Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / May 2006

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Who Is Leslee Unruh?

by Myra Batchelder
05.11.06

Leslee Unruh, a key lobbyist for the sweeping abortion ban passed in
South Dakota this year, has in recent months become one of the most
visible anti-choice hardliners in the country. As a fervent opponent of
reproductive rights and medically accurate sex education, her name has
long been familiar to many in the pro-choice community.

Unruh's History with Abortion
For Unruh and her anti-choice allies, the ban in South Dakota is only
the beginning.
Unruh had an abortion when she was in her early 20s, an experience she
has said left her with feelings of extreme guilt. Several years later,
she began "counseling" other women who'd had abortions or were
considering the procedure. In 1984, she established the Alpha Center,
which tried to dissuade women from getting abortions. Unruh and her
husband also established the Omega Maternity Home in 1986, a home for
pregnant girls in Sioux Falls, SD, that closed in 1994.

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.

Myra Batchelder is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, NY.