The Hawleys’ latest project seeks to move the antiabortion fight beyond the courts and into culture, elections and state legislatures.
Antiabortion power couple Erin and Josh Hawley announced in December the launch of a new dark money antiabortion group: the Love Life Initiative.
Erin Hawley this week joined conservative law firm Lex Politica—founded by Chris Gober, former director and chief lawyer for Elon Musk’s America PAC—as chair of its Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice. She was previously senior counsel at the far-right Christian legal advocacy Alliance Defending Freedom and member of the legal team responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has an A-grade from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
The Hawleys say their initiative was born from a “burning desire” to take back the public “argument on abortion”—which, they maintain, has been thwarted by Democrats who have “drowned out the pro-life narrative and overwhelmed the pro-life agenda” through the millions spent on “infrastructure, advocacy and advertising.”
It is decidedly impossible to square this claim with reality: Since the fall of Roe, lawmakers in abortion-hostile states have engaged in a scorched-earth campaign to restrict abortion access in several ways, and have succeed across wide swaths of the country.
Underscoring the success of this effort in the first two years post–Dobbs, these lawmakers are now turning their attention to “cutting off the ways that people in states with total and gestational bans are still accessing care, in spite of these restrictions,” writes Guttmacher’s state policy advisor Kimya Fourzan.
Reprising the Hawleys’ misguided complaint that post-Dobbs Democratic machinations have taken a toll on the country, they miss who has truly borne the consequences: pregnant women. At least 12 U.S. women have died as a result of being denied abortion care. (And this is no doubt an undercount.) People in ban states are twice as likely to die during pregnancy as those in abortion-protective states, according to the Gender Equity Institute, with an outsized impact on women of color.
This is the true forsaking of a culture of life.
Apparently impervious to this grim reality—as well as the fact that abortion rights are widely supported across the U.S., and a top issue for young American women who vote in large numbers—the Hawleys believe they have been inspired by God to save the “soul of our nation” by reversing the trivialization of the “precious life of the unborn.” As they embark on their hallowed mission to “restore love for every life across the nation” (emphasis added),” they admit their true fight is advocacy for “innocent unborn life.”
A Culture-War Campaign Takes Shape
The Hawleys’ plan to reorder the country’s abortion politics is fairly straightforward, if short on specifics. While nodding to the importance of courtroom victories, the Love Life Initiative is aimed less at litigation than at reshaping public opinion and state policy from the ground up.
In practical terms, the group says it will invest in national advertising campaigns promoting the “sanctity of life,” push ballot initiatives designed to restrict abortion, and work to block proposals in state legislatures that expand access. The broader goal is cultural as much as legal: to reverse what the Hawleys describe as a “dangerous new trend”—namely, growing public support for abortion rights.
Despite the cruelty of the post-Dobbs landscape across much of the country, this “dangerous new trend” is in fact quite real. Gallup finds that public opinion is more accepting of abortion than it was before Dobbs, even as gender and partisan divides on the issue have reached historic highs.
Critically, this growing acceptance of abortion has resulted in important countermoves by abortion-protective states. Examples include: shield laws supporting the provision of care to abortion-seekers from restrictive states; data privacy protections; expansion of the pool of abortion providers beyond physicians; and the enshrining of abortion rights into state constitutions.
For the Hawleys, this polling data affirms the animating fear behind the launch of Love Life—namely, that the nation is not fully onboard with their post-Dobbs vision of an uncompromising national reproductive ecosystem that sanctifies “innocent unborn life,” and is thus in dire need of being lifted up. After all, as they saw it, Dobbs represented the ushering in of the promised land, in which “an untold number of unborn babies [would be] given a new chance at life.”
The day Dobbs was decided, underscoring his joy at the overturning of Roe, Josh Hawley posted on X, “This is a momentous day in America, when the efforts of generations of modern-day abolitionists comes to fruition. One of the most unjust decisions in American history has been overturned.”
A month later, Erin Hawley joyfully testified before Congress in a hearing on the impact of Dobbs, that the “Supreme Court’s decision corrects a 50-year wrong, one that resulted in the death of over 60 million unborn children.”
One Family, Two Different Antiabortion Extremists
There is no doubt that the Hawleys are fully united in Love Life’s unwavering commitment to “saving innocent unborn life.” But behind this united front, each appears to be aligned with a different branch of the antiabortion movement, with increasingly conflicting visions for a post–Roe America.
Erin Hawley is clearly aligned with what is generally referred to as the mainstream branch of the movement, which generally accepts limited exceptions for health, incest and rape, and is opposed to the prosecution of women who choose abortion over childbirth.
Josh Hawley, however, appears to be aligned with the extremist abortion abolitionist branch of the movement, which believes abortion must be “completely abolished” without exceptions, and demands the “prosecution of aborting mothers.”
Erin Hawley
In testimony before the House Oversight Committee on the impact of Dobbs, in addition to heralding its significance for the ‘unborn’ whom she regards as “fully alive and fully human,” Erin Hawley rejoiced in the decision’s repudiation of Roe v. Wade, which she characterized as “tragically … wrong about women.”
She dismissed what she called the lament of “seven male authors” who warned that, when not freely chosen, motherhood can “force upon women a bleak and stressful future.” Instead, she praised Dobbs as an opportunity to “reaffirm motherhood” and, in her view, empower women.
As she sees it, women would choose motherhood over abortion “if they had more support,” and most are doomed to suffer post-abortion “emotional and mental harm” for abandoning their maternal destiny (notwithstanding the robust body of evidence to the contrary).
Tracking the ‘pro-woman/pro-life’ antiabortion frame made famous by David C. Reardon, Erin Hawley casts women as victims of abortion; accordingly, they “should never be prosecuted for having an abortion,” she testified.
By way of elucidation, Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, made a similar argument in a letter signed by more than 70 “leading pro-life organizations.” Rejecting abolitionists’ calls for prosecuting women who obtain abortions, she wrote that a “mother … left abandoned by the abortion industry” to cope with physical complications and long-term emotional harm “require[s] our compassion and support, not criminalization.”
In an interview with Fox, Erin Hawley elaborated on this theme of empowerment: “States that do protect life with their laws have really expanded empowerment opportunities for women. In fact, every state that has laws on the books protecting life has expanded support for pregnant and new moms, some to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually, and I think this is just such a powerful example of how pro-life states are serving women and children, not only during pregnancy, but also beyond.”
Josh Hawley
Josh Hawley welcomed the Dobbs decision as a modern-day abolitionist victory, a victory he had prophesied in an earlier Facebook post proclaiming, “I firmly believe that today the pro-life advocates are modern day abolitionists. … I have every confidence we’ll look back and say ‘I just can’t believe the innocent were ever subjected to this kind of harm and this kind of damage.’”
As I’ve written in a previous article for Ms., the use of the descriptor, ‘abolitionist,’ is a deliberate choice intended to showcase that they are the true heirs apparent of the 19th-century movement to abolish slavery, and that the fetus is a symbol of the “moral and legal equivalent” of the slave.
Eschewing Erin Hawley’s (seemingly) pro-woman frame, abolitionists unequivocally reject the view that women are non-agentic when it comes to abortion. As antiabortion activist Jason Conover put it at a 2023 abolitionist gathering sponsored by Operation Save America (classified as a “male supremacist hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law center), the “lie that women should be allowed to kill their own children with immunity and impunity because they themselves are victims of abortion” is a “heretical teaching.”
Casting women instead as a “principal actor in the death of her own child,” abolitionists believe anyone who has an abortion should be punished under state law as any murderer would be, including in states that have the death penalty, which, as argued is the “only way to provide equal protection for children in the womb” in keeping with “God’s word [that] to acquit the guilty is an abomination in his sight.”
To be clear, I did not uncover any record of Sen. Hawley calling for women who have abortions as murderers. However, he unabashedly celebrates the abolitionist branch as the true face of the contemporary pro-life movement, which firmly repudiates what it refers to as the ‘Pro-Life Establishment’ strategy of “giving automatic immunity … to the mother who murders her child,” in favor of imposing “the available penalties for murdering any other person.”
Needless to say, both antiabortion approaches suggested by the Hawleys are deeply problematic, as each calls upon different gendered norms in support of the exercise of state control over women’s reproductive bodies.
Abolitionists cast women who choose abortion as possessed of evil intent with a “darkened mind that thinks child sacrifice is good.”
In contrast, the seemingly kinder and gentler pro-woman/pro-life frame adopted by many of the mainstream antiabortion groups believe, as David Reardon famously puts it in his book, Making Abortion Rare: A Healing Strategy for a Divided Nation, that “abortion is inherently harmful to women. It is simply impossible to rip a child from the womb of a mother without tearing out a part of the woman herself”—which, of course, erases any possibility of abortion as a voluntary and freely chosen reproductive option.
Thanks to Ava Slocum, fact-checking fellow at Ms., for her research assistance.
