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.
