“I’m coming for your abortion access.”
This was the warning Kristan Hawkins shared with New Mexico State University on October 4. A prominent anti-abortionist, Hawkins is president of Students for Life, an organization that has chapters at different universities, including NMSU, across the country. Las Cruces was the latest stop on her tour to fight for an abortion ban on a federal level.
Hawkins was in Washington, D.C. with Students for Life when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which held that the U.S. constitution protected a person’s right to an abortion, in June 2022. However, the repeal of the landmark case is far from the end of the abortion debate for either side.
“It’s very clear in post-Roe America, the battleground has indeed shifted,” Hawkins said. “Right now, our nation is divided. We have half free-to-be-born states like Texas, and we have half free-to-kill states like New Mexico. So, our work is definitely cut out for us. But I’m ready. We’re resolute and we’re coming for abortion access.”
This work refers to Hawkins’ goal of banning all abortions at a federal level with no exceptions – including instances of rape and incest, which many other abortion bans allow for. After opening the floor to pro-choice attendees, Hawkins gave her reasoning in response to a question about extreme circumstances.
“I don’t think that matters,” she said. “If my father goes out and commits a rape tonight or act of terrorism, nobody in America would say I should be killed for my father’s crimes because we’d say ‘No, Kristen is an adult. She’s living, she’s breathing. She’s right up here. We can’t kill her. How can she be responsible for her father’s crimes?’ When it comes to abortion? We give the death card to a child.”
Most of Hawkins’ speech was devoted to her five reasons why she believes that all abortion should be banned. For each claim, she cited various sources, from Mayo Clinic to Elon Musk and Wikipedia.
- Abortion harms the physical and mental health of the recipient.
- Abortion is responsible for “unrecoverable” population decline in the U.S.
- Abortion harms the environment through chemical abortion waste.
- Planned Parenthood is racist.
- Abortion is a tool of the patriarchy.
Hawkins also expressed her belief that women should want to start a family, saying that “married women are 30 points happier than unmarried women”. She argued that to achieve happiness as a society, everyone should want to do hard things, such as getting married and having a baby to subvert the “anti-baby bias” in our culture.
“We have a system pushing so hard against women and families,” Hawkins said. “They want women to be single, they want women to be childless. They want women to focus on their careers in their peak productive years, working their hardest. And then when she’s 40, 45, and she wakes up and decides she wants to have a child.”
Hawkins believes that women shouldn’t be the only people responsible for choosing to have children, however. She disagrees with the popular pro-choice slogan, “My body, my choice”. She argues that not only should men have the choice to have their child, but that a woman doesn’t want to hear men tell them abortion is her choice. Kristin Hawkins
“She wants to hear, ‘You don’t have to do this. I’ll help you,’” Hawkins said. “But when she hears ‘Your body, your choice’ or ‘It’s your decision,’ she hears ‘Go have an abortion.’ And it’s absolutely tragic because he doesn’t want to have an abortion, she doesn’t want abortion. She’s looking for one person to tell her not to have an abortion.”
After once again opening the floor to questions from audience members, Hawkins ended her event thanking the pro-life movement at NMSU. She said she was surprised to see so many pro-life advocates and so few pro-choice, but that the anti-abortion movement would “ultimately be successful” due to the community coming together.
While campus pro-choice groups declined to attend Hawkins’ event, there is at least one thing that both pro- and anti-abortion advocates agree on – that New Mexico and NMSU are central to the abortion access fight, now more than ever.
“Her directly supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade and showing up here shows how important NMSU is as a battleground in the abortion debate,” said Shadyn Roy, president of NMSU’s Students for Reproductive Rights.
“What we’re seeing is the pro-choice groups are a little bit dormant or not as organized right now,” Roy said. “This is a push for them to come forward and start organizing their own groups to fight back and it’s working with us, not directly engaging in them and still getting support for our groups. I see this as a win for the future. And hopefully for our groups.”
