Kristin Hawkins is the President of Students for Life and Students For Life Action, a pro-life organization that fights for the cause of life among a generation who needs to hear this message. In this episode of the Anchor Podcast with Matt Gaetz and Dan Ball, Kristin talks about how she got started in the pro life movement and how she started Students For LIFE.
00:05:36.840But a lot of folks didn't think it would be possible.
00:05:39.140But if you know your social movement history, you know you have to have the largest, the most well-trained army, grassroots army, in order to win.
00:05:49.360No social movement is victorious without that.
00:05:52.400And when you look at social movement history, it's always the young people leading the charge.
00:05:59.720It's so true that the movement has been a successful one since you started 19 years ago.
00:06:07.900But monumental successes in the overturning of Roe that I didn't think or I certainly didn't know we would see in our lifetime.
00:06:15.760And I want to get to the impact that's had.
00:06:19.160But maybe as you talk about the build-out of what you've done, what is driving the interest in membership?
00:06:25.500Like what is bringing young people in to say yes?
00:06:27.940Of all the causes, of all of the political groups I could be a part of, Students for Life is something that I'm going to dedicate my time to.
00:06:43.020I think the campus conservative movement is very united.
00:06:46.780I'm honored that we have so many Turning Point groups co-hosting with Students for Life and vice versa.
00:06:51.740And it's really been great to see the movement on campuses understand that we have to be united.
00:06:57.600But I definitely think that when it comes to the issue of abortion, this is a generation that has seen their brothers and sisters via ultrasound, right?
00:07:09.020So the tired 1970s talking points of, it's just a clump of cells.
00:07:16.220If you're an intellectually honest person, you understand that what's inside of that mother, even though you may think that they're inconvenient or they're small, definitely is a human being.
00:07:31.780We've also seen this sense of injustice, right?
00:07:34.880This is a generation that has seen in real time transformational change happen because they were the ones who led it.
00:07:43.760And when we talk to young people on campuses, I'm talking to them about human rights.
00:07:49.700I'm talking to them about oppression and discrimination.
00:07:52.240I'm using words that they hear and they're talking about on their own.
00:07:57.780And I'm applying those words to the greatest human rights tragedy, which is the abortion, the killing of these tiny, innocent humans.
00:08:07.040And it kind of makes them stop in their tracks, right?
00:08:10.860It's not something they're used to hearing.
00:08:12.400You know, I even sometimes talk to students about feminism, of what is feminism to you, especially these young women who, as we saw with the polls in this election this week, are so lost.
00:08:26.700And, you know, what they think of feminism, I think I talked to them, I said, you know, who tells you, who is telling you that you have to choose abortion?
00:08:36.340Who's telling you that you're not strong enough to become a mother and stay in school or achieve your career goals?
00:08:42.880Because you're not hearing that from the pro-life movement.
00:08:45.040We're actually the ones who are willing to stand alongside of you, help you choose both your life and your child's life, which will be, by the way, the best for your child.
00:08:53.960Because if you graduate college, a child born into poverty is seven times more likely to live in poverty his whole life.
00:09:03.920Because don't you think that's the opposite of feminism, telling you that you can't, that there's this whole industry that's literally profiting off of your despair, off of your hopelessness, and telling you you're not strong enough?
00:09:17.460And so when you can have that conversation with them, it starts to really turn heads and it gets them to get their ear pods out of their ears and to have a real conversation.
00:09:27.000I wish I could animate the conversations I have on campuses, you know, because you could see, like, the proverbial head explode over some of these students when you're having these conversations with them.
00:09:36.920But I love that because I have this opportunity to plant those seeds of doubt for them to really start reevaluating all that they've heard.
00:09:45.360Well, and it's so brilliant that you're able to frame the pro-life movement as the movement of empowerment.
00:09:53.340I think all young people want to be empowered regardless of their politics.
00:09:57.480Some people believe that empowerment comes through limited government.
00:10:00.880Some people believe it comes through endless entitlements.
00:10:03.760But I could tell you just as a new parent, parenting is awesome.
00:10:08.120It shows you the strain and the limits and the investment of human potential.
00:10:14.660And for you to say that the pro-life movement is there for the full range of those truly human and exquisite experiences, I think that does critique neo-feminism in a very clever way.
00:10:28.100And I could see that drawing people in as folks are trying to find their ideology in themselves and enduring the challenges that come with an unplanned pregnancy.
00:10:37.360I am fascinated to hear more about your time as even a teenager counseling others who are going through some of these moments.
00:10:46.260I know you have to anonymize them and not give out anyone's information.
00:10:49.900But were there stories or experiences from your time giving that counsel that really sharpened your belief system in this space?
00:11:52.660And I think that time I spent the four or five years I spent volunteering at the pregnancy center
00:11:58.080really prepared me for these conversations because I can see in my mind's eye the faces of the young women that I counseled.
00:12:08.520Many of the women that were coming into the pregnancy center were actually older than me when I had the opportunity to sit down and counsel with them.
00:12:15.920And there was one woman I remember who, she was going to choose abortion.
00:14:27.120That if you just have this abortion, it creates this externality that solves another problem.
00:14:33.240And I think some of the valuable counseling that pro-life groups do show other remedies that aren't the killing of a baby, but that can help you.
00:14:41.580And by the way, if you think it's going to be a remedy and it's not, you're going to kill the baby and you're still going to have that problem that you need to deal with in your life.
00:14:49.380When you've seen circumstances where someone goes from wanting to have that abortion to wanting to have the baby, is there like a number one thing or a group of things that you can honestly say are effective at changing minds and changing hearts?
00:15:06.400I don't know if it's necessarily one thing when you're talking to a woman who's in an unplanned or crisis pregnancy situation.
00:15:14.200I think the number one thing that I've seen, and my first book, I interviewed these women who were in these circumstances.
00:15:24.040The difference between a young girl who chooses life and chooses abortion is that she found one person to tell her she didn't have to do it.
00:15:49.060And then you have to try to explain to them why would someone choose abortion.
00:15:52.940When we're children, when we hear about abortion, we are shocked and saddened because we already know it's a baby.
00:16:01.900And so when you think about these women in these crisis situations, it's often just being the one person because she doesn't want to have the abortion.
00:16:10.100But society is telling her to be a responsible person.
00:16:14.980You know, this is the responsible decision to make.
00:16:17.960Maybe her boyfriend or her husband or partner are telling her to have the abortion.
00:16:25.400I had one of our Students for Life groups.
00:16:27.540They were one of our first groups that launched a scholarship, a pregnant parenting scholarship fund on a college campus.
00:16:34.500And I remember after they had launched it, they had pimped out their group to work at the campus basketball games all year round to raise money to start a scholarship fund.
00:16:43.620And they advertised it on campus, a scholarship fund, and it was like $250.
00:16:48.940And I was talking to their campus administrator, and he was telling me that a woman had applied for the scholarship, and they met with her, and they were meeting with all these applicants.
00:16:58.500And she said she had chosen life the previous semester because she saw the scholarship fund being advertised.
00:17:14.500It was that somebody on her campus was telling her they cared about her.
00:17:20.100And, you know, you make such an interesting point about what drives people to the point of seeking an abortion is often external pressure.
00:17:28.560And so an easy release valve for that is to create external comfort, to create care, to create love around this person.
00:17:36.220And in the hopes that they will choose a path that will allow them to experience some of the greatest love that a human being can experience, and that's through parenthood.
00:17:45.140I want to talk about the relationship between abortion and race.
00:17:50.440We know that the founder of Planned Parenthood had deeply racist views and wanted to see the extermination of African Americans.
00:17:58.600And we see a lot of abortion clinics emerge in low-income communities and minority communities.
00:18:04.680Is abortion a path to black genocide in America?
00:18:10.520And, you know, it's funny how God can take things that you don't like or appreciate and use them for good.
00:18:16.820I was on campus today, and there was two African-American girls there who were very pro-choice and were biting their tongues, waiting to talk to me.
00:18:23.740And both of them said, well, yeah, Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist.
00:18:32.500Please explain to all your pro-choice friends what you just said.
00:18:35.120Because, you know, when we started Students for Life talking about Margaret Sanger and the founder of Planned Parenthood,
00:18:41.960about how the founder of Planned Parenthood literally wrote and spoke openly that certain breeds and stocks shouldn't be allowed to reproduce,
00:18:50.240we were, like, dismissed as, like, these crazy conspiracy theorists.
00:18:55.200And since the Black Lives Matter movement, actually, Planned Parenthood has come out and has actually openly admitted that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist.
00:19:04.280In fact, you could, you used to be able to go to NYU's website, and they had a Margaret Sanger Center where you could read all of Margaret Sanger's insane writings.
00:19:17.560I mean, she truly believed that people like my great-grandmother, who was a bastard born in a workhouse in Ireland,
00:19:28.140who was shipped to the United States before she was even 18, came by herself,
00:19:32.420that people like my great-grandmother should have been sterilized because these were these poor immigrants who were ruining New York City, right?
00:19:41.800And that's the time that she lived in.
00:19:44.260She was friends with a gentleman, Lothrop Stockard, who actually served, Stockard, who served on her first board of the American Birth Control League,
00:19:54.600and it was on her paper, who actually famously debated W.E.B. Du Bois, wrote The Rising Tide of Color, who conspired with known Nazis.
00:20:06.120That was the founding of Planned Parenthood, and today you'll hear Planned Parenthood say, well, we disavow Margaret Sanger.
00:20:12.340We're no longer giving, you know, like Kelly Clinton and all these others got the Margaret Sanger Award back in the day.
00:20:19.520They shut down the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood Center in Manhattan just this year.
00:20:24.800Funny how all these Planned Parenthoods keep shutting down in blue states, but it's all the red states that apparently are harming women's health care.
00:20:30.860But they haven't disavowed her because the fact is what you just brought up is nearly 90% of Planned Parenthoods are located in urban minority walkable neighborhoods.
00:21:04.540We know they're targeting based on race where they locate.
00:21:09.500We know we have more than 16,000 fairly qualified health center service locations out there country that our Department of Health and Human Services already funds.
00:21:18.800There are actual true nonprofits that aren't the biggest political lobbyists in Washington, D.C., operating PACs that serve patients at a third of the cost of Planned Parenthood, that offer every service that Planned Parenthood offers, minus abortion, plus a whole list more, and legally obligated to help you get to health care, even help you find transportation to health care if they don't offer it.
00:21:42.040Why would anyone still support Planned Parenthood?
00:21:45.520Like, it doesn't make any financial sense.
00:22:45.060Whether it is the supplements that you use or whether it's your daily maintenance medications or maybe a prescription that a doctor provides, you definitely want to use All Family Pharmacy.
00:22:54.620Go to allfamilypharmacy.com forward slash Matt, code MATT10.
00:23:00.520These are folks doing it the right way.
00:23:02.120We're back with Kristen Hawkins, the president of Students for Life and Students for Life Action.
00:23:06.780Kristen, take a moment and explain what you're doing at San Diego State today and how students reacted.
00:23:12.000Today, I was there at San Diego State for my campus speaking tour, tabling, talking to students about why all human life matters, and starting conversations.
00:23:21.580Changing minds, changing minds, hopefully, planting seeds of doubt about the abortion industry in the minds of hundreds of students who stopped by.
00:23:30.420The school stopped us from using sound amplification at the last moment, so my voice is pretty raw.
00:23:38.720I'm certain it did, and sometimes even more when you have to play against those dirty tricks.
00:23:46.420I've had a few of those played against me in the past.
00:23:48.980I want to get to what this movement looks like post-Roe, because so many of the March for Life events, so many of the pro-life groups really looked to the reversal, the overturning of Roe v. Wade as an organizing objective.
00:24:04.100Now that that has happened, there have been some in the movement who say, well, we've sort of done what we intended to do, and activists go on to other things and choose other causes.
00:24:14.720How would you respond to the observation that maybe the pro-life movement is deflated a little bit after having prevailed in the principal question before us?
00:24:24.020Yeah, if you're a pro-life activist and you've been deflated, then you didn't really understand the battle, right?
00:24:29.720Because think about the book of Joshua, when the Israelites enter the promised land, and they have this great victory at Jericho.
00:24:51.380Jericho's walls have fallen, but there's a lot of cities we still have to win, and we have to defeat.
00:24:58.400And that's really where we've always said at Students for Life, and when I launched Students for Life 19 years ago, I always talked about us being the post-Rowe organization,
00:25:09.380understanding that the moment Rowe fell, we would need to be ready in every single state.
00:25:14.740I was always stress testing the system, right, of mobilizing our students, how quickly and how many students could I mobilize to a state capital, for example,
00:25:22.480in the years leading up to Rowe's reversal, because that's exactly what had to happen.
00:25:27.020We had to rush to several state capitals to finalize pro-life legislation, and now we continue to do that.
00:25:35.220But this is really just the beginning of the end of abortion.
00:25:39.300Rowe was this stranglehold, right, that said, written in the Constitution, on the sides of the Constitution,
00:25:45.480in the Visible Inc., there was somehow this right to kill a child, and to kill your child.
00:25:50.800And when that was gone, it said, now the people and its representatives, so Dobbs said, the people and its representatives now get to decide.
00:25:58.460And that's state legislatures and the U.S. governments, not just one or the other, President Trump, if you're watching right now.
00:26:05.440It's both, and we have to be involved, both at the federal and the state level, because guess what?
00:26:12.560Abortion's federal if we're paying for it, and we've been paying it for decades with our federal taxpayer dollars.
00:26:18.400We're paying with our state taxpayer dollars.
00:26:21.340And you have to think about, and I've looked high and low, there is no silver bullet to ending abortion, I'm sad to say.
00:26:28.680Ending abortion, the violence of abortion, means you have to change law.
00:26:33.000You have to make it illegal, but you also have to make it unthinkable, because we all know abortions were happening before Roe v. Wade, before it was legalized.
00:26:42.060It wasn't happening at the level that's happening today, but it was happening before.
00:26:46.840And so it's cultural change and political change that's required for this movement.
00:26:52.140So it really is this all hands on deck.
00:26:54.280There's, you know, I talk about these, you know, 10 cities we have to chase, and we have to engage in battle.
00:27:01.900One of them, which is we have to change the culture on all of our college campuses, so no woman ever again feels like she has to choose between the life of her child and education.
00:27:12.320We have to finally defund and debar plan parenthood.
00:27:15.780We cannot continue to use taxpayer dollars, federal or state, to fund the nation's largest abortion vendor, who, by the way, is their biggest political lobbyist,
00:27:24.900and is the reason we see so many Republican defeats time and time again.
00:27:30.040We have to tackle the proliferation of chemical abortion pills, which are even the Trump administration, you know, the FDA approving a generic chemical abortion pill not long ago.
00:27:41.860Even today, our Department of Justice not enforcing the Federal Comstock Act, which bans the illegal mailing of abortion material,
00:27:51.200which is what's happening and how our state pro-life laws are being circumvented by abortionists in New York in their freaking basements,
00:27:59.800who are going to the New York Times proudly declaring that they're circumventing Texas's laws because four women in their basements are selling illegal chemical abortion pills.
00:28:10.580We have to make sure that the young people...
00:28:14.700Let me ask you about this, Kristen, because you've identified a few things that could be achieved through a different enforcement regime.
00:28:25.080But there are other things you've identified that require a change in law.
00:28:28.140And to do that in Washington today, you have to have all the Republicans and some Democrats.
00:28:34.760And we used to have pro-life Democrats.
00:28:37.420Where I'm talking to you from right now in Florida, we regularly in the Florida Panhandle elected some pro-life Democrats to Congress, to state legislatures.
00:28:49.620Only Henry Cuellar of Texas is a pro-life Democrat.
00:28:54.800What happened to that, like, endangered, almost extinct species?
00:28:59.720And does it have any hope of recovery?
00:29:01.400One, I think the hope of recovery is that the Republican Party is so strong in its pro-life beliefs that Democrats, in a self-interested manner, will start allowing some of their members to be pro-life.
00:29:17.220I think it's going to be a self-interested...
00:29:19.020I've been in Washington for a while, and I'm pretty jaded, but I think that's what that's going to take.
00:29:23.740Like, why have we seen Democrats leave the pro-life cause?
00:31:16.120We always are like, oh, it's a big tent.
00:31:17.680You can have all these different views.
00:31:19.480And then when we get to Congress and we get in the majority, and I shouldn't be lecturing you about this because you're the expert here, we can't get anything done.
00:31:26.960No, look, and I think that one of the reasons we haven't been successful is the adherence to this filibuster that Democrats will violate freely when they get power again.
00:31:40.520Like, the only people who stop the Democrats from violating the filibuster are either gone or, yeah, they're gone from the Senate.
00:31:48.060It was Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.
00:31:50.580So they're going to violate this thing when they get power.
00:31:54.120And so I think that where Trump talks about important issues that are critical to Republican voters and abortion being among them, we have to have a different playbook for the battle space than we're currently using now.
00:32:05.280I think it's why President Trump took the extraordinary step this week of going to Capitol Hill and trying to remind Republican senators what time it is.
00:32:14.140But there is the practical issue of the elections and the voting.
00:32:20.480Why do a number of these red states like Kansas continue to produce results when they vote on the question of abortion that portends a far more pro-choice position than we would otherwise think?
00:32:33.700There's a few reasons for that, some that I'll publicly talk about, some that I probably won't.
00:32:40.920I think that, you know, I was in Kansas and we were door knocking when that amendment came down.
00:32:47.740One, we have a problem within the Kansas GOP.
00:32:51.700We can't get pro-life bills passed now.
00:33:03.100We've seen this in President Trump and the success that the MAGA agenda has had because we have a strong leader willing to go to bat for the issues he believes in.
00:33:12.280You have to have strong leaders in the GOP.
00:33:49.600When we lost in Ohio, I guarantee you, if President Trump had gone to Ohio, if we would made it an issue during the presidential primary, Vivek donated to the pro-life groups in Ohio when the abortion ballot referendum was going on.
00:35:55.400So they have their, they funded their pregnancy center network in the state of Texas to over $100 million.
00:36:01.460So they took money that would have been going to the abortion industry and said, you know what, we're going to give it to the pro-life pregnancy centers, maternity homes, the adoption agencies, and they're going to be able to apply for state funding.
00:36:15.220That is game changing because we've never seen that level of support before.
00:36:19.820And now we're seeing it, I believe, and I don't want to offend Governor Santa, I believe Florida has it as well.
00:36:24.400We've seen some other states, Indiana, under the, when Governor Mike Pence was governor, did the same thing.
00:36:32.100That's game changing when you can start saying, no, we're also going to let pregnancy centers and these help agencies actually apply for federal funds.
00:36:40.820We've also seen Texas Lee, they were the first state to pass our Anti-Chemical Abortion Trafficking Act this year.
00:36:48.820It was signed into law this September, which not only says we know abortion's illegal here in our state, but we still know it's happening.
00:36:56.640Now we can, and citizens in our state can sue the illegal abortion vendors who are mailing these drugs into our states, which takes it out of the criminal courts to the civil courts,
00:37:09.660which, because we've had a problem with the shield laws in some states, where clerks just refuse to file lawsuits from the AG in Florida and Louisiana.
00:37:19.340Louisiana, speaking of Louisiana, has had some really interesting and innovative laws of really classifying chemical abortion drugs,
00:37:27.800like you would other pharmaceutical drugs that are high, or that are deadly.