President of Project 2025 partner brags about their hands-on role passing abortion bans at the state level
Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins celebrates “major wins” and “ongoing efforts” to “make abortion unthinkable and unavailable throughout America”
Published
Citation From the July 17, 2024, edition of Students for Life of America's The Explicitly Pro-Life Podcast
KRISTAN HAWKINS (PRESIDENT, STUDENTS FOR LIFE OF AMERICA): You name it, we’re trying it, because everything is on the line in this post-Roe moment and this post-Roe generation that we face. So join me today as I’m going to highlight some of our major wins and our ongoing efforts to make abortion unthinkable and unavailable throughout America.
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Abortion is a federal, state, and local issue, all levels, not just one. But, I do want to talk about Students For Life Action’s work at the state legislative level. Like I said, this doesn't get talked about a lot, but this is important because when you look at our landscape 2 years out from post-Roe, abortions are still happening. But now, we have whole sections of the United States, that are safe havens, that are no-kill states versus other states, California, Illinois, New York, go on to name Democrat states, which are, you know, basically free-to-kill states. So I'm going to highlight some of these legislative victories that you probably haven't heard about.
The first one I want to talk to you about is Oklahoma's Life at Conception Act. Oklahoma was the second state to pick up Students for Life Action's Life at Conception Act after Arkansas, which also passed it. These bills prohibit all abortion. No abortion. And they make committing abortion a punishable crime of a $100,000, up to 10 years imprisonment. So, make it a criminal penalty for an abortion is to commit abortions.
These are major steps. These – neither one of the bills, the bills in our the the bill in Arkansas, the bill in Oklahoma, neither one of them have exceptions to allow children to be killed based on what happened, during their conception, the events of the night of their conception, i.e., children who are conceived in rape still matter and they're not authorized to be killed in these bills.
These bills were really important to pass.
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In Florida, Students For Life Action pushed hard to see Florida's Heartbeat Abortion Prevention Act introduced and then ultimately pass the fact that we were standing – our student leaders from Florida state were standing behind Governor DeSantis the night he signed this bill into a law, and has now recently gone into effect with their state Supreme Court ruling.
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Before this bill went into effect, Florida was the fifth highest abortion center in our nation, one of the largest – world's largest and international abortion destinations with women coming into Miami from Central and South America. This bill also insured millions of dollars of funding for Florida's pregnancy care network. So super excited about that.
The other legislative win we saw this spring was in Kentucky. Going back to that question about the rape exception, there was a legislative effort by some Republicans and mostly Democrats in the state to add an exception to Kentucky's abortion prevention acts to allow abortions in cases of rape. We had to fight against some of our friends in the pro-life movement conservative movement to say that we are holding the line on this issue. We weren't going to give in. We had to do mail and email and text messages, reminding voters about what their pro-life, elected officials had done. At the end of the day, when the dust cleared, the exceptions bill was dropped, and we are victorious, and babies are being saved in Kentucky.
We've also seen a lot of legislation move forward in states that haven't passed yet but been introduced. West Virginia introduced our chemical abortion pill legislation, which is – will actually restrict the sale of chemical abortion pills. It will be a full prevention act. Wyoming was the first day in the nation, a year ago, to actually pass our chemical abortion prevention act, a full ban on chemical abortion pills, which is important because rural states are more of the target from the abortion industry for chemical abortion pills. We will have other states, going into January 2025, thanks to our legislative primary efforts in the Republican state primaries, where we'll be able to introduce a lot more chemical abortion legislation, whether it's full prevention acts, full bans, or a law that we introduced in Oklahoma and other states, that we made progress on this year, that hasn't fully passed yet, but the Clean Water For All Life Act, which will say that if you're going to commit chemical abortions, you have to be in the state. You can't be an outside the state predator, and you have to collect the medical waste that your procedure generates, which actually makes it untenable for these illegal chemical abortion pill, like, schemes, to mail into states. So we have a lot more work to do.
I'm also very, very excited, we saw the South Carolina Heartbeat Protection – Abortion Protection Act, actually finally pass – repass. That will soon be going into effect, and I'll get into this in the next segment, but because of some of our legislative work, it's – and the primary work that we've done, it's now being predicted that our Life at Conception Act will be able to pass and move forward in South Carolina in 2025, ending abortions in the Palmetto State.