I'm Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI. We're a coalition of patriotic Americans who want to stop AI from taking our freedoms. Big tech is propping up AI-powered mass surveillance and exploiting our children online. This is not the future we want. The Alliance is working hard to ensure that we put Americans first. Join us at secureainow.org to learn more. Paid for by the Alliance for Secure AI. We have to remember in the pro-life movement, our mission is to go onto campuses, is to speak the truth nationally that every human is created in the image of our maker and has infinite value and dignity. That is the child in the womb, and that's also her. College campuses have become ground zero for the fight over abortion, with pro-lifers and abortion activists competing for the hearts and minds of the next generation. One of the pro-life groups taking their messages to universities is Students for Life Action, and they say they're seeing real results despite serious headwinds. In this episode, we sit down with the president of the group, Kristen Hawkins, to discuss the pro-life movement's successes and setbacks on college campuses across the country. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of our nation, and Alliance Defending Freedom is committed to protecting it, including by making sure that Christian organizations are free to live out their faith. But right now, Chicago Public Schools is discriminating against the private Christian college, Moody Bible Institute, because it only hires people who share its biblical beliefs. The school district is blocking Moody's elementary education students from participating in Chicago's student teaching program. 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Their Alive and Thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy, backed by ongoing support from trained plant experts to help you plan, choose, and care for your new greenery. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% off their first purchase when using the code WIRE at checkout. That's an additional 20% off Better Plants and Better Growing at FastGrowingTrees.com using the code WIRE at checkout. FastGrowingTrees.com, code WIRE. Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use WIRE to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Kristen, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. So you do a lot of campus outreach regarding the pro-life issue. And of course, we know that young women in general tend to be pretty pro-choice. But is that true at the college level? What are you seeing there? There's a lot of fascinating trends going on with Gen Z versus Gen Y. I've been doing this long enough. We've actually transitioned a whole generation, right? From the snowflake millennials to now Gen Z. I mean, I think it's true, certainly when we look at the demographics. young men have gone right and they've shifted hard right in fact um charlie's i think it was his last tv show he was on laura the night before he was murdered he and i were texting there had been a study that came out in september from i think it was abc and they did it of youth voters who voted for trump versus kamala and it shows kind of what we're seeing on campuses pretty accurately where they did women and men who voted for trump young women and men who voted for kamala And the young men who voted for Trump, they were asked to rank one through 13 what success in their life looked like. For young men who voted for President Trump, number one marker of success was having children. I think marriage was like third or fourth. For women who voted for President Trump, young women, it was like four for having kids. It was the fourth marker of success. For men who voted for Kamala Harris, it was 10. for women who voted for Kamala Harris, it was 12 out of 13. The only thing that beat out having kids was a social media influencer, was 13 for all four demographics. And so I think that shows you what we're facing on college campuses right now, where we have seen this shift of young men who will vocally say they oppose abortion. We have younger women who've moved somewhat conservative who will kind of talk, But then you have this opposite of the pendulum where you just have unhinged. And we've all seen these girls on TikTok and on Twitter, right? The blue haired, purple haired, green haired, septum ring girl who's just unhinged. One of my things is that I've been really focusing on when I'm reaching out to other pro-life leaders or folks that are on college campuses doing ministry work is reminding everyone that she's also part of our mission too. That you know especially as X and social media has moved so hard right And it kind of like that the trending influencer thing of like let make fun of the girls Let you know blame Adami success all on the white middle Karens who own cats and then talk about let taking away their right to vote and some of this crazy stuff that we starting to see We have to remember in the pro-life movement, our mission is to go onto campuses, is to speak the truth nationally that every human is created in the image of our maker and has infinite value and dignity. That is the child in the womb. And that's also her. And that's really where the conversation shifting on campus is of who gave you value and do you as a 21, 22-year-old young woman, do you have value? We believe you do. You have the same value as a child within you and you're both equally valuable and worthy of a great, wonderful life. How long have you been doing this on campus? I started Students for Life in 2006. So this is my 20th year. What kind of, in that time, have you seen trends in one way or another? So basically what I want to know is obviously we have the divergent groups of women, but are we seeing any kind of success overall with the pro-life movement or do you see more in the other direction with young women? Definitely seen a lot of success. I mean, we've seen the trends going from Gen Y to Gen Z, right? Gen Y, it was harder to have a conversation about abortion. Don't talk about that. That's not polite. That's too difficult. Or Gen Z is much more direct. They don't mind the direct conversation, which is why videos of me on campuses go viral now. or before, even though I am a millennial, you know, I wasn't, I was born in the wrong decade, apparently. I'm either an X or a Z. I'm definitely not a Y, right? The Gen Zs value that directness. But I do think, you know, we've seen substantial success in the broader pro-life movement, reversing row. The thing that, you know, we talked about when I launched Students for Life, preparing for this moment, everyone told us and me that it was impossible and it was imprudent to even think that Roe would ever be reversed, let alone prepare an army for that moment. Now we saw Planned Parenthood, you know, the nation's largest abortion vendor, defunded of 80 percent of their taxpayer dollars for one year this past year because of the BBB and the leadership we saw in the House. So we've made remarkable gains. We have now whole regions of our country that are legally abortion-free or heavily restricted. Now, illegal chemical abortion pills are flooding into their borders because Pam Bondi and the DOJ refused to enforce the Federal Comstock Act, which would prevent this illegal shipping of chemical abortion pills into the pro-life states. But we have made progress, and we've seen this progress now playing out in the culture, where young men are valuing having children, getting married. We're seeing some women come along, but we definitely have also seen the rise and the counter of, you know, the resistance of the Dobbs decision. And you saw young women very quickly go hard left when they were in for so long demographically. And when we polled, we did, you know, focus groups and, you know, qualitative and quantitative polling, you had a lot of people that said they were in the middle. They were the mushy middle, right? The, I don't like abortion, but I don't want to be considered pro-abortion or pro-choice. I want to be in the middle. When the Dobbs decision came out, it forced those in the middle to pick a side. And the left Planned Parenthood went hard for these young women, pulling them over to their side. And so now we're trying to reach back and pull them back to a position. I think our polling this January with YouGov shows us, it's kind of surprising, I think, for folks who are on the ground. Nearly seven in 10 Gen Z and Gen Y voters want to see restrictions on abortion. Nine in 10 say that common sense safety standards on chemical abortion pills should be in place, which the Trump administration has not done. I mean, those are some pretty good numbers. We saw a 34% shift. Three in 10 said they'd be more likely to vote for politicians to restrict abortion if they felt that women had the resources they need after choosing life. And that was a seven-point Overton window shift between a pro-choice person at the beginning of the poll towards the end of the poll with that question. So there's definitely common ground and there's definitely room to move. We are not even in the middle yet when it comes to abortion in most of our states. We've seen, we've been tracking the religious, almost revival that was happening over the last few months, more receptivity among college students in general to religious messages. You said your message is primarily one of who gives you value. Do you see that working among women, particularly on the left on college campuses? We'll find out this spring when I'm back on campuses. My tour is called Abortion is Human Sacrifice. So that's going to be a very interesting conversation with young women who've been told for decades to sacrifice their child by the feminist movement, the lies of the feminist movement. I think we have seen, especially since Charlie's assassination, we've definitely seen this huge shift, right? And this openness towards religion, towards faith. I mean, I get text messages from kids I've met years ago going, what Bible should I get? Which one? Is there a podcast that you listen to? That's great. The bad news is this is the least church generation in American history. so the pew poll that came out in june of this year this was the first youth generation that polled under 50 self-identifying as christian not even living out christian values just self-identifying that was the first time in their history that it was under 50 so we've seen this huge spike which is amazing but it's because we are starting at a very low ground and that's something we have to realize when we on camp when I on campuses for example I cannot take for granted I can assume that the person I talking to even understands the gospel or what Christians believe at all Now you said that Gen Zs prefer a more direct approach. What have you found is the most effective way to speak to those women who are on the left? Not necessarily the blue hair, but like your cosmopolitan, coastal, young woman who's like fashionable but likes uh is it considers herself pro-choice how what do you find is successful with that group because that seems to be like i've never heard that phrase cosmopolitan coastal that's so cool but you know what i mean yeah no i know what you mean no i i love speaking to them and that's they're the whole reason i'm going to campuses right i get frustrated if i walk into a room and it's a bunch of pro-life kits right Because they've all seen my videos. They're probably smarter than, they are smarter than me, half of them, right? I'm there for these women who we're trying to bring out of these lies. What I see on campuses and what, I always wish I could have like a little, almost like a GoPro on me that would animate what's going on in their brains because I get the best view on campus because I can see the little like animated light bulbs going off on their heads and you can see them processing what I'm saying. And even if they really hate me and they've come because they really hate me. They have a really hard time hating what I'm saying. I was thinking about these girls. I was at Harvard, I think it was last spring. And these two girls come in, middle of my speech. They're in a huff. They've got their midriffs on. Everybody else is very conservative in this room. I knew they were like, they're there for a fight. They're there for the Q&A. And I started talking about the lies that the second wave feminists told American women. You know, this belief that you aren't strong enough, that you have to choose between having your child and having your career or completing your educational goals, that this was the opposite of what feminism was supposed to be, right? Abortion is the opposite of empowerment because it says you are not strong enough. You can give us money, those of us who profit off of your despair, and we'll take care of it for you while you can remain chained to your desk and make a profit for somebody else for all your childbearing years, right? And then when you're 40 years old and you want to have kids, then you can give another industry, the IVF industry, a bunch of money to have maybe a 50 percent success rate. Right. So I started talking to these girls that entered the room and I was talking about how are we actually having hard conversations? Abortion does not allow us. The abortion lobby in D.C. does not allow us to have actual hard conversations. We are the only organization at Students for Life Action that's actually been campaigning and lobbying for a paid family leave policy. For example, expanded child tax credit. And there's conservative ways to do it, right? Borrowing from your own Social Security, not a payroll tax. There's legitimate policy debates of how do we make these things work. But we can't have honest conversations about supporting families because of abortion. Because the other side just doesn't even allow. Like we're trying to introduce a bill, a bereaved Parents Rights Act right now in Congress, been searching for a Democrat to co-sponsor it. All this bill does is say if you've had a miscarriage, the hospital is legally required to tell you you can get your child and you can take your child to a funeral home and bury your child and you can grieve your child. Your child doesn't have to be cremated with medical waste. And we can't get a Democrat to co-sponsor that bill. Why? because Democrats can't admit that in a miscarriage you've lost a child and you can't treat that child with dignity because if you do that that undermines their entire argument for abortion so we can't have actual hard conversations because of abortion and so these girls I just it was so much fun because I was talking to them and they were like you could tell they were struggling to like they wanted to yell at me but they couldn't right because I was speaking their language of like yes this is what We have always said as feminists that we believe she's saying it and trying to do it. But yeah, we hate her because she's anti-abortion. And so the girls, I ran out of the room in the middle of the speech because, you know, like a woman, my cycle started. It was so much fun. That's how I never forget that day because I'm like, this needs to be a reality TV show over here. I run out of the room and these girls meet me in the bathroom and they're like, we have to talk. I mean, I was there for like 45 minutes talking to these girls after the event because they just they were trying to figure out how to reconcile their beliefs about me. And they they they really hated that I was against abortion and I was taking away their rights. But then everything else I said made so much sense to them. And they're the reason we go to the campuses because we have to win. We have to win her like. Right. They are the stumbling block. So it's almost like you need to crack that argument before you even worry about the men and whatever. No, I mean, if you think about 2026 and 2028, what it's going to come down to in our country, how close the elections are going to be. I mean, oh, my gosh, the midterms, I'm already freaking out and having nightmares about the midterms, right? We have to win women. It is some of the conversations on our side of the aisle right now on X, for example, and my algorithms all whacked, right, of who I, you know, based on what I do. But it is unhelpful to have some of these conversations that are happening and how we're attacking these women because they are our mission, too. They are our neighbors. And, yes, we can vehemently disagree and tell them we disagree. Like, yes, voting for Zoran Mondami will destroy New York City, as we're all now seeing, right? But we need to be able to have conversations with them in a reasonable, respectful manner because they're actually part of our mission, too, is to win them over. And just speaking as like a formerly liberal young woman, I would say that is the linchpin issue that will flip a female voter because, you know, people don't like high taxes, you know, and they're not passionate about it, you know, but they are passionate when someone says you're being attacked Yeah Your rights are being attacked Your life will be over if you do not have this specific right So I would say like that if you can figure out how to massage your message for that group like that your key Yeah. And it's so important. The problem is that I'm seeing right now is I'm getting attacked on my own side. Like, oh, you're a raging feminist. There's too many women leaders in the pro-life movement. We need more men. there was literally a podcast recently where the person said you when women fight it's ugly you can't fight moloch satan with women i was like shut the hell up you wear loafers and you're in a freaking podcast room i'm like out on the ground getting like sunburned on campuses and getting spit at and yelled at and death threats so like i don't know join me on a campus and do the hard work um but it's weird because it you know there's like this division within the movement i think within the conservative movement, we got to check ourselves a little bit of like, these women are not our enemies. They are our friends. They are our sisters, our siblings, you know, like they are our neighbors. They're part of our mission too, just as much as these babies that we're trying to save. Because if we don't save her, if we can't convince her that she has value and worth and dignity, it's almost impossible to convince her that the temporarily inconvenient child in her womb for nine months also has value and dignity is worth sacrificing for if she doesn't think her life is worth sacrificing and somebody else sacrificing for her. Well, and there's a lot of young men who want to get married and there's not enough women for them to marry. Yes. So, you know, you have to start recruiting. You're welcome, young men. I'm making you young conservative women who are dateable again. So in terms of the pro-life movement, what do you say is the most immediate policy goal that you want to see? We have to end chemical abortion pills. The leading cause of infant death in our country today are chemical abortions. Chemical abortions are abortions that are happening in homes, in dormitories. There's two pills, Mepristone and Mepristol. The first pill is a progesterone blocker, which starves the baby and kills the baby. Mepristol is the second pill that deuces contractions. A woman is told when the period cramps get too much, the bleeding gets too heavy, to sit on the toilet, get in the bathtub, flush, don't look. We are aborting children into our waterways. Students for Life of America, we actually have proven that the antiprogesterone metabolites, the three metabolites that are mypristone that aren't found in any other pharmaceutical drug in the world are actually in our drinking water now. We've tested water before voice wire treatment, after, and at the tap. It's actually antiprogesterone metabolites, something that any woman who's trying to get pregnant, stay pregnant, men who need healthy brain development all need progesterone. It's in our drinking water. If you live in a pro-life state, I know there's a lot of hubris out there. What state's more pro-life? Like I don't talk to a Texan because we're in here in Tennessee and everyone tells me how great Nashville is, right? Go to Florida. They do the same thing. You hear these things of like, I have lived in a pro-life state. It doesn't matter because in two minutes or I can pull up on my phone eight different websites where a rapist, a minor girl, a minor boy, a deranged parent can go online, order chemical abortion pills. You can be a sex trafficker and order chemical abortion pills in less than two minutes. They will be shipped to you anywhere in the country, regardless of your state's pro-life laws. Usually they're shipped without any instructions. If you put on the website that you don't have money, they'll just ship them to you for free. We did this, an undercover investigation in December. I had minor students for life leaders. I had one boy in West Virginia. He got shipped 30 pills. It was enough to kill a woman. No instructions. Didn't have to pay. So we're trying to pass laws in at least our Republican states right now, Anti-Chemical Abortion Trafficking Act, which would allow for state attorneys general to criminally prosecute these illegal shippers and these websites, which, by the way. We don't even know where these pills are coming from. We're not even 100 percent sure they're real abortion pills. There's no verification or allow families or a mother who's had an abortion to civilly go after those who sell and invent these abortion pills. We've been trying to put pressure on the DOJ because we have an 1890 law still in the books called the Comstock Act, which makes it illegal, a federal crime to ship abortion related material, which has been violated. the Biden DOJ put a memo out after the Dobbs decision in 2022 basically saying they weren't going to force it. The Trump administration has done nothing to enforce this. We have to first stop the illegal shipments of these pills into pro-life states or you don't live in a pro-life state. The FDA has said they're investigating the harms of Mepristone. We know from the EEPC data that came out this May, more than 10 percent of women who have these pills will end up in the emergency room with life-threatening conditions, they are way more dangerous than what the FDA told us in 2000. We need the EPA to act because we've proven they are contaminating our water supply. These are forever chemicals that violate the EPA's own forever chemical standards. And the FDA in 2000, when they approved the pill, literally didn't check the box on the application proving it wasn't violating the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, didn't even do it. This has been happening for 20, now six years in our country. We need the Trump administration and the states to take action on these pills because if you're serious about ending abortion, this is why Planned Parenthood is now the leading vendor of cross-sex hormones to transgender and gender-confused kids that, by the way, are sterilizing. They have moved on because this whole abortion industry has moved online to chemical abortion pills and they're not getting the money they used to get. So, Kristen, where can people find your podcast? You can go to Apple Podcasts, anywhere you do podcasts, the Kristen Hawkins Show, or follow me on X and Instagram, Kristen Mercer Hawkins. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks. That was Kristen Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
