Step through the looking glass.
Legislation was passed in 2005 establishing a task force that would study abortion. The motive for establishing the task force – to gather information that would be used to fuel further anti-choice legislation – was clear, but at the time there was still some hope that the truth would win out. Instead, the task force turned out to be a set up from the very beginning. The make-up of the task force was to be decided by the Speaker of the House, the President Pro-Tempore of the Senate, and the Governor, all stridently anti-choice. And while the bill required some diversity in the party affiliation of its members, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that there would be a task force without any pro-choice representation at all.
As it turned out, there was actually minimal effort made to make the task force seem legitimate. Of the seventeen members, six (Planned Parenthood State Director Kate Looby, Sen. Stan Adelstein, Sen. Theresa Two Bulls, Dr. Maria Bell, councilor Linda Holcomb, and USD law professor David Day) were pro-choice and the chair, Dr. Marty Allison, was fairly moderate. However, the rest of the roster looked like a Who’s Who of Anti-Choice Loons: Sen. Julie Bartling, who would go on to introduce the abortion ban during the next session; Travis Benson, lobbyist for the Catholic Diocese of South Dakota; Sen. Jay Duenwald and Rep. Roger Hunt, two men who had campaigned against abortion since before Roe v. Wade (and perhaps before South Dakota became a state); Rep. Brock Greenfield, president of South Dakota Right to Life; crisis pregnancy center champion Rep. Elizabeth Kraus; Rep. Kathy Miles, who famously said that bearing a rapist’s child could be healing for the victim; family practitioners Dr. John Stransky and Dr. David Wachs; and, finally, the wackiest of the wackjobs, 'Dr.' Allen Unruh. Allen is a chiropractor, not an MD, but he must have felt that using the title gave him an air of authority he was desperately lacking. Allen is married to the notorious Leslee Unruh, a long-time anti-choice personality and founder of the Abstinence Clearinghouse and a local crisis pregnancy center. Not satisfied toiling away in obscurity, Allen styled himself as an anti-choice demagogue, a favorite pundit of local right-wing talk radio and frequent keynote speaker wherever nuts gathered to mix and plot.
The circus that was the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion would almost have to have been experienced to be believed. To attend the meetings of the task force was like stepping through the looking glass. Landing in Oz. Being locked in the zoo. Choose your own metaphor here, but be assured, it was absurd and insane in a way that few of us who attended had experienced before or since. Unsubstantiated written testimony from all over the country was allowed to be entered as evidence. Out-of-state 'experts' whose testimony consisted of anecdotal stories were allowed to testify before South Dakota constituents who had traveled for hours to appear before the task force. “It's interesting to me how the rules keep changing. And that's made it very, very difficult. They keep changing and there's no consistency,” complained task force member Linda Holcomb. "I hope someone from the media is here to hear that we voted that South Dakota residents do not take precedence."
One woman considered an 'expert' by the task force claimed she had blocked out the name of the doctor who had performed her abortion until appearing before the task force dislodged this buried memory. Carol Whalon, a white woman from the Pine Ridge Indian reservation (again, an 'expert'), assured the task force that, "Lakota people are strongly pro-life." Other Lakota people in the room were surprised to hear this. She also shared a story about a medicine woman who gave an abortifacient herb to women in a village and eventually went crazy from the voices of the spirits of the children she had helped kill. Dr. Donald Oliver of Rapid City suggested that, “just as two bad genes might pair up and lead to an unfortunate outcome, two good genes can pair up and the infant of this incestual relationship may be the brightest person in the family, sometimes in the genius range of intellect.”
Kate Looby was incredulous. "I wonder if you could clarify, a little bit, your testimony regarding incest. I'm assuming that you're not in any way advocating incest as it could possibly lead to some sort of brilliance."
"Of course not," Dr. Oliver answered. "The point primarily of my testimony is to say that even in incest, the overwhelming majority of these infants, in the nineties – perhaps high nineties – are perfectly normal children. Some of them turn out to be geniuses."
Person after person got up to testify, some tearfully telling how abortion had screwed up their lives, others begging the members of the task force to understand that women needed safe, legal options to end an unintended pregnancy. Those serving on this 'fact finding' body, as Roger Hunt often called it, acted as was to be expected, being kind to those who said things they agreed with and being rude to those who didn't (going so far as to interrupt a rape victim multiple times during her testimony). And in the end, it was only the testimony of the parade of dishonest, inaccurate, and sometimes mentally ill anti-choice witnesses that would eventually inform the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion’s final report to the governor and the legislature.
BONUS: Enjoy some of my favorite Allen Unruh quotes from the Task Force.
"[S]ometimes I think with the attitude that if just everybody had enough latex from the cradle to the grave, womb to the tomb, and everybody in America had all access to free latex and free abortion it would be a step in the right direction, we'd be a perfect world. ... I mean, that would be a step in the right direction from the attitude that I'm kind of hearing."
"In South Dakota, we value a hen pheasant. It's like a $200 fine if you kill a hen pheasant, but no fine if you kill an unborn child."
