This story is part of the Life After Roe package, which 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.

This spring, the Mother Jones team heard a lot of talking points from anti-abortion leader Kristan Hawkins as we followed her around the country for a documentary. The one she most urgently wants progressive readers and viewers to consider: Abortion is wrong and should be banned nationwide.  

Hawkins has led Students for Life of America for 20 years, and because of my work—including my recent book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights—she’s been on my radar for much of that time. Hawkins was once a fringe figure, but as the movement has shifted ever further to the right since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, she has become a leader of the anti-abortion mainstream. 

Hawkins has been mobilizing conservative students on college campuses since her friend Charlie Kirk was still in middle school, rallying an army of young people to elect hardline politicians and lobby for draconian abortion bans. And many of the strategies she pioneered worked: The day Roe was overturned, she was on the podium outside the Supreme Court, cheering the new Dobbs era. 

But four years later, things haven’t gone quite the way the anti-abortion movement planned, thanks to an explosion in abortion-pill access. These days, as she debates on college campuses using the format Kirk popularized, Hawkins is constantly confronted by an even farther-right faction of her own movement that wants to lock women up for having abortions. And she’s losing traction with her target audience, young women, who are more progressive than ever before. 

It turns out, being a female version of Charlie Kirk can bring heat from all sides. 

But Hawkins has kept at it, because she understands changing the law is not enough. Instead, her mission is to make abortion unthinkable. To do that, she knows she needs to change the culture—and reach progressive women—which is why she let us tag along while she put on makeup in an airport bathroom, filmed a botched abortion-pill sting operation in the parking lot of the Space Center Houston, and discussed whether abortion medication might be tainting her favorite energy drink. 

Along the way, we saw Hawkins try to defend extreme positions at odds with how the majority of Americans think. It was an illuminating, and unsettling, look not just at Hawkins, but at the entire anti-abortion movement at a critical, and unexpected, crossroads. 

Top image: Illustration by Blake Cale; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty, Allison Shelley/Getty, Anna Moneymaker/Getty