Kristan Hawkins: Pro-Life Leader

Dr. Morse introduces Kristan Hawkins and presents the Ruth Institute Pro-Life Leadership Award

Transcript

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse: We invented this special award just for Kristan Hawkins, the Pro-Life Leadership Award. Look at you there. Let’s have a cheer for her. Let’s have a cheer for this girl. Love it. I love it. Well, I had a few slides to show people about how great you are, but maybe we can just skip that and go right to your talk. I have a couple of slides about your great accomplishments and everything. Do you want to go straight into your talk?

Kristan Hawkins: There’s nowhere to go but down after today of seeing Roe versus Wade reversed.

Dr. Morse: How about that? How about that? You know, I asked her staff to send me a few photos of her and some of her accomplishments so I could scroll through them and show you like I did with the other guests. And it was just photo after photo of her with a mob of young people holding fantastic signs, some of which were the slogans of the organization, Students for Life of America, and some of which were hand-lettered signs. And they’re just hysterical, a lot of them.

Very, very proud of you, Kristan Hawkins, and very proud of the work you’ve done. Kristan Hawkins, the Ruth Institute, Pro-life Leadership Award is for you. I’m going to hand it to you in a minute, virtually, but we want to hear what you have to say. Can we give a warm Louisiana welcome to Kristin Mercer Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, leading us to a post-Roe world. That’s what she’s been talking about for years, the post-Roe world.

All right. I’m going to sit down.

Take it away, girl.

Kristan Hawkins: Thank you, Dr. J. I want to thank everyone there at the Ruth Institute for this incredible honor. I want to thank your organization for rolling with the punches, with my flight was canceled yesterday and after a couple of hours to figure out there was no possible way to get to Louisiana. I’ve been getting a call late at night from our executive vice president who said it’s going to be tomorrow, you must be here.

And when your vice president tells you have to do something as a press organization, you do that thing. And so I want to thank you guys for rolling with these punches. I’m so sorry I can’t be with you in person. You’re not missing much. I’m pretty sleep deprived for a couple of days, so I’m going to try to make my remarks as snappy as possible.

But what incredible honor to be able to speak with you tonight on this historic day that we’ve had. It has just been absolutely incredible. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled.

Friends, that’s what I was honored to read today at the steps of the Supreme Court to the pro-life generation. To those young people who all could have been aborted for the price of a PlayStation. Everyone who was standing behind me today at the court was conceived and born after 1973, who proudly called themselves the pro-life generation and who takes this mantle very seriously that we are now the first post-Roe generation.

What an incredible honor to be here with you today, to speak about this moment that we’ve experienced and really to speak to you all at the Ruth Institute for all the work you all have been doing to identify the core problems that have led to this culture of abortion, that we are still combating and we’re going to be combating for years to come.

And more importantly, an institution that has to offer real solutions to the problems our nation faces. So I am so deeply honored to be with you tonight.

We are the survivors of the sexual revolution. We have survived Roe by the grace of God. Roe did not survive us. And if I have anything to say about it, the gods of the sexual revolution will not survive our generation either. But today, I want to frame my remarks in the context of a story. My story. Many people may or may not know my story.

I grew up in West Virginia with my parents and my younger sister. My father was raised by a mostly single mother who lived in poverty his whole life. Thankfully, graduated college, got a good paying, blue collar job immediately after graduation. Had a job, sadly, that he hated every day for 40 years, married my mother, and is now retired.

But when I look back at my life and how we’ve gotten to this, how I’ve gotten to this point, I remember the moments I had with my dad growing up. He was sort of my main driver in life, always pushing me to do my best, to be my best. Getting a full ride to college and scholarships wasn’t a hope that my father had, it was an understanding that I would achieve those things.

From his rise from poverty and his dedication to his career and to our family, he really instilled in me that we have to work hard for everything that we’re given. But he really wanted me to have what he would say in a lot of the lectures and the talks back and forth from volleyball and basketball tournaments, he wanted me to have the choices in my life that he felt he’d never had. And he wanted me to go to college and pushed me to seek my career dreams. I think he still, I don’t know, maybe after today he’ll ease up. I think he was still, like, disappointed a couple of years ago that I didn’t become a lawyer. To him that was like the peak.

I’m just like a crazy activist in Washington, D.C. But to him, that’s where he wanted his daughter, his oldest daughter. But also, I knew growing up, while he wanted to have a career, while I wanted to achieve these educational goals, I knew getting married and having children was always part of the plan.

I had a wonderful example of my mother, who I always saw hustling from home to work to church, back to home, understanding that being a working mother is not easy, but it’s possible. That you are the first one up in the morning and you are the last one to go to bed every night.

And I think if you had asked me in high school, and even in college, really, if I were a feminist, I would have replied enthusiastically, yes, hell yes, actually, because I knew I was equal to the men in my grade. I never doubted it. I worked harder than most of them. Most all of them. I had better grades than all of them and the better scholarships to show for it.

But today, at 37, I don’t embrace that feminist label with as much enthusiasm as I once did. But I will tell you, I do use it, but simply just to make them mad most of the time, even though I’m pretty dang sure that my life that I lead is a testimony to what the first and even second wave of feminists said that they wanted, that they had vision for women in our lifetime.

I’m college educated. I run an organization of nearly 100 employees of mostly all women. I’m the primary breadwinner for my home. I’m the mother to four amazing children, a wife to my husband, a selfless man who’s given up his career as a school teacher to homeschool our children while I travel. I think I live a life that they would have said was an empowered feminist life.

But I’m not welcome in the feminist fan club. And today at the Supreme Court, those who gathered to support the right to end the life of a child simply because he or she is inconvenient, they would tell you that I am not welcome in their little feminist club. The self-proclaimed leaders of today’s mainstream intersectional feminist movement, the lingering leaders from the 1960s and 1970s, the second and the third wave of feminism.

They would definitely say, Kristen Hawkins, president of Students for Life, is not welcome and you cannot be a feminist and are not welcome in their movement. Just as I would say, if you look back at the first wave of feminists, the first wave of feminists in our nation, I call them the original feminist badasses. Women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Willard, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, they wouldn’t be welcomed today in the modern feminist movement either, and it’s over one issue. And that issue is the violence of abortion.

The fact that we don’t believe a woman should or can purchase her freedom with the blood of her own child. This exclusion and discrimination against this, the pro-life generation that we’ve seen has been demonstrated countless times. Like I said this morning at the Supreme Court was a perfect example to verbal abuse and taunting and bullying.

This weekend, tonight, the quote unquote, night of rage. My mother and father have called me multiple times to make sure I’m secure in our hotel here in Washington, D.C. There will be vandalism. There will be physical violence that takes place. Our national headquarters in Virginia is now being guarded by paid security, security that we have gone without for the last 16 years.

Our website, as I speak right now, I believe, is under attack for the umpteenth time in the past month. New equipment and safety protocols have had to be installed. Today in Washington, D.C. I had a bodyguard on me, next to me the entire time. This is the price that we are paying for rejecting the violence of abortion, for standing up to today’s “intersectionalist” feminists.

Actually, I would say to be a real feminist, to be a real feminist to the left, the deranged left, means falling in line, falling in line with their violent agenda of abortion. And to be honest, the pro-life generation rejects it outright, unapologetically.

We go to work every day, whether it’s on our campuses and our state capitals. You know, at the Women’s March in 2017, right after President Trump was elected, we were there, Students for Life. We jumped in front of the Women’s March as a lot marched in front of the White House with a large banner saying women have been betrayed by abortion, abortion betrays women, only to be harassed, only to have to pull back my teenage leaders who are there because the women who are my mother’s age and older were becoming too violent for us.

But we were there. We went to the Women’s March in 2017. We’ve been to the Women’s March every year. We went every year that it’s been hosted even this fall. And we continued to go to these types of feminist events to stand for those who’ve been violently taken away from us, to stand for the women who’ve died alone on the cold table in the abortionists-filled facility thinking that it was their only option, their only way out, their only way for freedom.

We’ve been there for the millions who’ve been duped by the lies of the predatory abortion industry and Planned Parenthood while falling prey, falling victim to that lie that they must choose between the life of their child and their education or their career goals.

We were there for the Women’s March and every Women’s March since for the post-abortive men and women who joined us today at the Supreme Court who see our signs: Abortion betrays women, who nod silently and put their head down. We are there for the young women, the young women who have been misogynistically told since we were in elementary school by the Supreme Court that abortion is somehow critical for us to succeed.

And quite honestly, when you’re wondering why there’s so much anger out there, why we experience hatred and violence against Students for Life on college campuses or at the Supreme Court, this is why, because they’ve been told that their freedom, that their equality, that their opportunity in life is tied to the violent destruction of abortion.

But we go to these places, not because I enjoy getting spit at, not because I enjoy getting yelled at, not because I enjoy getting siren blasted in my ear. I’m still having a hard time hearing out of my right ear from today. We go there because we know this movement is bigger than any one of us, because there are people who need our voice and the thought for the well-being of another. The thing that makes motherhood and being human so uniquely beautiful is exactly what differentiates us from the modern, broken, mainstream, intersectional feminist movement.

Men and women, I reject the lies of the mainstream feminist movement that exclaim that abortion sets us free, that abortion is needed to secure our freedom, that I have to pay somebody else to commit a violent act, to do harm on someone weaker than me, in order to have control of my body and my life. Abortion has and always will be the opposite of empowerment and has, quite frankly, no place in our civil society.

As the Supreme Court has aptly said today, empowering women for greatness in any field they choose, including the family, used to be the goal of feminism. And the first-wave feminists had this right. They actually had that goal of empowering women right there at the forefront of what they were championing with rational voices. It’s a stark contrast between those first-wave feminists and misogynistic realities facing women today.

We know the British feminist foremother, Mary Wollstonecraft, believed education was a key to female liberation, argued that girls and boys in the 1700s should be co-educated and that women and men should share parental responsibilities. This is a woman who today feminists have apparently forgotten all of her lessons. As just two days ago, the Department of Education has decided that they want to completely obliterate the distinction between boys and girls in schools, running women’s sports a moot point by letting bigger, stronger, faster boys compete in divisions that were designed to foster competition among women, to help women succeed, to help women receive scholarships that they normally may not have access to, to complete their higher education goals and reach their career goals in life.

Now we’re being told we have to use terms even like birthing person, erasing the identity and unique beauty of the woman. I found fascinating today at the Supreme Court, all the pro-choice men out there holding signs about women. And I kept asking them what was a woman? And none of them had an answer for me. But don’t worry, they had a sign.

Mothers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought for women’s rights for 60 years. A devoted mother of seven children herself. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, you know, a world where killing a child is the complete opposite of empowerment. Feminism for her was elevating the women to such a degree in society that their maternal powers were actually revered.

Instead, it’s a Planned Parenthood generation of feminists who chose regress over progress. They’ve obliterated the very meaning of feminism, dragged women back to the era before feminism, when women felt they had to kill their child in order to succeed.

Another feminist foremother, Mattie Brinkerhoff, was an early women’s rights activist who wrote, “When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society. So when a woman destroys a life of her unborn child, it is evidence of either by education or circumstances, she has been greatly wronged.

Today’s feminists have created the very conditions that lead women to feel that abortion is their only choice. Even the Guttmacher Institute, named after Planned Parenthood’s second president, Allen Guttmacher, the former president of American Eugenics Society, admitted that women typically seek abortion because they lack the support and resources they need to flourish and feel that they have no other choice.

It is modern feminists who propose that we help society and alleviate these stresses by nuking the nuclear family, by championing no fault divorce, by advancing government programs that disincentivize marriage, and encourage fatherlessness. Make no mistake, this is a worldview of destruction that leads to the hopelessness that has perpetuated 63 million abortion deaths since it wrapped its hands around the neck of American society. Sixty-three million.

Another feminist foremother, Dr. Charlotte Lozier, was one of the first female doctors in America. When a man brought a teenage girl to her for abortion, Dr. Lozier told him that this was shameful, revolting, unnatural, unlawful. She delivered to the young woman any assistance in her power to render at the proper time and caution to counsel her against a fearful act of abortion.

Today’s feminists have taken over the medical field, which was designed to heal, with their destructive idea that somehow women’s fertility is a disease. In fact, Obamacare officially labeled pregnancy a preventable disease. And if women’s fertility is disease, the building of families is in danger. Consequently, so much of women’s medical care has now turned from healing reproductive ailments to finding any possible way to block and inhibit the natural, healthy fertility that is uniquely female.

Women have superpowers, I remind our college students all the time, that we can gestate, lactate and, yes, men, you should be very jealous. We can menstruate. These are natural abilities that we have that make us uniquely female. They’re not diseases that must be masked or covered up. To the rampant use and abuse of hormonal contraception, our doctors tell us it’s better to be drugged at 13 and 14 years old, injected and planted and packed with hormones than allow our bodies to function naturally.

And when nature does breakthrough and new life is formed as a result of sexual expression, the same medical professionals offer to sell us more poisoning, suction, dismemberment for our own precious children. Today in America, women have full equality with men under the law. I know you won’t be reading that anytime soon in The Washington Post or The New York Times or heck, Amnesty International’s Instagram post this evening.

We have incredible freedoms in the United States, freedoms that women in other nations can scarcely hope to attain in the future. We can be successful and achieve the career of our dreams no matter our background or circumstances. By and large, American women live without fear of female genital mutilation. To live without fear of becoming a child bride to a violent abuser or being robbed of our basic human rights.

Unlike our sisters in other nations, we have been guaranteed our right to vote, to property, to apparent family wealth, to achieve our educational goals, to work in a career of our choice, to drive cars, to walk beside my husband or when I’m mad, walk in front of my husband on the street. These realities represent the triumph. They should represent the triumph of feminism.

And yet, it is exactly those who call themselves feminists, those who call themselves, quote unquote, the progressives who spend their days fearmongering about the terrible outcomes for women if they’re not allowed to kill their children in a post-Roe America. Killing our children was never progress and will never be a progress. To flourish is progress. To destroy is regress.

And it is the pro-life movement that promotes flourishing for women and families and children by coming alongside them with hope, resources, working to drown out the pro-abortion voices that taunt and lie to them and frighten them into an abortion. And while it seems like modern feminists hate women in general, well, if they even will define what a woman is, they especially hate you and I.

They disdain us. They disdain those who refuse to relinquish the truth that human life is made in the image of an Almighty Creator, that we were created out of love, and are being held in existence by a loving God. That reality comes with the objective truths and moral commands that we must follow it if we wish to flourish.

They hate us. And sadly, this ire towards us, towards our God have grown to such a terror, which remains, quite frankly, unchecked by the Biden administration, by the way. That many pro-life advocates are now facing threats of violence above and beyond the normal assaults and vandalization that we have grown accustomed to in the last 15 years in this woke world.

Since May, more than two dozen pregnancy health centers have had their properties vandalized or even catastrophically damaged in firebombings. Groups like Jane’s Revenge and Ruth Sent Us, referring to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, ironically even admitted Roe versus Wade was a terrible decision, have made it known that their mission is to harass and threaten pro-lifers because we want to stop babies from being slaughtered and that they want them to continue to be killed.

It really comes down to that. It’s actually very simple. I mean, I don’t know why would I, I shouldn’t be surprised that those who advocate for violence behind the closed doors of the Planned Parenthood are the same ones openly committing it in our streets. I cannot today, I could not travel in public without an armed guard. So we cannot hold events with young people without now hiring armed security. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve had to now for the first time hire armed security for our headquarters in Virginia.

We’ve had to cancel rallies where we could not find security, a security firm even willing to protect us, because it really is that dangerous to carry out our activism without it. We’ve had pregnant staffers who’ve had to change plans, declined to attend events because they can no longer risk putting themselves and their preborn children’s lives at risk. And even with all the precautions that we’re taking, the trainings we’re giving our young people and our staff members, we know that our continued pro-life witness, our continued activism, will put us in the path of deranged, pro-abortion terrorists.

Amidst this massive victory today, amidst this huge celebration that we know will save hundreds of lives, we are now facing a reality of a nation that is divided over the so-called right to kill children. Tonight, as I speak, pro-abortion protesters in just 40 minutes are ready to begin their night of rage in Washington, DC.

Our work is not done. Yes, we are hated. But to be honest with you, I think we’re in pretty good company because anyone who has sought to upend the status quo has faced the same. We can look not much further back than in the civil rights movement in our nation. Being hated absolutely cannot deter us from the important work that lies ahead of us.

We must be, as Scripture says, sober and alert, knowing that your opponent, the devil, is prowling like a lion, looking for someone to devour. And that is the actual nature of evil when it comes into contact with the good. It seeks to devour. But we know who ultimately has won this war.

So where do we go from here? What do we do? I would challenge you tonight. My call for you tonight is to live, despite all of the hate, to live your pro-life, your pro-family values loudly. During her confirmation hearings, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was blocked by Senator Feinstein for these values. Feinstein said to bear, I think in your case, Professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that is our concern.

I urge you tonight to emulate Justice Barrett in living your dogma loudly in your life, because we know the fruit it bore when Justice Barrett lived it in hers. Advocates, go rally joyfully at pro-life events. Wear your pro-life shirts, bring your bullhorn, hold your rosary outside of the abortion facility. Sing praise and worship music with abandon, as I did today at the Supreme Court.

John 13:35 Jesus said, “By the will, all men know that you are my disciples. If you love one another, your love in itself is a witness.” Openly discuss your faith and your values. Talk about the controversial issues. Bring levity to these conversations and reclaim them. These conversations cannot remain to stigmatize, to discuss in our Christian circles.

Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victims. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

It’s sobering to say it, but this victory probably would not have taken 50 years to achieve if we had not believed the lie. that it is is more offensive to talk about abortion at the dinner table than it is to watch our neighbor, our sister, our friend walk into Planned Parenthood thinking she had no other choice.

Parents, show your joy in your vocation. Take delight in your children in public. Buck the narrative that says children will drag us down. Modern feminists promised us equality, happiness, empowerment, independence, progress. The reality? Modern feminists deliver the opposite while pro-family believers made progress, lived independence, empowered women, experienced happiness, furthered equality and justice.

We are the ones fighting till no woman feels like she has to choose between the life of her child and her career aspirations. We are the ones insisting that the right to life belongs to all, not just some humans. We are the ones offering hope and healing to mothers and fathers and families broken by abortion in their own lives. We are the ones demanding that the medical community stop treating women’s fertility like a leprous disease. That is what progress looks like.

Friends, I’ll close my story tonight as how I began my speech telling you about my life. You know, I came from a family of no connection to blue collar home in West Virginia. I ended up graduating the top of my class in college and high school and meeting those aspirations that my father had for me.

I got hired by the Bush administration out of college. I married my high school sweetheart. I was hired to launch Students for Life in 2006, and we had our first child, Gunner, in 2009. And soon after Gunner’s birth, we came face to face with the reality of suffering and uncertainty, as our infant boy was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a disease that can be tested on in utero. And many parents sadly choose when they receive a positive diagnosis to end the life of these children before they are born.

Jonathan and I knew that every child that we would conceive would have a one in four chance of having CF. But we continued to have children and continue to create a home for our family and welcome our children into our lives.

We have a nuclear family that the modern feminist movement hopes to obliterate. A married couple proud of our Christian faith, welcoming more than the acceptable 2.1 children, 2.1 children and eight carbon footprints in my house. Half of my children have cystic fibrosis. We homeschool. We travel the country in our RV.

I’ve looked at the prescriptions of modern feminism and the misery that they’ve been creating for half a century, and I did the exact opposite in my life. As a result, my kids are more well adjusted than most. My husband and I are closer than most, and we have never regretted the choice to live the way we do.

Friends, the moment to embrace being counter-cultural has come, and it makes a difference. Absolutely makes a difference. I’m thoroughly convinced it is time to confound the world with our joy, to show them the peace that they longed for. That you are not placed on this earth by a mere accident. That we know sometimes what the future may hold may not be easy, but God is moving, and life is winning. And I am eternally grateful to be continuing fighting alongside each one of you. Thank you.

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse: Thank you so much. Let’s have a big round of applause for Miss Kristin Hawkins, who truly, truly did her best to be here with us. And we so appreciate her organization and all of their contributions. Thank you so much.

I do want to show you a couple of the things that she has achieved. This is a photo of her with her family. Of her four children, two of them have cystic fibrosis. So when she’s a mom, she’s got some serious momming she has to do.

I wanted to show you a few photos of the many speeches that she has given on campus. And they have numerous organizations. I’m going to show you that. And she is often heckled on campus. And you can see these very classy opponents that she has here with these obnoxious signs. This is part of her daily life, you know, is to go on campus and have this happen. And as you heard her say, she now needs armed guards a lot of the time.

I want to tell you about one project they did. They collected baby booties. I don’t know where they got the number, but it was like a million baby booties or something, and they deposited them on the on the Capitol Steps lawn. And so it made quite an impact.

As she mentioned today, they were in front of the Supreme Court, and they have been at the Supreme Court on many occasions. These students have with their signs and all these wonderful things that they have talked about, right, and drawn attention to. And the mission of Students for Life of America is to, in the end, abolish abortion. They have never made any bones about it, that that’s what their organization is about to recruit, train and mobilize the pro-life generation to abolish abortion.

This slide, I got to show you this slide. I get exhausted just looking at these numbers of things that they have done, the number of chapters that they have. They have over 1200, almost 1300 campus chapters on high schools and colleges. So this is truly an organization that has achieved a lot.

About the Ruth Institute

The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.

Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

To get more information or schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.

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