Supreme Court, fighting against a Nebraska abortion law similar to the Federal Abortion Ban. In that case Stenberg v. Carhart, the Court declared the state ban unconstitutional, protecting women from losing the right to obtain the best medical care. As a result, numerous federal courts struck down similar state abortion bans—those enacted before and after the decision. Now, six years later, Dr. Carhart is taking the lead again in the legal challenge against the Federal Abortion Ban in Gonzales v. Carhart.