Kristan Hawkins helped kill Roe. Now she’s fighting to control the movement she created.

This story is part of the Life After Roe package, appearing this week, that looks at the surprising resilience of the abortion access movement in the Dobbs era—and at how hardliners are doubling down on their efforts to ban abortion nationwide.

The young woman was on her way out of her chemistry class on a warm spring day at Texas Tech when she noticed Kristan Hawkins’ tent. A blue tarp displayed an unsettling image of two disembodied hands cupping a baby’s head, with the theme of Hawkins’ campus tour in red and white letters: “ABORTION IS HUMAN SACRIFICE.”

Hawkins, the Instagram-ready president of Students for Life of America, was dressed in a blue silk Eileen Fisher blouse over a bulletproof vest—a wardrobe staple since her friend and fellow conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot to death in September 2025. She was inviting students to step to the microphone to participate in the “change my mind” debate format that Kirk had made famous. Hawkins wasn’t really there to have her mind changed, of course; after two decades leading one of the most influential anti-abortion organizations in the movement, that would be unlikely. Her real goal was to gather clips of irate pro-choicers saying stupid things, which then could be turned into viral videos that might change the minds of people watching them—or just stoke their outrage.

One by one, a series of brave but hapless students half Hawkins’ age accepted her challenge, and one by one, she reduced them to incoherence. Then the young woman in the green sweatshirt walked to the mic, her long brown hair swept behind her shoulders, her right hand shoved in her jeans pocket. 

“If I was not allowed to have an abortion, I would have been pregnant by 9,” she said, stammering a bit. “I’ve been raped three times.” She opposed later abortions, she told Hawkins, but in cases like her own, she thought ending a pregnancy should be an option.

Hawkins has been fielding challenges about rape and abortion since students like this one were in diapers. First came her lecture about fetal brain activity and the Book of Genesis—“Adam was created from dust, because that’s how awesome God is”—before she acknowledged, “That shouldn’t have happened to you, and you were not ready, and no 9-year-old would ever be ready for that.” 

But what happened, Hawkins continued, wasn’t the fault of her fetus. “You are a mother, because you had a child within you,” she told the student, who stood knitting her fingers together. “All we simply ask is that you, as a woman, as a girl—and this is a completely unfair and unjust thing that’s happened, I’m not saying it was fair or just in any way—that you are capable and can withstand nine months of sacrifice so somebody else might have 90 years.” 

In fact, it likely wouldn’t have taken nine months at all, Hawkins went on. What she did not say is that the birth canal of a girl that young is too narrow to allow the passage of a baby; childbirth could tear her uterus and crack her pelvis. “Surgeons that are my friends that have had to help girls overcome this, usually it’s an early delivery, an early C-section,” she explained. “She will most likely need to deliver early for her own safety.” 

“Right,” the young woman said, sounding more like she was giving up than agreeing. “Thank you for having this conversation,” she added, then walked away. 

Nothing about this exchange should have surprised me—I’d seen clips of Hawkins making similar arguments on social media. Online, she deployed a casual cruelty all the time, taking aim at gay men she claimed were “denying biology” by adopting kids and transgender women whom she called “sir” for laughs. But somehow, watching it play out in real time, with this nervous young woman absorbing her words, was different. I couldn’t stop thinking about how nonchalantly Hawkins mentioned C-sections, a major surgery for adults, let alone children. How did it feel to be told she should have stayed pregnant at 9? I asked the student when I caught up with her. “It was really tough,” she said, holding back tears. “I know that my body would not have forgiven me if I didn’t do what I did. I think I would have lost my childhood.”

I spoke with the young woman again a few weeks later to confirm her story, though I haven’t been able to verify it independently. There was no doubt, however, about how to interpret Hawkins’ response. “I do not think sexual assault survivors should have access to abortion, no,” she told me when I asked her about the incident. It was a matter of moral consistency, she maintained. “The circumstances of a human’s conception do not change that human’s value.” 

And not for the first time, I wondered: What does it mean that someone who believes a fourth grader should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s child is now leading the anti-abortion mainstream?

On June 24, 2022, Hawkins stood outside the Supreme Court, holding a sign that read “The future is anti-abortion” as she screamed into a microphone that Roe v. Wade was gone. Around her, a sea of young people in sky-blue “I am the pro-life generation” T-shirts wept with joy.

Hawkins had earned her place on the podium that day by building Students for Life into an anti-abortion powerhouse whose 1,700 chapters have trained more than 250,000 right-wing activists. Her most hardcore fans, like Hawkins herself, were uncompromising in their conviction that life begins at fertilization, that embryos should have the same right to exist as the people carrying them, and that no matter how tragic the circumstances, abortion could almost never be justified. Over two decades, Hawkins had mobilized them into a potent political force—battalions of true believers who could be counted on to knock on doors for their favored candidates and pack legislative hearings in support of hardline bills, all to accelerate their movement’s incremental approach to taking down Roe. 

And now, Hawkins and her allies had won. “This was phase one,” she told NBC News that day. “Our objective in the pro-life movement is to make abortion unthinkable.” 

Yet four years later, that sweeping goal is further away than ever. The expanded availability of the medications mifepristone and misoprostol by mail has increased the volume of abortions, including in states with near-total bans. “It took a good number of years to get the pro-life movement reoriented around this extreme new frontier,” Hawkins acknowledged. “It was hard for people to get their heads wrapped around [the reality that] we were shifting from brick-and-mortar facilities to at-home abortions.” Seeing the numbers rise with Republicans in power in Washington has been especially galling. “Your ‘team’ has the majority,” she said, “and yet nothing gets done.” 

As many of her allies have become more frustrated, a growing faction has embraced an idea that was itself once unthinkable within their cause: charging women who terminate pregnancies with murder and even threatening them with the death penalty. The most outspoken proponents of so-called abortion abolitionism are a contingent of extremely online men who hate their movement’s incrementalism, and especially hate their women leaders. For them, Hawkins has become a prime target. 

These days, Hawkins is almost as likely to find herself battling with misogynists who think women shouldn’t have the right to work or vote as with progressives. It’s a fight she welcomes. “Kristan is a brawler,” Mary Ziegler, a legal historian who has followed Hawkins’ career for years, told me. “Kristan gets down into the mud and debates, and she makes people look silly and unintellectual and unprepared.” 

But it’s also a diversion from her true mission. Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, voters in 12 states have passed ballot measures enshrining reproductive rights into their constitutions, including places like Montana and Ohio, where conservatives dominate. Sixty-six percent of Americans under 30 now say they want abortion to be legal in all or most cases; among young women, it’s as high as 76 percent. Hawkins understands that to make abortion unthinkable, she needs to change the culture, which means convincing people outside her base—especially young women—and addressing what she sees as a dangerous spiritual malaise, one in which the worldview is “Nothing matters, my life doesn’t matter, it’s all meaningless,” she told me. “The blue-haired septum-ring girl is also our mission. It’s not just her baby when she gets pregnant. It’s also saving her.”

Breaking through to this demographic is the main reason Hawkins allowed me to shadow her around the country for a few weeks this past spring. “I want to reach your audience,” she told me early on. “I want [them] to be like, ‘Wow, I really don’t like her, but she had some good points, and I might need to go investigate some of those good points.’” 

And to do that, she knows she has to find a middle ground—a deeply uncomfortable place for someone who seems mainstream only because the rest of the anti-abortion movement has shifted so far right. Hawkins opposes IVF, most forms of contraception, and same-sex marriage, all of which are supported by large majorities of the “mushy middle” she hopes to persuade. Meanwhile, she’s trying to stay relevant as a 41-year-old woman leading an organization targeting Gen Z, even as she runs the risk of being outinfluenced by hard-right digital natives a decade younger who have figured out that being more extreme is the surest way to get more clicks. 

In early June, Hawkins strode onto the stage of a San Antonio hotel ballroom in a cream-colored pantsuit and bright pink lipstick. “I’m going to tell you something nobody at a ‘women’s’ conference is supposed to say,” she declared. “It’s not fair.” It was the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, the premier annual gathering for conservative women and the first since the killing of its patriarch, Charlie Kirk. For three days, a parade of Christian influencers, media makers, and politicians evangelized about the need to get married, have kids, praise Jesus, sideline careers, and put “faith over feminism.” 

It was a fitting venue for a woman whom one admirer I spoke with described as “the Charlie Kirk of abortion.” But Hawkins stood out among the other speakers for her frankness about life as a mom with a career. She described working 15 hours a day, leaving her four kids, two of whom have cystic fibrosis, at home with her husband, and how it wasn’t fair that women had to balance so much. “We’re juggling more balls than the men in our lives. Sorry, gentlemen,” she said, to appreciative laughs. “Some of the balls we juggle are rubber,” she went on, “and some of them are glass.” The rubber ones—the Zoom invites, the laundry—“you can drop those, and they bounce back up.” The glass ones—your marriage, your children’s health—will shatter. “And your job, every single day, is to know which is which.”

It was actually a terrific metaphor for working motherhood, I thought, as I escaped periodically to pump breast milk for the 8-month-old I’d left at home. Emerson Mullinax, a 19-year-old college student from Oklahoma sitting next to me, told me that of all the summit speakers, she was most excited for Hawkins, whose debate clips she watched on Instagram. “I really love how she’s super-straightforward and just tells everyone the truth.” 

Mullinax was pursuing a career—nursing­—­but she wanted a family, too. Hawkins offered a pathway between the scary feminists chained to desks, delaying kids until it was too late, and the long-haired tradwives, in linen dresses and full makeup, baking sourdough from scratch. “Most of us know that is not anyone’s actual daily life,” Hawkins told the audience of 2,000 or so, adding wryly, “even though I do try my best on the weekends.” She had sometimes taken issue with Kirk’s comments about women, such as when he urged them not to date men who couldn’t provide for a family. 

“I was so pissed about that,” Hawkins told me. Her husband of 20 years taught school before quitting to homeschool their kids. According to Kirk’s logic, “with how little we pay teachers and public service workers and our military members, those men aren’t acceptable mates. I don’t think Charlie was thinking about that, honestly, but I was like, ‘Oh my god, stop.’”

Onstage, Hawkins attempted to balance arguments that sounded downright feminist with baseless clichés about the miseries wrought by feminism that Kirk would have loved. “While we have achieved everything we were told we should need or want,” she declared, “anxiety and depression are at all-time highs.” 

This was an argument Hawkins told me she believed stood the best chance of reaching the women in the cultural mainstream whom she fantasized about luring to the anti-abortion side—maybe even those blue-haired, septum-pierced feminists. But it seemed more likely to succeed as a retention strategy for young Christian women who hope to have a family but lack the economic means to be tradwives, even if they wanted to. 

This, too, is all part of Hawkins’ balancing act. Even as she reaches out to progressives, she has to avoid alienating the young women who make up her base.

But in this era of GOP-sanctioned misogyny, what did her side actually offer? After giving her audience permission to be frustrated, Hawkins ended by telling them to suck it up. “Learn to juggle, because if you go through life telling yourself, ‘It’s not fair,’ you are signing yourself up for misery,” she said. “You can take it up with God when you get to heaven.”

Born in 1985, Hawkins grew up in the small town of Wellsburg, West Virginia. Her mother, Marla, taught music, and her dad, Gary, worked at a coal power plant. An overachiever who was voted most likely to succeed in eighth grade and was valedictorian of her high school class of 13, Hawkins dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer. To fulfill her school’s volunteer service requirement, she pitched in at a local crisis pregnancy center, where she met women in desperate circumstances that having an abortion didn’t seem to improve. Before that, she had never given the abortion issue much thought. “I remember leaving the pregnancy center the first day, like, ‘Oh my god, what’s been going on?’” 

At Bethany College, a small liberal arts school near her home, she started an anti-­abortion group and distinguished herself as a motivated student whose ideological views seemed well formed but not fixed. Barbara Ann Rieffer-Flanagan, a political science professor who became her mentor, recalled one discussion about whether abortion should be allowed for rape. “My impression of that conversation,” Rieffer-­Flanagan told me, “was that she was struggling with that.” 

After graduating a year early, in 2005, Hawkins began working full time for the Republican National Committee and then joined a faith-based office within the Department of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. The following year, the little-known Students for Life tapped the 21-year-old to revive its flagging campus network; she slept in a derelict office, she told the BBC, where the only way to keep the cockroaches at bay was to leave the lights on all night. 

As she transformed the group and built a network that would eventually stretch from homeschools to elite colleges, she was invited to join the Council for National Policy, a secretive hub for conservative funders and strategists whose members included Phyllis Schlafly, slayer of the Equal Rights Amendment. “Phyllis was like my grandma,” Hawkins told me—a hypercritical one who admonished her protégé to lose weight. “I was pregnant at the time,” Hawkins recalled. “I was like, ‘I will, Phyllis, as soon as I push out this baby!’”

Long before Kirk arrived on the scene, Hawkins brought a youthful pugnaciousness to a movement dominated by gray-hairs. Richard Viguerie, a founding member of the council who used direct-mail fundraising to build the machine that brought Ronald Reagan to power in 1980, was among those who recognized her potential. “Kristan [saw] a hole in the marketplace, which is critically important,” he told me. “If you want to be successful, you’ve got to do something no one else does.” What no one else on the anti-abortion side was doing back then was connecting with college students. “Everybody can clearly understand the benefit of young people talking to other young people about life, instead of people like me,” said Viguerie, now 93.

Hawkins did more than talk; she turned her supporters out by the busload to events like the annual March for Life and rallied them behind efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and support fetal personhood. One of the movement’s most important players, Leonard Leo, the Catholic billionaire and Federalist Society power broker, served on the Students for Life board for 15 years. (During that time, he also helped engineer the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court that overturned Roe.) After the tea party sweep of 2010, Hawkins’ grassroots troops pressured Republican legislators around the country to pass a barrage of harsh new restrictions. Then they promoted their victories in the new social media ecosystem that was alien to the old guard. 

“She was one of the first people I ever heard talking about a post-Roe generation and post-Roe America, long before the Dobbs decision,” David Bereit, founder of 40 Days for Life and executive director of a new Leo-funded effort called the Life Leadership Conference, told me. “There’s no one else, I think, who had the drive, the vision, the passion, the bullheaded tenacity to say, ‘We’re going to do it.’”

Then Roe was overturned, abortion pills reshaped the landscape, and abortion foes were caught without a game plan. “What’s the strategy for the overall movement?” Hawkins asked. “I think that’s something that gets left out of the conversation too much.”

For Hawkins, one strategy was turning progressives’ own tools, such as arguments about environmental safety, against them. Hawkins and her team were quicker than most to recognize the existential threat posed by pills, leading the charge against a 2019 California law requiring public universities to make the drugs available. As they reached for ways to fearmonger in liberal states, Hawkins recalled a tale she had heard about someone “scooping” fetuses out of a water treatment plant. By 2020, she was leaning hard into the idea that fetal remains and abortion-medication residue in the drinking water supply were a threat to public health. 

The idea that we’re “drinking other people’s abortions” became a punch line in pro-choice circles, mocked by leading Democrats and rejected by environmental and health experts. Even some of Hawkins’ allies were dubious. But the idea gained traction. Last year, lawmakers in seven states introduced abortion water-safety bills, and an Illinois congresswoman proposed a five-year federal prison term for any doctor who doesn’t offer pill patients a “catch kit” for blood and fetal remains.

Then in September, Hawkins posted a video on X announcing that the EPA is adding mifepristone and misoprostol—along with birth control pills and hormones used in gender-affirming care—to the list of chemicals it wants states to test for in drinking water. “We’re literally breaking the story!” she declared, jumping up and down in her excitement. “Ahhhhh!” A couple of weeks later, Students for Life warned that if the FDA doesn’t act on mifepristone within 60 days, it will sue, alleging that the agency’s 2000 approval of the drug violated the Endangered Species Act.

This was classic Hawkins: transforming the outer fringe into the political mainstream. “A lot of the ideas that Students for Life comes up with, when you first hear them, people are just like, ‘That’s ridiculous,’” Ziegler, the legal historian, told me. But boiled down to an Instagram reel, they seem plausible enough to appeal to the same eco-warriors and MAHA moms worried about pesticides, birth control side effects, and vaccines. The drinking water testing also suggests a new mechanism for tracking abortion drugs, Ziegler told me. “If you’re ever going to have meaningful prosecutions of anything having to do with mifepristone, you’re going to have to know when somebody took [it], which means you’re going to have to have a method of detecting [it],” she said. “It’s really clever,” she added. “They’re really good at that kind of thing.” 

My foray into Hawkins’ world began on a warm spring morning at a coffee shop on the outskirts of Houston, where she was huddling with a group of eager-looking student volunteers in red Students for Life T-shirts. Hawkins doesn’t drink coffee, and tap water is out because she thinks it might be contaminated. Her caffeine fix of choice is the energy drink Celsius. Does she worry there might be abortion medication in the water that’s used to make these drinks? I asked. She responded, with a touch of sarcasm, “You know what, Amy, that is the question.” 

We were in Texas because Hawkins had a midterm primary to influence and a social media machine to feed. Outside the cafe, she filmed a TikTok video with the students as they prepared to door-knock for an ultra-­right state representative named Briscoe Cain, who had founded a Students for Life group at his law school. The congressional district he was running for was one of five that Republicans had just redrawn at President Donald Trump’s behest to take seats from Democrats in November. The students fanned out in the neighborhoods of large homes with neat gardens, telling the few people who answered their doors that the GOP frontrunner, Trump-backed investment banker Alex Mealer, hadn’t returned Students for Life Action’s candidate survey, while Cain had scored 100 percent. (A few weeks later, Cain was trounced.)

Next up: filming a video that would demonstrate just how shockingly easy it was to obtain abortion pills in Texas, despite its stringent laws, in the hopes that state and federal officials would do more to rein in online sales. We set up in the parking lot of the iconic Space Center Houston, apparently chosen because Hawkins had spent a summer at space camp in high school. Lydia Taylor Davis, Hawkins’ 23-year-old social media coordinator and coach on Gen Z terminology and TikTok trends, was running through the plan for a sting operation. “I’ll just start,” Hawkins snapped. “I don’t need a script.” 

Another staffer hit record on an iPhone, and from there, the scheme rapidly went off the rails. The plan was to purchase pills from a couple of services, with Hawkins posing as a male abuser while Davis pretended to be a 16-year-old—all to try to portray mail-order suppliers as reckless and dangerous. For reasons even she couldn’t explain, Hawkins chose the fake name “Wanda” as her male-abuser alter ego. But when Davis input her information, she hit a snag.

“Let’s see if it lets me order them!” she told the camera dramatically. Then, laughing awkwardly, “Oh.”

Unbeknownst to her, the group she was targeting, The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project (The MAP), had blocked Davis in its system after Students for Life teased the sting operation on social media. Hawkins attempted to save the stunt by placing her own order, but “Wanda” accidentally gave her age as 15, below The MAP’s cutoff. Now a security guard was wandering over to tell them they couldn’t film. Having set out to show that telemedicine services don’t screen their clients, they inadvertently proved the opposite. The stunt felt like a metaphor for the anti-abortion movement’s current plight: As pills flow freely across state lines, the strategies to stop them are destined to fail. Ranting on X about how easy pills are to obtain can end up being a PSA for abortion by mail.

We flew to Lubbock early the next morning for the event at Texas Tech, and Hawkins and I hung out as she got ready in the airport bathroom. She unplugged the automatic sinks and commandeered their outlets for her various appliances. Her iPhone dinged constantly with Microsoft Teams updates from her staff of 100. 

“My brand consultant would probably say you shouldn’t be filming me,” Hawkins told me, as she stood in a T-shirt, applying deodorant and spraying copious amounts of product in her long brown hair so she could twist it into barrel curls. “The consultant vibe is not to share the crazy.”

And yet, she sounded like the least crazy version of herself, as we chatted about how much it sucked to be a breastfeeding mom on the road and about her parents’ differing views of her work; her mom loves it, but her dad has never gotten the politics stuff. “I remember a couple of years after we started Students for Life…he was like, ‘So are you going to go to law school now?’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘No, Dad, I’m not.’”

Hawkins pulled a steamer through her blouse and adjusted the bulletproof vest her husband insisted that she wear. She met Jonathan Hawkins on the first day of high school. “This is the most attractive person I’ve ever seen in my life,” she remembered thinking. They married in 2006 and started having children, who now range in age from 11 to 17. He and the kids spend most of their time at their home in Idaho, but until 2024, the family lived in an RV so they could follow her around the country. The online misogynists tell her endlessly to get back to her kitchen and being a mom. “I was in the freakin’ kitchen,” she groused as she described rising at the crack of dawn before this trip to make bread, pot roast, chili, and chocolate chip cookies. 

These are the same manosphere critics who believe that the only way to stop abortion pills is to arrest the women who are taking them. For 50 years, abortion opponents have focused on criminalizing providers rather than patients. But in the post-Dobbs era, when hundreds of thousands of people each year are accessing medication without ever seeing a doctor, the idea of criminalizing abortion seekers is on the rise. This year, state lawmakers considered 14 bills that would have charged women who have abortions with homicide—a major increase from a few years ago, when there were just three bills. In a majority of states where these bills were floated, those who terminated their pregnancies would have been eligible for the death penalty.

Hawkins opposes punishing patients, at least in part because she believes it would create a huge cultural backlash. “At some point, criminalization for everyone could be on the table,” she told me. “I don’t think it’s in my lifetime, for sure, because culture is not there.” The “pro-­prosecutionists,” as Hawkins calls them, have come after her, showing up at her campus events shouting Bible verses and posting lengthy YouTube diatribes. “She’s an enemy of the word of God, through and through,” declared Abolitionists Rising founder T. Russell Hunter to a YouTube audience of nearly 500,000—larger than Students for Life’s following on the platform—after she shouted down a contingent of abolitionists who confronted her at a campus event in Oklahoma. “One of the reasons that we have not ended abortion in a single state in this country, I think, it’s because the pro-life movement is led largely by women,” Seth Gruber, founder of the anti-­abortion group White Rose Resistance, said in his own viral clip. The attacks have become so ugly that at one point, Hawkins posted on X: “The sad thing is the people I fear getting shot by, most of the time, aren’t crazy Leftists (most of them don’t have guns or how to use them, lol)…but ‘abolitionists.’” (“Kristan loves slander,” Abolitionists Rising posted on Facebook. “The idea that abolitionists would seek to kill her is patently insane.”)

But Hawkins has found a way to use those battles in her favor. Last year, abolitionists showed up at her campus event at the University of California, Berkeley, screaming, “Do you have the guts to call me a misogynist to my face?” and broadcasting her $320,000 annual salary. Hawkins told me that two young women passing by seemed to assume the lady being shouted down by anti-abortion men must be pro-choice. “And then some of the girls were like, ‘Oh, you’re pro-life, okay, I just want to let you know I’m sorry that this is happening to you,’” Hawkins recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Well, that’s great. Let’s have a conversation about why these guys don’t like me.’” In her telling, the abolitionist bros gave Hawkins a chance to reach young women who wouldn’t otherwise have engaged with her. “I’m not paying [the abolitionists] money to be insane,” Hawkins told me, deploying the same word they used about her, “but I have joked about it.” 

They’ve also helped on the policy front by making her state-level efforts to ban abortion and repeal rape exceptions seem almost moderate. Yet as abolitionists gain ground, they’re also making it harder for Hawkins to straddle the anti-abortion movement’s growing divide. In April, Hawkins endorsed a South Carolina bill that would have imposed a near-total ban on abortion—the current law allows it through about six weeks of pregnancy—with a two-year jail term for anyone who got one. She only did so, she said, because she had been privately assured that the criminalization provision would end up being stripped out. (Students for Life later updated its press release to say it hoped the penalties against mothers would be removed; in any case, the entire bill failed.) 

But increasingly prominent male and female conservative influencers and activists are going over to the “pro-prosecutionist” side. In June, more than 60 of them endorsed a petition to remove “wholesale legal immunity for mothers” from abortion bans. “It’s important to be logically consistent,” the popular Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey said in a video explaining her stance. Her wording struck me as familiar. It was the same rationale that Hawkins had used to tell me why a 9-year-old rape victim should give birth.

Hawkins favors another, no less draconian solution to the abortion-pill problem: the 1873 Comstock Act. On a rainy day in May, I watched her deliver four boxes of petitions to the Department of Justice demanding that it enforce this Victorian-era anti-vice law that could be used to ban the mailing of any drug or device used in an abortion. If broadly interpreted, the federal statute could effectively shut down abortions in the formal healthcare sector nationwide; in its original incarnation 150 years ago, it was also used to target information.

Hawkins confidently claimed afterward that the DOJ was actively discussing the idea, though a spokesperson told Politico that she had “misunderstood what was communicated by our attorneys.” It seemed like another wild Hawkins ploy gone awry—until July, when now–Attorney General Todd Blanche vowed during his confirmation hearing to review options to enforce Comstock. In August, Trump tapped Dr. Heidi Overton to run the FDA. She has argued the agency shouldn’t have allowed telehealth abortion to begin with, and in her Senate confirmation hearing last week, she said nothing to suggest she has changed her mind, referencing an ongoing FDA review of mifepristone’s safety as “very important.” The previous FDA director had slow-walked that review, to the fury of Hawkins and her allies.

Of course, if Hawkins gets her Comstock wish—a 50-state abortion ban that nobody voted on—the backlash would be seismic. Her most prized goal of changing the culture is proving to be elusive. During this fall’s midterm elections, four states will have abortion on the ballot, including Hawkins’ home state of Idaho, where voters will consider a citizen-initiated measure to repeal the state’s near-total ban. 

Since 2022, Idahoans have lost a third of their obstetricians and watched miscarrying women be flown out of state by helicopter to save their lives. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when Hawkins held a meeting for initiative opponents in August at her local coffee shop in Teton Valley, she got kicked out by the shop’s irate pro-choice owner.

Hawkins’ video of the confrontation went viral. But like the sting operation in the Houston parking lot, it had the flavor of a self-own. The owner reported he’d been so flooded with support—and orders—from around the country afterward that he was having trouble keeping up. Hawkins had set out to make abortion unthinkable. And with her own content, she had proved that, even here, in her own deep-red state, she had failed. 

Amy Littlefield is the author of Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights (2026). Additional reporting by Anna Yeo and ­Rachel de Leon.

Top image: Illustration by Matthieu Bourel; Jose Luis Magana/AP