Op-Ed: The Subversive Grift of Students For Life’s Model Legislation
Image: Associated Press
By Nathan Weisser @nathanweisser
Kristan Hawkins, President of Students for Life Action, has gone on the offensive these last few weeks against those whom she is calling “Pro-prosecutionists”, aka abolitionists. This has come after years of her tactically ignoring abolitionists, then eventually quietly jabbing at them in replies to tweets, podcast interviews, and training material. These last few days have felt like a dam bursting, where she finally decided to blast abolitionists publicly, much to the detriment of the pro-life industry’s plan to keep abolitionism as secret as possible.
The content of the disagreement is over whether women who murder their children via abortion should be treated as murderers by our laws. After Hawkins signed a letter discouraging politicians from supporting personhood legislation, which adversely impacts bills that would have abolished abortion in North Dakota, she finally blew up at the people calling her out for it. Hearing this for the first time, many of her followers were taken aback and agreed with the people she was attacking. As the mask slips, more and more pro-lifers will see the grift and become abolitionists.
While Students for Life Action (SFLA) and Kristan Hawkins are fighting in the civil sphere against the abolition of abortion, let’s look at the things they are fighting for. These are some of the marquee bills that SFLA advertises in a press release they posted on January 6th, 2025.
Clean Water for All Act
Pill Trafficking Prevention Act
Chemical Abortion Prevention Act
Life at Conception Bills
Reading the names of these bills, you’d think they would be wonderful laws aimed at protecting all life and bringing our laws into accordance with God’s Law. Well, let’s go through them one by one:
Clean Water for All Acts
It’s fitting to start with these acts, as they might be the most egregious examples of nonsense-with-a-veneer-of-activism that SFLA puts out. Its stated purpose is to prevent preborn human remains and chemical abortion pill residue from ending up in the water supply. Their website links to the bill text of SB1809 in Oklahoma, carried by Senator Nathan Dahm. The legislation merely requires physicians and pill manufacturers to provide their customers – women who intend to murder their children by abortion – with “catch kits” marked with a biohazard symbol, so that the fetal remains of their preborn children don’t enter the water supply. [§B(4)] The bill also holds the pill manufacturers responsible for any “endocrine-disrupting chemicals from abortion drugs found in wastewater” [§E]
There are many problems with this bill, the first of which is that it does nothing to curtail abortion in any way. It also, as you’ll see in all of SFLA’s model legislation, explicitly codifies a right to abortion for the mothers who are committing the abortion. §D2 of this bill states, “A patient upon whom an abortion is performed may not be prosecuted for a violation of this section or a conspiracy to violate this section.”
Not only that, but this bill doesn’t even require mothers to use the catch kits that the physicians are required to provide. Ironically, this bill is requiring physicians to provide these kits in a state where it is already illegal for physicians to provide abortion pills. This bill is useless. It does nothing.
Women are getting abortion pills through various means in states like Oklahoma, none of which this bill addresses. The pills are as easy as a Google search away, and websites, where you can buy them for as low as $30, are all over the internet, not to mention pro-choice networks that will get you pills for free. I, myself, have bought abortion pills and had free abortion pills sent to me, to see how easy the process was. If I were a pregnant mother, at no point in that process would I be doing anything illegal, and I sure wouldn’t be prevented by some hypothetical biohazard bag that was provided with the pills.
Pill Trafficking Prevention Acts
We all want pill trafficking to end, right? Surely, this bill would prevent it if the title were to be believed. Well, let’s look into it. On SFLA’s website, they link to a West Virginia law, SB735, which supposedly seeks to hold “foreign senders” of abortion pills accountable. Their website says these acts, “Empower law enforcement to address the use of Chemical Abortion Pills on women without their knowledge or consent.”
As SFLA knows, the current predominant way that women are aborting their children is through pills ordered from out-of-state companies and networks. This bill provides a penalty for an individual or entity who sends and administers abortion pills that result in an abortion, and provides the mother who murdered her own child legal standing to bring a civil action against them.
This is, of course, pointless. This bill does not make sending abortion pills through the mail illegal, as federal mail is not West Virginia’s jurisdiction. It makes “performing or attempting to perform an abortion with an abortifacient” a felony, punishable by up to 10 years or $100,000. [§16-2R-10 (b)(1)] Of course, in the next line, it exempts mothers from that punishment.
So, to summarize, it gives mothers who successfully abort their own children legal standing to bring civil action against the person or entity who she bought the abortion pill from. It awards $10,000 for every abortion performed.
This law depends upon the idea that someone can order an abortion pill and take it without knowledge of what they are doing to their own unborn child, which is ridiculous. It’s like writing a law that a gun manufacturer can be sued if one of their customers shoots someone with the gun and then goes, “Wait, I didn’t know this would KILL the guy!” and decides to sue them.
Chemical Abortion Prevention Acts
As you’ll see, SFLA’s goal is always to prevent abortion, but never prosecute it, which is the fatal flaw of their mission. Of course, it never actually prevents it, either.
This bill, which was filed in Iowa as H.F. 146, bans the manufacturing, distribution, prescription, dispensing, sale, or transfer of generic and non-generic abortifacient drugs in the states. Of course, this line of attack has the same issues that the above two bills had, in that you can’t prevent pills from out-of-state, as it’s not in Iowa’s jurisdiction to do so. Yet, a bill like this would have an effect, if it didn’t also explicitly exempt the mother who aborts her own child from any punishment.
Even if the Comstock laws were enforced by the federal government, and abortion pills became impossible to order through the mail, mothers could use hangers, eat a lot of papayas, concoct herbal remedies, or even buy horse paste mifepristone from a feed store, bind it with corn starch and make their own abortion pills.
This is the problem with going after the methods used instead of the act itself. There will always be methods invented, and the legislature will never be able to keep up. The only way to abolish abortion is by criminalizing it as murder. Our law teaches righteousness, just as the Old Testament law did to the Israelites. Currently, our law is teaching women that abortion isn’t actually murder, and they have a legal right to do so, as long as they manage to do it themselves.
Life at Conception Bills
SFLA states that these bills, “Protect all preborn babies”. They link to a bill they was filed in the Florida House of Representatives, SB1519. It’s a long bill, but the gist of it is that it recognizes that “person” in the Florida law includes preborn children, and they have the right to all legal privileges that born people have. Sounds good, right?
This is commonly called the “Personhood Strategy”. It seems like a good idea at first, but it fails when you realize that all of these state laws explicitly allow mothers to murder preborn persons. So even if you affirm that the preborn are legal “people”, the law also affirms that mothers have special murder privileges to murder those people. This model law from SFLA is no different, and it even further codifies that exception.
Not only that, but the law shouldn’t define who is and isn’t “a person.” All human beings are persons. There is no such thing as an image bearer of God who isn’t a person, so we shouldn’t be pretending like there is. Governments having the authority to define what human beings are and aren’t persons is the basis of “legal” genocide.
In Oklahoma, where I live, the preborn are already legally considered persons. This does not stop abortions, as all of those pesky mother immunity clauses remain, and have been affirmed by our Attorney General Gentner Drummond in Opinion 2023-12.
Conclusion
So, what is the solution that abolitionists propose that people like Kristan Hawkins so vehemently oppose? We call for the equal treatment of all humans under the law, and that includes equal justice. The Supreme Court building in Washington DC has inscribed on it, “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW”.
Preborn children, when killed in the womb with malice aforethought, deserve justice. Kristan Hawkins and SFLA are explicitly fighting against that. That’s why there is this divide. It’s not merely a divide in strategy, it’s a divide in ultimate foundations.
If we lived in a world where a woman who aborted her child knew that if she was caught, she would be facing the same law that she would face had she killed her boyfriend, we would live in a world with less abortion.
Will abortion be eradicated? No. Yet, our law would be further brought into accordance with God’s Law, and we would begin the process of repenting to God for the bloodshed we have allowed to continue for so long now. The state of the world we live in is due to the bloodshed that has gone without meaningful opposition by the Church of Jesus Christ. The land is polluted with blood, and God promises to “spit us out”, if we don’t stand up and demand abortion’s abolition, and repent of our apathy towards it.
Abolitionists want to “do justice” (Jeremiah 22:3), and Pro-Lifers like SFLA want to “acquit the guilty.” (Proverbs 17:15) So when people like Kristan Hawkins try to insult abolitionists by calling them “Pro-prosecutionists”, the correct response should be, “Yeah, I’m pro-prosecution. You don’t want murder to be prosecuted?”
Great article. Very insightful.