She helped kill Roe v Wade - now she wants to end abortion in America

Kristan Hawkins says she will abolish abortion in the US

When Kristan Hawkins was 23, she started sleeping in her office.

It was years before her organisation, Students for Life of America (SFLA), would become one of the largest, most influential anti-abortion groups in the country. And it was more than a decade before she would stand outside the US Supreme Court to announce to her triumphant supporters that the nationwide right to abortion had been undone.

But back then, in 2008, the SFLA headquarters were in Arlington, Virginia, and the closest town where Hawkins and her husband could afford to buy a house was 90 minutes away.

At first, she tried the commute, leaving home at 5am and returning at 8pm. But the drives became too much, fuel too expensive.

So she bought a cheap loveseat from Ikea, figuring she could put in 30 hours of work over two days before driving home for a night. She used a nearby Gold's Gym for showers, the new couch for naps. When Hawkins found the office was also inhabited by cockroaches, she bought an eye mask and started sleeping with the lights on to keep them away.

"It was terrible, terrible," her husband Jonathan said of that period, which was just two years into their marriage.

But Kristan Hawkins was relentless. And she had a job to do, she was going to see the end of Roe v Wade, overturning the national right to abortion that had been protected for nearly half a century.

Last June, she was successful. Pro-choice advocates say that her activism since then has already helped cut off abortion access for around 20 million women, and pushed the country into a public health crisis.

But Hawkins has a new, more ambitious goal: she wants to make abortion unthinkable and unavailable across the US.

In the year after Roe was overturned, Hawkins has gone into overdrive, growing the size and reach of SFLA and using that power to push state legislatures to pass increasingly severe bans.

"That's the momentum thing, right? Like, ok, all of America is watching, push the gas pedal down on everything, right now," she said. "More, more, more, more, more."

Hawkins, now 38, is bolder and more unyielding than her predecessors, reflective of a new generation of activists moving towards their ultimate goal: a federal abortion ban, beginning at conception.

"She's representative of the rightward shift in the movement… and how far the movement can go," said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a leading expert on the US abortion debate. "Kristan is really important to understanding what comes next."

Hawkins' plans are at odds with public opinion - a majority of Americans support access to legal abortion - and even some Republicans say she is going too far, too fast.

But Roe's reversal, too, was once considered a longshot. And now, one year after its demise, Hawkins believes she will lead the anti-abortion movement to another improbable win.

Students for Life activists celebrate the end of Roe v Wade. "We launched SFLA to be this post-Roe generation," Hawkins said

Most anti-abortion advocates have an origin story, a moment they say set them on a mission.

Kristan Hawkins' moment came when she was 15. At home in West Virginia, she started volunteering at a crisis pregnancy centre, the type of facility that dissuades women from having abortions by providing anti-abortion counselling, ultrasounds and material supplies like diapers and wipes.

Before she was allowed to start work, Hawkins had to learn what abortion was, to understand what it looked like. Someone at the clinic gave her a VHS tape of the Silent Scream, a controversial 1984 anti-abortion propaganda film that purported to show a foetus on ultrasound experiencing distress during an abortion at 12 weeks. The film, denounced as a fraud by abortion rights activists, runs counter to findings from leading scientists who say a foetus does not have the capacity to feel pain until at least 24 weeks gestation.

But Hawkins was horrified. She was also incredulous. In her view, she had just encountered the greatest human rights atrocity of our time: the routine killing of "preborn babies" - the term she uses to describe foetuses. So why wasn't everyone trying to stop it?

"I remember that first day at the pregnancy centre, walking out and saying 'Oh my God, how is life going on as normal when this is happening?'" she said during an interview in May. "That changed everything."

After a summer at the clinic, Hawkins started a community anti-abortion group called Teens for Life. She joined the local Right to Life chapter, she joined the local Republican chapter. "I was the youngest one there by like four decades," she said.

By 2006, after college graduation and short stints at the Republican National Committee and the Department of Health and Human Services, Hawkins was recruited to run Students for Life, then a fledgling organisation with groups on 180 campuses. She was 21.

Seventeen years later, Hawkins remains obsessive, prone to sending colleagues texts and emails at all hours. Her daily schedule, typed into her iPhone, is a nightmare, more than two dozen meetings and commitments blocked off in overlapping intervals. Her days are, occasionally, interrupted by calls from a health coach. "They're trying to get me to drink water," she said. "I always joke that Students for Life is built on Diet Mountain Dew."

She and Jonathan live in a motorhome with their four children so the entire family can join her on her frequent SFLA excursions. Jonathan, a former teacher, provides homeschooling.

"I just go with the flow, that's all you can do," Jonathan said during a family outing at the Pittsburgh Zoo last month.

"I think you're sick of the word abortion," Kristan said to him later that day. "When I say it sometimes, I swear I can see you twitch."

Watching her with followers and donors, Hawkins is sarcastic and often turns to humour, a sometimes unexpected habit from a woman pushing to outlaw abortion entirely. She also swears a lot and fidgets when she talks. She doesn't have friends, she said, "in the traditional sense".

"Like, I don't have girlfriends I go for brunch with… what would I talk about besides ending abortion?"

Hawkins' mission, born that day at the pregnancy centre, has proven to be all consuming, something she is well aware of. She has tried to teach her team the principle of DBW - Don't Be Weird - which is code for: don't freak people out.

"You have to know when to display your passion," she said. "If you carry around a pocketbook of graphic images of children who've been aborted and whip that out at the dinner table, some people are going to be pretty mad at you."

SFLA now has 1,400 campus groups in all 50 states

On a swampy June day in Washington, between clusters of teenagers on school trips and tour groups in matching t-shirts, six Students for Life members made their way to Capitol Hill, ready to lobby.

They all wore red, half in SFLA branded clothing - "The Pro-Life Generation VOTES" emblazoned on their chests like a cheery warning. One wore a pair of dangly earrings, tiny gold feet meant to match the size of a foetus's foot at 12 weeks. "It's a picture into their humanity," she said.

Groups like this can be found at state legislatures and on college campuses across the US on any given week. Under Hawkins, SFLA has grown into more than 1,400 campus groups in 50 states, overseen by 80 paid staff. Since 2006, more than 160,000 anti-abortion activists have completed SFLA training. Experts say Hawkins' particular power lies in her ability to get people to turn out - SFLA activists are now staples at anti-abortion demonstrations across the country.

"We launched SFLA to be this post-Roe generation," she said. "We were going to have that trained army."

And after Roe's reversal last year, that army has mobilised, helping to steer dozens of anti-abortion bills through state legislatures. So far, 13 Republican-controlled states have outlawed abortion. Bans in at least six other states are in limbo pending legal challenges.

Nearly one-third of American women of reproductive age now live in states where abortion is unavailable or severely restricted, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group. Over the past year, stories have emerged about the apparent consequences of these bans - a 10-year-old rape victim denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio, 13 women in Texas who say they were denied abortions despite life-threatening pregnancy complications - further galvanising support for abortion access.

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"What SFLA and other anti-abortion groups promote is the worst, most damaging, most criminalising policy," said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice-president at NARAL Pro-Choice America. "She [Kristan] is the embodiment of the extremeness of the movement."

"You're making it unsafe to be pregnant in the United States," she said.

But where the anti-abortion movement goes now that Roe has been overturned is a matter of debate.

Hawkins and most other leaders still share a unifying philosophy: a foetus is a rights-holding person. They share an objective too: a federal abortion ban. But there is disagreement on what that ban would look like and how, exactly, to get there.

"The movement is really fragmented," said University of California's Mary Ziegler. "There is no consensus."

Hawkins reflects the rightward shift of the anti-abortion movement

SFLA has pushed what they call an "early abortion model", drafting and championing legislation that bans abortion at conception or, at the latest, after early cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks of pregnancy.

Hawkins' organisation, in other words, has abandoned the incrementalism that shaped earlier iterations of the anti-abortion movement, a strategy still favoured by some of SFLA's peers.

Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA) is one such group. A powerful and long-established presence in the anti-abortion lobby, SBA's leader Marjorie Dannenfelser has said she will oppose any presidential candidate who does not embrace a 15-week national ban, a benchmark supported by 44% of Americans, according to a recent poll.

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That isn't good enough for Hawkins. Candidates must pledge support for a federal ban at six weeks if they want SFLA's support.

It's a tension Hawkins acknowledges. "Marjorie is the insider…and I'm the person who comes in and is like, '[Screw] it, we're just doing what we know is right'," Hawkins said, using an expletive. "We're not fighting."

Hawkins is also more outspoken, more outwardly conservative, on other abortion-related issues. She opposes exceptions for rape and incest. And she opposes several forms of birth control, including oral contraceptives, a position another anti-abortion leader privately called "unhelpful".

"What has changed is they are willing to say the quiet part out loud," said Elisabeth Smith, state policy director at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-choice group. "They are willing to be publicly extreme."

Pro-choice groups say Hawkins' work has helped push the US into a public health crisis

Hawkins' uncompromising approach worries some Republicans, too. Politicians have been forced to choose between disappointing Hawkins and her allies and alienating a much more moderate electorate.

"Republicans are politically in a much more defensive position than the Democrats because they keep talking about restrictions that are not supported by most Americans," said John Feehery, a former Republican congressional aide.

A predicted red wave at the 2022 midterms seemed to collide with a surge of support for abortion rights, carrying Democrats to unexpected victories in a series of high-profile races. Last year, pro-choice voters swept all six abortion-related ballot measures, including in conservative states like Kansas and Kentucky.

"Women are watching Republicans post-Roe, and anything short of a compassionate strategy to win back suburban women and swing voters will severely set back the pro-life movement and the party as a whole," Nancy Mace, one of the few House Republicans who has publicly called for more flexibility on abortion, told the BBC in a statement.

But Hawkins does not see the Republican party as her problem. She has little patience for politicians she deems insufficiently "pro-life", threatening primary challenges against Republicans who do not support early bans.

Merv Riepe, a Nebraska state senator who voted against a six-week ban this year, "is going to be retired pretty soon", Hawkins said.

The three female Republican senators in South Carolina who opposed an outright ban face the same threat. Two supported a six-week ban, but that was not sufficient for Hawkins. Each of them was sent a plastic infant-size spine from SFLA earlier this year, with a note suggesting they grow a backbone.

"I think that's the difference between us and other pro-life organisations," Hawkins said. "I don't really care if so-and-so in Washington, DC, isn't happy with me. It doesn't even earn me any points in my demographic."

That approach - aggressive, uncompromising - has fuelled her dominance among anti-abortion activists, now lurching to the right in the absence of Roe.

"The movement as a whole is moving towards asking for more extreme bans," said Zelly Martin, a researcher at University of Texas' propaganda lab, who specialises in the US abortion debate. "They feel like now that we don't have Roe protecting abortion why would we pull back? And I think Kristan Hawkins is a big part of that."

In the year since Roe was overturned, the anti-abortion movement has splintered

Just how far Hawkins will get - how close to abolishing abortion she will come - remains an open question.

"I don't see a point in American history where Americans are going to want an absolute ban on abortion," Ziegler said. "There is no sign of that."

But Hawkins and others are exploring ways to bypass both public opinion and political resistance, Zieger said. One, perhaps the most feasible, would be to ask the conservative-leaning Supreme Court to recognise foetal personhood under the Constitution.

It seems improbable, but those are odds Hawkins is used to.

Last month, in Northville, Michigan, Hawkins stood in a small first-floor conference room, neat rows of potential donors sitting in front of her. She began her speech with an anecdote from early in her career.

A mentor in the anti-abortion movement had offered Hawkins some unsolicited advice: stop saying "when" Roe v Wade is overturned. By assuming Roe's demise, he cautioned, she sounded "too immature, too naive".

Hawkins ignored him. She told her staff to double down, boost their messaging that promised to send Roe to the "ash heap of history".

"I always tell our team: winners envision the win."

Update 11 July 2023: This article was amended in line with BBC Style Guide to describe activists as anti-abortion rather than pro-life.