“Unthinkable and unavailable” has been the mission of Students for Life of America (SFLA) and Students for Life Action (SFLAction) President Kristan Hawkins for the past 20 years, during which the organization grew from a handful of campus groups to more than 1,700 in all 50 states today, along with a grassroots army of more than 250,000. 

The evolution of SFLA from scrappy outsider to “one of the most influential anti-abortion organizations in the movement” is detailed in a profile and mini documentary that just ran in Mother Jones and was featured on YouTube by their team. Over more than a year, reporter and author Amy Littlefield followed Hawkins and the team to produce a profile piece titled: “Kristan Hawkins Helped Kill Roe. Now She’s Fighting to Control the Movement She Created.”

Hawkins’ impact on saving lives and advancing the pro-life movement through innovative policies is so undeniable that Mother Jones called her “the window into the movement’s future.” 

Littlefield got a firsthand look of Students for Life on college campuses, in social media, on the campaign trail, and at events advocating for policy changes from the Trump Administration and working to save preborn children from the horrors of abortion while we promote a culture of life. 

Comparing her to Charlie Kirk, Littlefield couldn’t deny Hawkins’ likability and pro-life, pro-woman message — especially in the face of rising misogynistic rhetoric in American politics. 

As Littlefield detailed for Mother Jones: 

These days, Hawkins is almost as likely to find herself battling with misogynists who think women shouldn’t have the right to work or vote as with progressives. It’s a fight she welcomes. 

“Kristan is a brawler,” Mary Ziegler, a legal historian who has followed Hawkins’ career for years, told me. “Kristan gets down into the mud and debates, and she makes people look silly and unintellectual and unprepared.”

Despite what her detractors might say, young women are impacted by Hawkins’ boldness. 

“It’s refreshing that empowerment isn’t just being able to have an abortion,” said one student interviewed by Mother Jones in a mini documentary about Hawkins.

While some frame pro-life beliefs as extreme or difficult to sell, Hawkins showed that moral consistency is the only path that values the lives of all preborn children. She detailed the importance of tackling mail-order abortion pills and the need to enforce the Comstock Act.

Furthermore, Mother Jones highlighted what makes Kristan unique in the current pro-life landscape, whether through her life as a working mother in conservative politics or her desire to appeal to culture as much as law. 

“She doesn’t just want to change laws,” said Littlefield in the mini documentary. “She wants to change minds.” 

The profile continued: 

Hawkins understands that to make abortion unthinkable, she needs to change the culture, which means convincing people outside her base—especially young women—and addressing what she sees as a dangerous spiritual malaise, one in which the worldview is “Nothing matters, my life doesn’t matter, it’s all meaningless,” she told me. “The blue-haired septum-ring girl is also our mission. It’s not just her baby when she gets pregnant. It’s also saving her.” 

Over the 20 years of SFLA’s existence, Hawkins has led the organization through the successful effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, remove federal funding from Planned Parenthood for an entire year, and change countless minds to value life in and out of the womb. It is incredible to see Mother Jones document Hawkins’ work and SFLA’s leadership in the pro-life movement. 

And she has accomplished this as a working mother, something Littlefield is balancing as well. Littlefield wrote: 

[Hawkins] described working 15 hours a day, leaving her four kids, two of whom have cystic fibrosis, at home with her husband, and how it wasn’t fair that women had to balance so much. “We’re juggling more balls than the men in our lives. Sorry, gentlemen,” she said, to appreciative laughs. “Some of the balls we juggle are rubber,” she went on, “and some of them are glass.” The rubber ones—the Zoom invites, the laundry—”you can drop those, and they bounce back up.” The glass ones—your marriage, your children’s health—will shatter. “And your job, every single day, is to know which is which.”

“It was actually a terrific metaphor for working motherhood, I thought, as I escaped periodically to pump breast milk for the 8-month-old I’d left at home.”

Just in case you’re wondering, the reporter from the abortion-loving outlet did find some things to complain about, along with some critics. No surprise there.

One story highlighted involved a video shoot in Houston, Texas, where chemical abortion pills cannot be legally ordered. In order to illustrate that deadly pills could be ordered and mailed to a pro-life state, Hawkins, along with SFLA spokesperson and social media coordinator Lydia Taylor Davis, who was also featured in the piece, filmed an order in process. Technical difficulties meant we had to do order a second time, and though that was explained, it didn’t make the cut. We did receive the pills in Texas.

WATCH: Davis’ order chemical abortion pills online, without any pushback from pill pushers.

For those who will be critical of why Students for Life would spend so much time with reporters, photographers, and video journalists who are known to disagree with us, that sums us up perfectly. We talk to many to win some because the life-and-death stakes are too important for us to talk only with those who agree with us. 

Students for Life and Hawkins are not afraid to talk with people about the human rights issue of our day, for the hope of achieving change. The profile says that Hawkins turned “Students for Life into an anti-abortion powerhouse,” and she did that one conversation at a time. 

For a picture worth a thousand words, check out the documentary that gives a glimpse of both 20 years advocacy and the crazy day-in-the-life realities of balancing the needs of a family and an organization, while leading in a movement to empower others to do the same. 

WATCH THE MINI DOCUMENTARY HERE.