Kate Looby was the director of Planned Parenthood in South Dakota from 2003 to the end of 2008. During that time, voters twice rejected near total abortion bans during elections in 2006 and 2008.
South Dakota voters are once again voting on abortion access, this time in the form of a Constitutional Amendment.
SDPB's Lee Strubinger speaks with Looby about those campaigns and abortion advocacy in a notoriously anti-abortion state legislature. The text of the interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like working for Planned Parenthood in that capacity and in South Dakota at that time?
For me, it was an opportunity to be a voice for the women and families of South Dakota who need access to affordable women's healthcare, as well as safe and legal abortion care. South Dakota is a conservative place, and many people are uncomfortable being outspoken about abortion rights.
It certainly was true when I was working at Planned Parenthood and before that. I just really believe that we needed to be willing to give voice on behalf of the people who didn't feel free to say they were pro-choice in South Dakota. Somebody needed to stand up because there was a silent majority in South Dakota, and nobody was really willing or able to give voice to that side of the of the argument.
When I was working as a lobbyist in Pierre for Planned Parenthood people would come up to me all the time and say, ‘Thank you for what you're doing.’ I'd be at restaurants or grocery stores, or rest stops around the state and people would just walk up to me, strangers to me, but they had seen me on the news or on television and say, ‘Thank you.’
There was a flip side to that.
A lot of people that didn't like what I was doing and some of those people are not very nice. My children were young at the time, and they were feeling the heat at school. So, it was a tough six years.
What drove you to that work? I know. You talked about giving voice to to focus in South Dakota who maybe didn't feel comfortable was. There were there other things that drove you to that line of work as well?
I was back in South Dakota for opening pheasant weekend recently and a relative of mine was recalling a story of being at our house when I was in high school. I was apparently writing a research paper on abortion for a class. At that time, I also was writing letters to the editor of my school newspaper about abortion rights. For some reason, this has always been a real area of passion for me.
What role did your father, who was an OBGYN, play in your decision to go into this work?
My dad probably delivered, certainly hundreds, if not thousands of babies in South Dakota during the 40 years that he practiced medicine in Sioux Falls. He did not provide elective abortions, but he definitely took care of his patients when they had pregnancies that went awry, as we all know, some do.
All my life he was such an advocate for women and still is. He's he just believes so strongly that women can make decisions on their own. So, I really grew up in a house where the idea that the government would somehow make women’s healthcare decisions, rather than the woman and her doctor and family, that's just seems so crazy to us.
He knew that I was doing this really important work for women, and he believed so strongly and what I was doing and that's it was really important to me to have that support from him. Now, I have a daughter who is a midwife, a nurse midwife, and is delivering babies and carrying on that tradition of caring for women.
Can we shift a little bit to the ‘06 and ‘08 elections and the campaigns around this issue? What did you learn about the state during those elections?
I learned that the voters are very pragmatic, and they definitely have a libertarian streak. They don't want the government telling them what to do.
It really made a lot of sense to us that the voters in South Dakota would vote to keep abortion access and that women—in consultation with their family and doctors—would be able to make those decisions
Our message back in ‘06 and ‘08 was let families decide. They do not want the government entering that part of their life.
The thing that was really strange to me was after we won so decidedly in 2006, by almost 12 points, the legislators went back and would continue to put in anti-choice legislation. They didn't get the message from their constituents that this was an issue that they wanted to keep private.
In South Dakota you can be two things at one time. You can be opposed to abortion and want women and families to make those decisions themselves.
So now, here we are with a ban on the books that was far more extreme than what the voters actually rejected back in 06 and 08.
The ‘05 trigger law, how much was that like talked about? How much were people aware of that, trigger law being passed by state lawmakers?
I don't think the trigger law was really recognized at the time because we had Roe. People really weren't as concerned about it as they should have been.
The ban that you have now in South Dakota is far more extreme than what was rejected in 2008. That had a rape and incest exception. The current ban doesn't have anything like that.
When it came to the organizing around those '06 and '08 ballot questions, how much work went into rejecting those proposals? How hard fought were those campaigns and what did that infrastructure look like?
They were very hard-fought campaigns because, for us, there was a lot at stake. There was a lot of money going into both sides of the argument, but we felt like we had a really good chance of winning at the Supreme Court, even if RL 6 passed in South Dakota.
Based on our polling at the time it was close, but we had a lot of confidence that we would win.
If you were in South Dakota at the time, you'd go into a town and the whole town would be blanketed with yard signs. It would be all the banning abortions side. Then, you'd look at the vote totals after the election and that town would have gone overwhelmingly in favor of abortion access.
People just have a lot of fear in South Dakota. Whether it's from their pastor or their community leaders, they feel a lot of pressure to publicly have one position that is anti-abortion, yet in the privacy of the voting booth you just don't see that.
Those were really hard-fought battles. We had well-designed and well-staffed campaigns both of those years, but so did the other side. There was no shortage of money and volunteers. People coming in from rural areas to help and people from Sioux Falls going out around the state. You go, wherever you could to help and lend a hand to get the message out. There was a lot of door knocking and yard sign putting up—and all the things that you do with the regular campaign,
What did the rejection of those bans tell you?
People in a smaller, more insular state don't want to put their neck out on a really controversial issue like abortion.
They're worried about what their co-workers will think. Their worried about what the people sitting next to them in the pews will think—their friends, their neighbors.
I live in California. We have 39 million people here. I don't really worry about losing my job or my husband, losing his job if somebody finds out that we're pro-choice. That is not part of the culture here, but it could be in South Dakota.
Going back to your earlier question about why I thought it was important to take the job at Planned Parenthood, it really comes down to I wanted people to feel comfortable and see somebody as a leader in the state who was willing to say, ‘Women need access to safe and affordable health care.’
Abortion is healthcare for women and it needs to stay legal
