Woman Who Flies to South Dakota to Do Abortions Unapologetic, Won’t Quit 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 4, 2006
Sioux Falls, SD (LifeNews.com) — As the state of South Dakota prepares for a battle over a new law banning virtually all abortions, CNN conducted an interview with a woman who flies in from Minnesota to do abortions at the state’s only abortion business, in Sioux Falls.
No one in South Dakota will do abortions so Planned Parenthood is forced to bring abortion practitioners in from out of state.
Miriam McCreary, a 70 year-old retired abortion practitioner is one of four the abortion business brings in every Saturday to perform more than a dozen abortions each week.
"There is quite a need for somebody to come out here. We used to have a gentleman that worked in our clinic from Sioux Falls. And since he retired then there’s never been anybody else from Sioux Falls who was willing to work at our clinic," she told CNN.
McCreary takes the 45 minute flight from Minneapolis, where she lives, and a 15 minute drive from the Sioux Falls airport to the abortion center.
When she arrives, women are waiting for the abortion, having already been prescreened by Planned Parenthood staff and completed and signed the forms required under current state pro-life laws before an abortion can be done.
McCreary claims she talks some women out of having an abortion who she thinks are not ready for it. She alleged she has told some to consider adoption rather than coming back for an abortion.
CNN talked with some of the women having abortions on the day they interviewed McCreary.
Some 16 women were there that day and the ranged in age from 18 to 34. Ten women have children already and one of them has five. Five of the sixteen said this was not their first abortion and one woman was having her fourth abortion that day.
Six of the women said they were having the abortion because they could not afford to have a baby at the time. That’s the most common reason women typically give for having abortions, according to research from the Planned Parenthood-affiliated Alan Guttmacher Institute.
Asked whether she has any doubts about the abortions she continues to do, despite having five grandchildren, McCreary doesn’t miss a beat.
"The only doubts I have are that I want the patient to be really sure that she wants this," she responded. "These women need somebody to provide this. If they don’t have it, they’ll go some place else and they may not have a safe abortion. And I want that to not happen."
Told by CNN that the state of South Dakota considered McCreary guilty of murder under its new abortion ban, she says that without her some children would be born into families who didn’t want the child.
"I don’t want children to be born into families where they are not wanted and where they can’t be cared for properly," McCreary responded, citing a standard pro-abortion argument.
Ultimate, the abortion practitioner told CNN she feels good about doing abortions because, "I helped them out of a predicament that they were not happy to be in. If I wasn’t here to do it maybe no one else would do it."
McCreary has been traveling from Minnesota to Sioux Falls for seven years to do abortions. She’s ready to retire for good, but continues because no one is willing to take her place.
Asked if she’ll come back again in a few weeks to do more abortions: "Oh yes."
