Anti-Abortion Activists Want to Have It Both Ways

Hawkins,
though, maintains that having 50 competing legal regimes governing abortion
would be total chaos. And the implied solution to all this disorder is simple: a
national ban on abortion.

Hawkins
is not some undergraduate with edgy, “heterodox” opinions, the kind who pops up
in the pages of the Times with some frequency. Around the time she actually was
a student, according to her own biography, she was working for the
Republican National Committee and was an appointee in the George W. Bush administration.
Students for Life may sound like a smallish group who hand out literature on
campus—some chapters do—but conservative dark
money maestro Leonard Leo sits on their board. They are in the same network of
Leo-backed groups, such as the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending
Freedom, who lobby Congress together and file amici briefs in the same Supreme Court cases,
including the case meant to take mifepristone, which can be used for abortions,
off the market. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts spoke at Students
for Life’s annual summit in January. “We meet today amid a
pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told the student
attendees. Heritage also had a Project 2025 promotional booth. The Project 2025
anti-abortion agenda
shares much with Students for Life’s.

Even
when it wins, the anti-abortion movement poses as the victims. No one should
be surprised that Hawkins, who seeks an end to abortion altogether, is not
concerned with “states’ rights,” as it were. A national ban is already part of the Republican Party platform
adopted at this year’s convention, even though Trump and Vance may pretend it
is not. I don’t mean the platform’s single use of the word “abortion,” which
appears in its opposition to “Late Term Abortion.” Rather, the gesture toward a
possible national abortion ban is buried in what might read like the most banal
reiteration of promises to uphold the Constitution: “We believe that the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person
can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are,
therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” This is a thinly veiled
reference to a dubious anti-abortion legal strategy: that a fertilized egg is a
legal person with constitutional rights—rights that, inevitably, outweigh the rights of the pregnant person.