Who gets abortions in South Dakota? A quick profile

By Mary Garrigan, Journal staff | Wednesday, October 22, 2008

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The majority of the 748 women who had abortions in South Dakota in 2006 fit better into Jackie Senn’s demographic than Tiffany Campbell’s.

Campbell of Sioux Falls has become the face of the anti-Measure 11 campaign. Campbell’s 2006 termination of one of her twins to save the life of the other was performed in Ohio, not South Dakota, so she was not included in 2006 vital statistic records of the South Dakota Department of Health, the most recent available.

But most abortions in South Dakota are performed on women who are single, low-income and 20-something.

* At 32 years old, Campbell is older than most of those women, 60 percent of whom were in their 20s at the time of their abortions.

* Married to an accountant, she is more financially secure. Eighty-five percent of the women who got an abortion in 2006 were single, and 81 percent of them were low-income, earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold. That’s defined as $20,800 per year for a single person or $35,200 for a family of 3.

* Having earned a college degree, she also is better educated. Slightly fewer than 23 percent of women who got an abortion here in 2006 had a college degree or some other form of post-high school diploma.

But Campbell was typical, how-ever, in two ways:

* Like 55 percent of the women who sought an abortion in South Dakota in 2006, she was already a mother of at least one child.

* She is white. Caucasian women accounted for 84 percent of abortions. Native American women made up 7 percent of women who got abortions in 2006 and all other races accounted for nearly 9 percent.

Senn, 26, presents a more representative profile of most women who choose abortion in South Dakota, except that she didn’t.

She is single and earns about $21,000 a year as a stocker for Pepsi. She graduated from high school but never went to college. And Senn considers herself an anti-abortion activist who plans to vote against Measure 11 because: “I believe it shouldn’t be anyone else’s decision what a woman does with her body. If that’s a decision they can live with, it shouldn’t be mine to make for them.”

But as the mother of a 3-month-old daughter, MacKenzie — conceived when her birth control failed — abortion wasn’t the choice she made, despite the fact that “we weren’t ready,” Senn said.

Senn and MacKenzie’s father face financial struggles as new parents with few resources.

There are “definitely situations in which I could see the need for myself” to choose abortion, including rape or severe fetal defect, she said.

“But we took everything into consideration. How our families would feel. How we’d feel living with that decision. And then we made our decision,” she said.

See related stories:

Are the abortion ban’s exceptions enough?

Who gets abortions in South Dakota? A quick profile

Campbell: Reluctant face of Vote No ads

Billboard helped Rieman choose not to abort baby

Initiated Measure 11 Ballot Question