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."
