“Pro-abortion leaders in the nation’s capital must not be allowed to violate the U.S. Constitution by criminalizing pro-life speech they don’t like, and we will come back to court in Washington, D.C., for as many times as it takes to protect the rights of Americans who care about babies in the womb,” said Students for Life of America’s (SFLA) Kristan Hawkins. “Blocking pro-life students from peacefully chalking ‘Black Preborn Lives Matter’ is viewpoint discrimination. It’s striking that one of the few ways for protestors to get the attention of D.C. officials is not by violence or vandalism, but by voicing love and concern for the preborn with sidewalk chalk.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. (07-20-2026) – Students for Life of America (SFLA) and Frederick Douglass Foundation’s (FDF) court case against the District of Columbia for preventing pro-life speech and arresting pro-life protestors in violation of their First Amendment right to freedom of speech has been appealed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. FDF, SFLA v. D.C. will be reviewed by a court panel, and the appeal was filed by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) last week. 

“Washington officials can’t censor messages they disagree with. The right to free speech is for everyone,” said ADF Senior Counsel John Bursch, vice president of appellate advocacy. “As this court has already held, in this very case, the ‘First Amendment prohibits the government from favoring some speakers over others’ in law enforcement. The Frederick Douglass Foundation and Students for Life should be able to exercise their constitutionally protected freedom to peacefully share their views, the same as anyone else. We’re urging the court to once again protect every American’s right to speak messages on important cultural and political issues.”

As SFLA previously reported describing the case: Two SFLA students were arrested in August 2020, on a Saturday morning, while peacefully attempting to chalk BLACK PREBORN LIVES MATTER as part of an event with FDF, following months of turmoil in the nation’s capital during Black Lives Matter confrontations. Though BLM protestors did paint, vandalize, and protest around the city,police stepped in to stop pro-life speech from being applied with washable paint and then made two arrests when a pro-life activist tried to use chalk. 

Video taken in the early hours of Saturday shows Washington, D.C., police engagement with Students for Life team members preparing to chalk BLACK PREBORN LIVES MATTER outside the Planned Parenthood on the 1200 block of 4th Street NE. Prior to the planned, peaceful event, SFLA got a permit and addressed in conversation and a letter that, following the city’s decision to allow a private organization to paint a message to defund the police, the pro-life team would also be expressing their speech in paint.

Watch a video of the encounter HERE.

ON BACKGROUND: 

The case has faced prior roadblocks. In 2021,a federal judge dismissed the case, claiming SFLA’s speech could be suppressed because the chalking was not “part of ongoing, large-scale, and national demonstrations” and because of an increased concern of “violent reaction from the peaceful protestors” that the court claimed did not exist with Black Lives Matter protestors who did identical chalking demonstrations.

A Circuit Court later found evidence that the District of Columbia was suppressing pro-life free speech by arresting the SFLA members while not enforcing the same defacement laws against Black Lives Matter protestors.

For Breitbart’s VIDEO illustrating D.C. police treatment of pro-life Americans compared to Black Lives Matter protestors, CLICK HERE.

The most recent appeal, filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on behalf of SFLA, argues with the Court’s own findings that the pro-life protestors were targeted because of their Life-affirming message.

“Officers nonetheless persistently enforced the defacement ordinance against [SFLA and FDF],” says the appeal. “Yet there is no evidence in the record suggesting that MPD arrested even a single Black Lives Matter speaker for defacement over the summer and fall of 2020. Because ‘both messages … are political speech’ expressing differing perspectives on the same issue, ‘[a]llowing the expression of one message while silencing another is quintessential viewpoint discrimination,’ as this Court has already explained once in this case.”

In an opinion piece at Newsweek during the early days of the controversy, Hawkins, along with Toni McFadden, formerly Minority Outreach & Healthy Relationships Director with Students for Life of America, addressed the issues at stake.

They observed: “The issue here is constitutional fairness. Actors, artists, politicians, and CEOs have the liberty under the First Amendment to voice support for abortion or omit preborn children from their activism. But governmental entities engage in unconstitutional overreach when they seek to bar pro-life citizens from expressing the position that all Black lives matter, that abortion is violence, and that the Black preborn child deserves protection.”

To read the full appeal, CLICK HERE.

For interviews, email [email protected].

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The Pro-Life Generation (PLG) is an umbrella organization encompassing the most cutting-edge engagement opportunities for a Vote Pro-Life First Community. PLG includes Students for Life Action (SFLAction), a 501c4, along with its 501c3 sister organization, Students for Life of America (SFLA), that together make up the nation’s largest, pro-life youth organization, managing a grassroots political and policy operation engaging Americans of all ages but with a special emphasis on the largest segment of voters — the Youth Vote. Headquartered in Fredericksburg, VA, PLG/SFLA/SFLActionserves more than 1,400 groups on middle, high school, college, medical, and law school campuses in all 50 states. Our team has more conversations with this generation targeted by the abortion lobby than any other pro-life operation in the world, each week reaching more than 4 million across social media platforms and averaging 1.3 million video views. In addition to SFLA/SFLAction, PLG leads multiple initiatives to lead and serve  the future of the pro-life movement, including the Campaign for Abortion Free Cities, Standing With You, and the Demetree Institute for Pro-LifeAdvancement . Over more than 17 years, PLG CEO Kristan Hawkins has grown the operation into a nearly $20M organization, now preparing for an abortion-free America.