Some in the Anti-Abortion Movement Want a New Deal With Trump

Vice President Kamala Harris is putting new and potentially significant energy into holding Donald Trump responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade and attacking him and the G.O.P. over abortion, in what Democrats hope will lead to robust turnout by women for Ms. Harris in November. While Mr. Trump has tried to distance himself from bans on abortion at the federal level and from some efforts by states to criminalize virtually all abortions, he is politically vulnerable because of his nominees to the Supreme Court and his support from anti-abortion groups that wish to see abortion made illegal nationally, full stop.

Among those groups is Students for Life, whose president, Kristan Hawkins, spoke with me in April 2023. We talked then about the failure of state-level ballot measures to limit abortion and her work to push the G.O.P. toward supporting a federal abortion ban. We spoke again this month, after the release of the Republican Party platform (which some believe is soft on abortion) and before President Biden decided to withdraw from the presidential race. She told me she believed that the platform didn’t go far enough but was still good and absolutely helped in her efforts to make abortion “illegal and unthinkable.”

This interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew.

Jane Coaston: I know you’re not entirely happy with the 2024 Republican platform. What’s your central disagreement?

Kristan Hawkins: We worked for months with representatives of the campaign to make sure they knew the will of the pro-life movement. We were pleased to see that the 14th Amendment was actually in the platform — that took some education. There’s a lot of concern about the short nature of the platform — and there was also this concern of, well, did they read the 14th Amendment? Because saying it’s a state’s issue doesn’t actually legally jive with the 14th Amendment. That’s the reason we have the 14th Amendment, because your human rights should not be determined based on state lines.

[Anti-abortion activists want courts or lawmakers to interpret the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” to include fetuses. This is sometimes referred to as fetal personhood, and would ban abortion.]