Photos: Providing abortions at South Dakota’s only clinic

Holding paperwork and a bag of medication, Carol Ball enters a room to provide a patient with an abortion at the Sioux Falls Planned Parenthood clinic.

Carol Ball fills out paperwork at the Sioux Falls clinic. Ball flies in from St. Paul, Minn., several times a month to provide abortions to women in South Dakota, which has only one such clinic and no local doctors willing to staff it.

An examination room at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls, S.D.

At the end of the day, after providing 17 women with abortions, Carol Ball is picked up by security and taken back to the airport to fly home to Minnesota.   (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times)

A security camera is aimed at the grounds outside the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Grant Geister, with rosary, Father Joe Vogel, Rita Siebert and Mike McConnell pray in front of the Sioux Falls clinic. They said members of the St. Katharine Drexel Parish pray each Friday for the “conversion of staff and patients to respect life from natural conception to natural death.”

The sun begins to set on Phillips Avenue in downtown Sioux Falls, which has the only clinic in South Dakota that offers abortions.   (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times)