Who Is Leslee Unruh?

Unruh's History with Abortion

In 1987, Unruh was investigated by authorities after complaints surfaced that she had offered money to young women to carry their pregnancies to term and put their babies up for adoption. Tim Wilka, the Minnehaha County state's attorney at the time, told the local Sioux Falls, SD, newspaper the Argus Leader in 2003, "There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made [against Unruh] and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children... Gov. George Mickelson called me and asked me to take the case."

The Alpha Center pleaded "no contest" to five misdemeanor charges of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices, and was fined $500 as part of a plea bargain in which 19 charges, including four felonies, were dropped.

In 2000, the Alpha Center moved into an office that had formerly belonged to a local Planned Parenthood clinic. Today, in addition to "counseling" pregnant women against abortion, the center provides ultrasound exams and abstinence-only education, and sponsors events such as "Memorials for the Unborn." The center also provides so-called "abortion recovery counseling," despite the fact that research studies indicate that emotional responses to legally induced abortion are largely positive, and that emotional problems resulting from abortion are rare and less frequent than those following childbirth.

The information the center provides is often medically inaccurate, and its website includes misleading information about abortion and emergency contraception (EC). For instance, the website claims EC can cause infertility, despite the fact that no medical evidence supports this.

Friends in High Places

Unruh is a powerful member of the anti-choice community in South Dakota. The Alpha Center's fundraising events have featured prominent conservative speakers, such as Ryan Dobson, son of Focus on the Family Director James Dobson, Tim Goeglein, special assistant to President George W. Bush, and Janet Folger, president and founder of Faith2Action, an organization committed to combating abortion, homosexuality, and pornography. She has been a member of Right to Life for more than 25 years, and her husband, Dr. Allen Unruh, a local chiropractor, helped start Right to Life chapters throughout South Dakota.

Unruh's Abstinence Clearinghouse

Banning abortions is not Unruh's only mission; she is also a prominent spokesperson for the closely related abstinence-only movement, which promotes education programs that stress abstinence as the only way to prevent unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. She founded the Abstinence Clearinghouse in 1997 and still serves as its president.

The stated mission of the Abstinence Clearinghouse is "to promote the appreciation for and practice of sexual abstinence (purity) until marriage through the distribution of age appropriate, factual and medically-referenced materials." The organization opposes reproductive rights, and its medical advisory council is made up of more than 60 health professionals who do not promote or prescribe contraception to unmarried teens. The clearinghouse maintains close ties to the Alpha Center; the two organizations not only share a president and a number of board members, but filed their 2004 taxes under the same address.

The Abstinence Clearinghouse maintains a strict definition of abstinence, defining sex as "intercourse, oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation and any genital contact or other contact that is sexually arousing." Its online store sells various abstinence-only propaganda, such as "Pet your dog, not your date" T-shirts and "What Would Jesus Do" purity rings. The group believes masturbation is dangerous, and Unruh has described masturbation as "the first step to sexual addiction." Unruh has even bragged that her daughter saved her first kiss for marriage.

President Bush has praised the Abstinence Clearinghouse repeatedly — on one occasion, in a prerecorded video that was shown at its annual conference — and Unruh has had several personal conversations with the president. Both the Abstinence Clearinghouse and Alpha Center have received thousands of dollars in federal funding since Bush took office.

The irony behind anti-choice forces like Unruh and the clearinghouse is that while they campaign to stop abortion, they also campaign against comprehensive sex education programs, which offer information on both abstinence and birth control — programs that would prevent unintended pregnancies and reduce the need for abortion.

Unruh and the South Dakota Abortion Ban

For some time, Unruh has been plotting an abortion ban in South Dakota as a means to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide. In a July 2005 article in the Argus Leader, she shared her thoughts on the retirement of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "This is huge, a great opportunity. We have been working every Thursday for six months on a plan when Rehnquist retired. Now, we will initiate it for O'Connor's replacement and will work very hard, turn up the heat and the machine. ... we will be the first state to ban abortion."

In 2005, Allen Unruh served on a highly controversial state task force established to look at the issue of abortion. The few pro-choice representatives on the task force said their opinions and much of the research presented were excluded from the final report, which erroneously states that science defines life as beginning at conception, and ultimately recommends a law banning all abortions.

State Rep. Roger Hunt's (R) bill — the unenforceable sweeping abortion ban in South Dakota that was recently signed into law — cited the report as a scientific rationale for the prohibition of abortion in the state.

Unruh has remained one of the abortion ban's most visible and vocal supporters since its passing. "We've been very successful to chip away at the laws of Roe v. Wade in South Dakota, and we think the rest of the country should really be following us, and following the heartland," she said in a February 2006 appearance on NPR's Morning Edition.

For Unruh and her anti-choice allies, the ban in South Dakota is only the beginning. In a recent interview on PBS' NOW, she said, "We're winning. I don't plan on looking back... I'm gonna help the other states also get there."

But for pro-choice advocates in South Dakota and throughout the country, the abortion ban has only marked the beginning of the end of Unruh's victories. On March 24, the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, a bipartisan coalition of organizations dedicated to fighting the abortion ban, announced the launch of a major grassroots mobilization to refer the state abortion ban to the November ballot, which will allow the people of South Dakota to vote to repeal it.