10/26/09
THE BEGINNING OF ME ACTUALLY PUTTING MY OWN WORDS INTO THIS BLOG
Elated and relieved, yet sad and deflated
1-30-10
In a world according to Leslee, no one would have sex before marriage, masturbation would be discouraged, and every woman and girl would carry her pregnancy to term, no matter what.
Update: MORE's profile of abstinence-only education and anti-abortion activist Leslee Unruh has won a 2009 Maggie Award for Excellence in Media from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The Most Influential Woman
I first learned of Leslee Unruh two years ago, when I went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to write an article about the state's one remaining abortion clinic. For me, it was not just another story. In 1998 my beloved uncle, Bart Slepian, an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions, was murdered by an antiabortion activist who shot him through a window in his upstate New York home. My sorrow knocked my political convictions out cold. I didn't give a damn about choice anymore; I was just desperate for everyone to stop raging about it. And inside Sioux Falls's nearly windowless (for obvious safety reasons) Planned Parenthood clinic, I blurted out a question that was really not journalistically appropriate but one that pressed hard on my heart.
"Can't you find some middle ground? Some way to stop the fighting?"
Kate Looby, the clinic director, sighed. She had tried, she said, to work with the other side. Teen pregnancy prevention programs. Contraception initiatives. "But with Leslee, it's always no, no, no."
She was talking about Leslee Unruh, 54, executive director of the Vote Yes for Life campaign, which led the fight to ban abortion in South Dakota, and president of Abstinence Clearinghouse, a Sioux Falls-based nonprofit with 4,000 affiliates in 50 states and 105 countries. Looby's boss, Sarah Stoesz, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, explained that the politicians I planned to meet with merely wrote and passed laws; it was Unruh who drummed up the popular support and often turned that legislation into political manna. She was the mother of the strategy to depict women who have had abortions as living victims of the procedure, midwife of the push to force public schools to swap biology-based sex-ed for chastity lectures, and nurturer of the program that replaced condoms with "Just don't do it!" campaigns in HIV-ravaged regions of Africa.
The most influential woman I'd never heard of, Unruh was largely credited with the passage of the nation's most restrictive antiabortion law, the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act, in March 2006. When it was overturned by South Dakota's voters in a referendum eight months later, Unruh was undaunted. "We'll never, never, never give up," she told supporters. And she hasn't: An amended version of the bill -- one with exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health -- will be on the state's ballot in November. Both sides see it as a direct, and potentially successful, challenge to Roe v. Wade.
"Regardless of how they present it, the reality is that this will be the most sweeping ban in the nation, leaving the majority of women in South Dakota without access to safe, legal abortion," Stoesz says. "It was designed as a vehicle to go straight to the Supreme Court."
But this legislation isn't the only weapon in Unruh's antichoice arsenal. An "informed consent" law she championed in 2005 requires South Dakota doctors to tell patients that abortion can cause numerous problems, including depression and sterility. Initially found to be unconstitutional, this law has also resurfaced. In June the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court's ruling that blocked enforcement of the law; the case is now back in district court for further wrangling. On another front, Unruh's pro-abstinence activism has helped reap a record $200 million in federal funding; this fall, that money will be spent teaching public school students that all sex outside of marriage is likely to have harmful consequences -- a view that Unruh herself routinely promulgates.
A Secret Hope
Her sweeping rhetoric not only roils her opponents on the left, it also frustrates many on the right. Some conservative groups object to her "abortion hurts women" sloganeering (they prefer to keep the emphasis on the fetus); others worry that her over-the-top pronouncements will tarnish the abstinence brand. But there can be no denying that in the high places where laws are written, Leslee Unruh's passionate message about sex and its consequences has been coming through loud and clear.
I had to interview Unruh to report my story on the state's only abortion clinic. But driving through the sleepy, slightly weedy residential Sioux Falls neighborhood where her headquarters is located, I held a secret hope. Like Unruh, the sniper who killed my uncle was obsessed with abortion and sexual purity. But he was crazy and violent. So I thought that by talking to a sane person who shared the killer's values -- who felt they were worth fighting for politically -- maybe I could finally see my uncle's death as something other than a giant, gaping hole in the middle of my family.
On display in the immaculate reception area of the converted ranch house were DVDs, books, and pamphlets about various abstinence-until-marriage programs; tiaras (apparently accessories for the "purity balls" at which fathers vow to help protect their daughters' virginity); and a three-foot statue of a knight in shining armor. The receptionist seemed nervous to have a reporter on the premises. The moment I announced my name, a blond woman with a razor-edged bob and siren-red lipstick strode out with a battle-ready swagger that reminded me of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, or Helen Mirren playing Queen Elizabeth I. She stuck out a French-manicured hand and said, "Leslee Unruh."
Her office was low-lit and as orderly as the reception area. On the wall were a framed letter from George W. Bush, a photo of Unruh with Laura Bush, and an ode to an aborted fetus. We sat. We smiled. We exchanged pleasantries about her staff's diligence in dusting. Then I asked why she refused to work with Planned Parenthood on teen pregnancy prevention programs or contraceptive initiatives. Leslee Unruh, the media's go-to resource on abstinence, whose views have been solicited by MTV, CNN, ABC, NPR, and more than 100 newspapers and magazines, answered that Planned Parenthood wants to sexualize children and that taking oral contraceptives is like ingesting pesticides. She went on to tell me that masturbation is dangerous, that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, and that young girls should pledge to give themselves as a "wedding gift" to their husbands.
We were interrupted by the assistant warily reminding Unruh about another meeting. I had to go.
"What is your secretary so afraid of?" I asked.
"You," Unruh replied. "My staff didn't want me to do this interview. They think you'll do a hit piece. But I think if you're not feeling persecuted, you're not doing enough."
"Like Jesus?" I murmured.
Unruh's smile disappeared. "The last article said I looked squishy." She bit the side of her mouth, which is something I do to stave off tears. I felt a jolt of sympathy, seeing how vulnerable she was to a journalist's slight.
"I get Botox," I said, offering her an example of my own imperfections. As I lifted my hair to display where my glabellar wrinkles should have been, Unruh stepped nearer. At that moment, our closeness was thrilling and scary.
Leslee's Defining Experience
Back at home, I began conducting imaginary conversations with Leslee Unruh, as I have done for years with my mother. I'd make elegant points; she'd see the light. But, as with my mom, in the real world, victory was difficult to come by. It's not just that Unruh and I disagree about what's right and wrong; we disagree about what's true and false.
One year later, in August 2007, I returned to South Dakota, this time to interview Unruh for MORE. It had taken me several e-mails and phone conversations to overcome her resistance. During one call, Unruh said she had read in a magazine article that my uncle was a slain abortion provider. I braced myself for the response that usually elicits from antichoice advocates -- some version (or combination) of "Well, then, you can't possibly be objective," "He deserved it" or "You need to pray for his soul." But Unruh simply said, softly, "I'm sorry. It must be so painful for your family." And finally, she and her staff agreed to have me back.
Unruh's HQ hadn't changed much, but the receptionist was now pregnant, and impending motherhood had evidently turned her nervousness into ferocity. When I pick up a brochure, she barks at me to put it down; she's not sure I am authorized to see it. So I stand, hands folded, beside the knight in shining armor until Unruh beckons me to go outside with her.
We reach the yard through a back door in her office. "I use it to avoid people I don't want to talk to -- like you!" she says with a laugh.
The gazebo, fountain, potted plants, and little stone statues are pretty in the late-summer sun, but the place seems uncharacteristically messy and cluttered compared with the rest of Unruh's operation. Then I notice the teddy bears. In the grass. In the trees. Some deep in the vegetation, as if they were extremely shy.
"Women leave things here every day," Unruh says. "Dads too." She calls it her Memorial Garden for the Unborn. She has created this haven, she says, because too many of her colleagues in the antiabortion movement treat women who've terminated their pregnancies with scorn rather than compassion. "I believe in a loving God, and he's not sending women to hell because they've had an abortion," she says.
While demonstrating in favor of the informed-consent law outside a courthouse with a group of these postabortive women, as she calls them, Unruh says, she got into an ugly confrontation with some men carrying "horrible signs" with pictures of fetuses. "I asked them to put their signs down," she says. "I was worried about the women. But they followed us down the street to our hotel, chanting."
"We know what we did," she adds. "We're not idiots."
"We"? Yes, Leslee Unruh, mother of five, has had an abortion. It was the defining experience of her life.
Buying into Lies
"I meant to grow up to be just like you: a typical liberal feminist," says the Sioux Falls native as she prunes plants and straightens stuffed bears. "Everyone in my family was a Democrat. I grew up in the time of Gloria Steinem, and it was exciting and inspiring." The 1972 Lincoln Senior High School yearbook reveals a boho-looking Leslee Bonrud lying in a circle with other arty types, the staff of a literary magazine called ut, an acronym for Unabashed Thoughts. After her parents' divorce (Unruh says her father, a plasterer, once had a drinking problem), her mother worked as a housekeeper, and Unruh says she told her mother to "get out of the kitchen, start a business," so she could "get out from under the thumb of a man."
After graduating from Lincoln, Unruh tells me, she trained racehorses in Florida for about two years, then became a Shaklee vitamin salesperson back home. It was while selling Shaklee at a state fair in 1976, she says, that she met her future husband, chiropractor Allen Unruh.
"He was practically a John Bircher," Unruh says, groaning. "But he was so cute!" As for his right-wing politics, "I thought I would straighten him out," Unruh says. One might assume it was Allen who pushed her politics to the right, but Unruh insists she reacted to the behavior of her feminist friends, who'd begun "acting like men." Also, Unruh confides, she's the kind of woman who "needs eyeliner," and late-1970s feminism in South Dakota was "awfully hippieish." Still, she says, she continued "buying feminism's lies" -- particularly the one about abortion being an important right for women. Unruh says that when she became pregnant with a fourth child, her obstetrician, Buck Williams, MD, recommended she abort.
Unruh recalls him telling her that the pregnancy might aggravate her Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a condition which can cause rapid heart rhythm, fainting and, occasionally, cardiac arrest. She also felt that "the doctor thought he was doing me a favor," since another baby might be overwhelming -- an idea Unruh now considers absurd. "I don't remember feeling stressed out," she says. "I nursed my babies. I had my garden. I had natural foods."
And yet "in 1978 or 1979," she had the procedure. "I guess I wanted to believe there was something wrong," she concedes. But she is convinced she would never have aborted if the doctor had not (according to Unruh) lied about the facts of the process. "He called it a premenstrual extraction," she continues. "A D&C. There was deception." Williams, now retired and living in Arizona, won't comment except to say, "Well, she would say that. I hear she's a big antiabortion activist now."
Unruh says she immediately regretted ending the pregnancy (she would later have two more children). She says Allen's anger about the abortion -- which she told him about soon afterward -- is not what inspired that regret. Remarkably, she also insists she had no idea at the time that Allen Unruh had been giving antiabortion speeches throughout South Dakota, sometimes with John Wilke, MD, founder of the National Right to Life Committee and the International Right to Life Federation.
Saving and Empowering Women
"He did it behind my back because it was such a volatile issue," Unruh says. "When I found out, I was furious."
When I ask how the abortion affected her marriage, all she will say is "It was the most painful time." But every couple that survives a serious strain comes up with a restoration narrative, and the Unruhs' is captured on a mini DVD produced for Leslee's Vote Yes for Life campaign. On camera, Allen Unruh says, "God was calling her to use the worst thing that ever happened in her life for good. God can take you from where you were and use you."
Where she was, exactly, can be maddeningly difficult to pin down. A 2003 Washington Post article reported that Leslee and Allen married in 1972. "Five kids, two of my sons are doctors," she told the paper. "Abstinence works, people. My daughter saved her first kiss for her wedding day. I'm here to tell ya." But according to Clark County, Nevada, marriage records, her name was Leslee Joy Kutzler (not Bonrud) when she married Allen Dale Unruh in a Las Vegas elopement. The recorded date of that marriage is November 17, 1978 -- five years after Nathan, her oldest, was born. Daughter Nakia and son Chace were born in 1974 and 1976, respectively. When I later contacted Unruh to clarify what seemed to be discrepancies in her marriage, motherhood, and abortion history, her assistant responded via e-mail: "I talked to [Leslee] on the phone and your facts are wrong." After repeated attempts to speak directly with Unruh, I finally got a callback. Yes, she said, she had been married before Allen, to a man named Larry Kutzler. He was the father of her first three children. And she said she was pregnant with Kutzler's baby, not Unruh's, when she had the abortion. She said she was not yet married to Unruh at the time of the termination. She refused to elaborate further, except to say that she has not discussed her first husband publicly because, "I had given him my word I would not ever name him." Kutzler, 57, a pastor in Minneapolis, is founder and executive director of CitySites Media, a ministry that uses media to spread the Gospel. In a brief phone conversation he declined to comment about his ex-wife. According to South Dakota Department of Health records, the couple was married on February 10, 1973 -- six months before Nathan's birth -- and they filed for divorce on September 15, 1977.
Whatever the circumstances of her life before she married Allen, Unruh's abortion propelled her into a career of increasingly effective and controversial advocacy. Although at first she confined her activities to protesting in front of abortion clinics, in 1984 she opened the Alpha Center for Women, the kind of "crisis pregnancy center" that advertises in the yellow pages under "abortion" but actually is devoted to persuading women not to have the procedure. In 1986, Unruh opened the Omega Maternity Home, a place where unwed mothers could live rent-free. But the following year, the Alpha Center was charged with 24 counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practice, and false advertising. According to the indictment, several young women stated that they had been offered money to carry their pregnancies to term and then give their babies up for adoption. On the center's behalf, Unruh entered a plea of no contest to five counts (the rest of the charges were dismissed) and paid a $500 fine. Unruh continued to run the Alpha Center (which is still in operation; the Omega Home closed in 1997). But after working with hundreds of women who got pregnant unintentionally, she says she began to realize that this kind of counseling put the cart before the horse in women's lives. To truly empower women, she became convinced, you have to "save them from sexual activity."
Getting the Money
Unruh began speaking to teens at churches and school groups about the importance of purity; she also lobbied state legislators to replace sex ed with abstinence ed. Even at that early stage, she was not the only person to link chastity to abortion prevention or to be horrified by what she felt was pornographic material in her child's grade-school science textbook. The 1990s in the United States were for sex what the late Middle Ages in Europe was for Christianity: a time when politics, economics, and epidemiology (the plague in the 14th century; HIV/AIDS in the 20th) created fertile ground for a few determined visionaries to transform the status quo.
One of the most prominent in the nineties was Robert Rector, a young analyst at the Heritage Foundation, the preeminent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. At about the same time that Unruh turned to abstinence activism, he began drafting legislation that would require all federally funded sex-education programs to teach that any sex outside marriage was likely to be harmful. Around the country, activist preachers and parents were mounting purity campaigns of their own. Unruh began reaching out to these fellow chastity advocates, who agreed, as she would later testify to the House Ways and Means Committee, that such an important effort was "too great" for anyone to undertake alone. For that reason, she told the committee, "I accepted leadership of the project, and the Abstinence Clearinghouse officially became operational in 1997."
Her timing could not have been better. After years of watching hundreds of millions of government dollars flow to such ideological rivals as Planned Parenthood, abstinence advocates could finally drink deep from the federal-funding trough themselves. In 1996, Rector's abstinence-education program was inserted into the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (aka the Welfare Reform Act); Republicans argued that reducing teen pregnancy would help fight poverty, and President Clinton signed the bill into law. Fifty million dollars a year for five years was earmarked for education programs that would, as the act specified, teach "the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity," and that "all sex outside marriage is likely to have harmful physical and psychological consequences." In 2000, Congress authorized another multimillion-dollar abstinence-education initiative, Community-Based Abstinence Education grants. "I'm pretty certain President Clinton did not understand what would happen [when he signed abstinence-only education into law]," Unruh crowed to a reporter in 2002. In fact, funding has more than quadrupled in the United States.; all told, more than $1 billion in federal money has been spent on domestic abstinence education in the past 12 years. This windfall is exclusively for school programs that teach only about abstinence.
By 2005, government contributions and contracts accounted for 71 percent -- about $1 million -- of Abstinence Clearinghouse's annual revenue. That same year, government grants accounted for 41 percent ($241,839) of the revenue at Unruh's crisis pregnancy center. Today, Abstinence Clearinghouse affiliates -- among them hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers -- pay Unruh and her staff to show them how to secure federal grants and then how to negotiate the government's review process. And today, says the women's rights advocacy group Legal Momentum, about 12 percent of all abstinence education funds go to crisis pregnancy centers or groups closely affiliated with them.
Explaining Abstinence
This infusion of cash has enabled Unruh to do for the purity pledge, the purity ring, and the purity ball what Bill Gates did for early versions of computer software: She repackaged confusing, competing programs and made them compatible and user-friendly. Her kits come in secular and religious versions, and she provides ready-to-use PowerPoint presentations such as "The Great Deception" (sexual freedom's true price) and "Why Buy the Cow?" (the pitfalls of cohabitation).
People just need to know, she tells me, closing her eyes, lifting her face to the Plains sun. "A condom won't protect them from disease. And it can't emotionally protect them, either."
Unruh invites me to lunch at Minervas, a 30-year-old bistro in downtown Sioux Falls. Arriving with her is like walking in with a rock star. As I do for celebrity interviews, I ask the maitre d' for an isolated booth in the back. Everybody stares, but few dare to approach. I'm hoping to discuss Unruh's plans for dealing with the Democrat-controlled Congress and, possibly, a Democrat in the White House in 2009. But right after our soup arrives, Unruh spots two out-of-towners -- she can tell because one of the men has a ponytail -- carrying a large camera. She calls her office to warn them that stalkers are on the prowl.
"I have a gun," Unruh confides. "I'm very good with it. I used to be very afraid of weapons. But I got it after the [abortion ban] campaign. I had to have bodyguards. The Hells Angels. They used to be Hells Angels. Now they've become Bikers for Jesus."
I try to turn our conversation back to funding and politics. But Unruh feels that what I really need to understand is the culture we share.
"I took my granddaughter shopping, and 10-year-olds had push-up bras on!" she says.
"Ten-year-olds?" I say skeptically.
"With all the pedophiles out there."
"What pedophiles?"
Unruh's eyes go as round as our soup crackers. I swear our stalkers are craning to eavesdrop.
"I gave my son a page out of Wilt Chamberlain's biography," Unruh continues. "He said he had sex with thousands of women. But the thing he regretted most in life was that he had never had one intimate relationship.
"But most people don't have thousands of lovers!" I say. (On average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American men have sex with seven women during their lifetimes; American women have sex with four men.)
"I just want my kids to have intimacy," Unruh says.
"Me too!"
"I have this lady, a quadriplegic, who comes to speak at our conferences," Unruh barrels on. "She says, 'I've never had physical sex. I can only feel in my face.' But she's married. And she says, 'I feel sorry for the people who are just into sex. Because my husband and I have intimacy. Because my husband loves me with his eyes.'"
"Funding," I try again, lamely.
Unruh stabs a piece of salmon and shrugs. "We started under Bill," she says. "We can finish under Hillary."
Sex Ed and Politics
Presumably she's as nonchalant about Obama. And she may need that confidence, given the reviews that are coming in on the success of abstinence programs. In 2007, a congressionally ordered 10-year study of four popular abstinence-education curricula found they had no effect on the age when young people started having sex. Seventeen states have decided to reject abstinence-only education grants. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives voted to eviscerate the abstinence-education requirements of President Bush's African HIV/AIDS-prevention program.
But these setbacks may not affect the funding Unruh is after. In the Capitol, the dollars for domestic abstinence education are virtually always included in huge, multifaceted, multibillion-dollar pieces of legislation, like the Welfare Reform Act and the Omnibus Appropriations Act. As a result, members of Congress are rarely forced to vote yes or no on individual programs. The presidential candidates, however, have chosen their sides. Senator Obama has put himself firmly in the so-called abstinence-plus camp by sponsoring legislation such as the Communities of Color Teen Pregnancy Prevention Act, which "encourage[s] young people to postpone sexual activity [and] provide[s]...medically accurate [contraceptive] information, for [those] who are already sexually active or are at risk of becoming sexually active." Senator McCain, on the other hand, supports abstinence-only education, and has spoken at pro-purity events while campaigning for president. But Unruh's agenda does not rely on elections going her way. It's cash she's after, and she feels certain she can get it, whoever occupies the White House. "If we can't get abstinence money, we'll apply for education grants or antidrug funds," she says. "I know how Washington works now."
Unruh has spent more than a decade acquiring her D.C. expertise. She is a familiar face to her contacts. But there are signs that newer, more dulcet tones are being sought to espouse the abstinence brand on the talking-head circuit.
"Leslee no longer seems to be the face and voice they use for their movement," says Martha Kempner, vice president of communications for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, a national advocacy group that was founded 44 years ago to "promote sexuality education for people of all ages." Increasingly, when Kempner and her staff are invited to debate sex education on TV and radio shows, they find themselves facing not Unruh but Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, which began operating in 2006. One of the specific goals listed on its Web site is to "rebrand the abstinence message to provide positive representation in the public square."
They may be referring to Unruh's tendency toward hyperbole. For example, in a May 2007 appearance on Fox News to discuss a birth control pill that suppresses menstruation, she told host Neil Cavuto, "This is a real war on women and war on children. We do not need big pharma, National Abortion Rights Action League, who have had a war on children and on babies, to now come in with another drug and to play God!...wanting us, women, who are feminine and have fertility and it's something to celebrate, wanting us to be like men -- c'mon!"
"All Effective Leaders Get Criticized"
Calls to Huber's office to ask whether "rebranding" was code for distancing themselves from Unruh's outbursts were not returned. The National Right to Life leadership also declined to discuss Unruh for this article, as did several other antichoice organizations.
But in South Dakota the conservative political establishment still appreciates Leslee Unruh. "No one understands better how these issues really impact women," says state representative Roger Hunt, who introduced the abortion ban in 2006 and again this year, and who has worked with Unruh on antichoice issues for two decades. "No one explains it better. And no one is more committed." And if there are some on the right who disapprove of her tactics, well, "all effective leaders get criticized," Hunt says.
Unruh admits she has felt "beat up" by such critiques. But she dismisses Huber's upstart organization as a bit player in her field.
Alone in my hotel room, I explain to Unruh, in a new imaginary conversation, that I understand what she is reacting to. I have a daughter in the second grade, and I do not want her to grow up thinking it is appropriate to flash a Brazilian-bikini-waxed vulva to the world. But in my view, I tell her, the overheated realm of Britney Spears and her ilk is simply the polar opposite of Unruh's chilly, abstemious clime. Both are extreme, and I want my daughter to live in a place that is habitable. Temperate.
Later that summer day, I have a chance to make that case to the real Unruh, sitting next to me on the screened-in patio of her manor-sized home as we enjoy peaches drenched in cream and honey.
"I feel like you're taking this one thing -- sex -- and blowing it out of proportion," I venture. "I resent your going into my public school and telling my 8-year-old daughter that 'all sex outside marriage is likely to have harmful physical and psychological consequences.' Who are you to tell my daughter that? I don't think so. I don't think premarital sex wrecks your life."
"The number-one thing," Unruh says, "is if a child is sexually molested, first you have to have compassion."
"I'm not talking about being molested," I answer. "I'm talking about doing it because she wants to. With someone she knows and likes and trusts."
"I'm on the other side," she says. "I resent that if my child goes to a public school, my child gets all these birth control options and feels like a geek if she's not having sex. You shouldn't feel like you have to have sex outside marriage...
"All we want to do is raise the bar for kids who have not been getting this choice. They are not getting it from their parents" -- and here, she narrows her perfectly made-up eyes at me. "[If] they didn't have the bar that high in their own personal lives, I don't get into that. But I'm like, 'Let your kid dream.'"
"Ninety-five percent of Americans have had premarital sex," I say.
"Where do you get that number?"
"The Guttmacher Institute."
"A plant for Planned Parenthood!"
And around and around we go.
Understanding Her Side
"There's gonna come a time down the road," she cautions, " -- and I'm not talking subject to reporter, but mama to mama -- when you're gonna be hoping the guy your daughter is with hasn't been involved in some weird pornography. That he does not hurt your daughter..."
On my last day in Sioux Falls, Unruh invites me to see her new, 40-foot bus. She intends it to be the first vehicle in a "Fleet for Little Feet": mobile crisis pregnancy centers that will find what Unruh calls abortion-minded women in malls, on college campuses throughout the rural badlands, or, as on the morning I visit the motor coach, at the state fair.
Inside, Unruh and a volunteer -- one of her post-abortive women -- give me a tour: the potty where women pee on their pregnancy-test sticks, an ultrasound that tells them the gestational age of their fetuses, an overhead compartment chock-full of baby clothes and -- like party favors -- dozens of two-inch plastic fetal dolls wearing red or blue diapers nestled in a wicker basket next to a sink.
I imagine myself walking into this claustrophobic space, afraid I might be pregnant. I think of the often complicated life of my mother, who gave birth to me (prematurely, she says) seven months after a wedding that took place on a Wednesday afternoon in between my parents' college classes. In place of the messiness of real women's lives, Unruh offers tidiness. Money, ambition, love, lust, loneliness -- forget 'em. Climb the bus stairs and you learn the secret: Life will be so much easier if you just follow the rules. Swear off premarital sex, but if you do stumble, have the kid.
Heaven and my political brethren forgive me, but I can imagine the profound relief her clients must feel at being told what to do. Despite the deep divisions between Unruh and me, I have found her oddly seductive; how can I be surprised if women in trouble do, too? I find myself wishing someone on the right would replace her, someone less able to touch all the conflicted feelings of the women she is trying to reach and the legislators she is seeking to persuade. I also wish that, for me, she could have been a better interpreter of her side of America's culture wars, so I could better understand why my Uncle Bart is dead. But now that I see how Unruh has edited her own past, I am more confused than ever. And I'm convinced that if Unruh would tell her very human story, plainly and completely, she would be more, not less, inspiring. She'd be real.
But at the state fair that last day in South Dakota, I don't know all of her story yet.
Unruh says, apologetically, that in her haste, she has forgotten to bring me a parting gift.
"Please," I joke. "Don't give me a present until you see what I write!"
She laughs. We "good-bye" and "thank you" and "oh goodness, those peaches" each other. Then Unruh -- perhaps reflexive in her good manners -- reaches into the wicker basket and offers me a plastic fetal doll, one in red swaddling clothes. I tuck it into my pocket and kiss her good-bye.
Originally published in MORE magazine, September 2008.
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