page_title: Abortion in South Dakota
section_title: Clinic history
hierarchical_section_title: Abortion in South Dakota / History / Clinic history
caption_attribution_description: English: Number of abortion clinics in South Dakota by year. Data is from articles linked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LauraHale/Template:Abortion_by_US_state
context_page_description: Abortion in South Dakota is legal. 48% of adults said in a poll by the Pew Research Center that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
  There were 878 legal abortions in 2000, 895 in 2001, 819 in 2003, 551 in 2014, and 444 in 2015.
context_section_description: In 1981, Dr. Buck Williams started offering abortion services at his Sioux Falls clinic.  At the time, he was the only abortion service provider in the state.  In 1989, he approached Planned Parenthood about taking over his clinic.  At the time, Planned Parenthood had no operations in South Dakota.  They agreed, and have been the state's only abortion service provider ever since.  Planned Parenthood moved out of their old building, and the building was taken over by AlphaCenter and run by Leslee Unruh. Unruh is very anti-abortion.  Some women would mistakenly go there after the move, thinking it was the Planned Parenthood facility. Another clinic opened in the stated by 1982 but was closed by 1992. In the period between 1992 and 1996, the state saw no change in the total number of abortion clinics. While only three states saw gains in this period, this state was one of four to see no changes with 1 abortion clinic in the state in 1996.
  In 2014, there was 1 abortion clinics in the state. In 2014, 98% of the counties in the state did not have an abortion clinic That year, 77% of women in the state aged 15 – 44 lived in a county without an abortion clinic. In 2016, only a small section of the state required women to drive fewer than 40 miles to access an abortion clinic.  In 2017, there was 1 Planned Parenthood clinics in a state with a population of 181,145 women aged 15 – 49 of which 1 offered abortion services.  The Planned Parenthood facility was the only one providing abortion services in the state.  Unable to find local doctors to run the clinic, they hired four doctors who flew in from out of state to work on rotation.  This makes the clinic very expensive to run. In May 2019, the state was one of six states in the nation with only one abortion clinic.
caption: Number of abortion clinics in South Dakota by year.
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