Kristin Hawkins has relentlessly pursued one goal - to make abortion unthinkable and unavailable.
When Kristan Hawkins was 23, she started sleeping in her office.
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.
But Hawkins has a new, more ambitious goal, she wants to make abortion unthinkable and unavailable across the US. "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."
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? 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.
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". 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.
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.
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. "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
"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.
"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."
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