Kristan Hawkins, the 28-year-old president of Students for Life of America, has had a busy week. She and her team organized the world’s largest student pro-life gathering in history, which took place on Tuesday. The next day, she led tens of thousands of youth in the March for Life in Washington. Oh, and did we mention that she just gave birth to her third son a few weeks ago? There is no question that feminism is alive, and it’s personified in Kristan Hawkins.
Kristan gave a convicting speech at the Students for Life conference, entitled Be the Revolution. Anyone familiar with Kristan knows that she actually believes — and constantly preaches — that her generation can end abortion. Sometimes it seems like she’s a little crazy… after all, there are still over three thousand reported abortions every day in America alone. But working closely with the young generation as the leader of the largest pro-life student organization in the world, Kristan has an insight into the abilities of this demographic that most people will never understand.
Kristan knows that the youth of today have untapped potential to make extraordinary changes in the culture, and the changes have begun (for example, the Students for Life conference has had to expand considerably every year since its inception because it simply can’t accommodate the droves of young people who want to attend).
Kristan’s Be the Revolution talk at the conference compared discrimination against black humans with discrimination against small humans who are not yet born. She cites the student influence that was required by the civil rights movement to ultimately achieve success, and affirms that it is this involvement of young people that will ultimately put an end to abortion in America once and for all.
If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think our nation can go for fifty-nine more years with this killing. Too much blood has been shed. Our nation is literally a nation full of hurting people because of abortion. Now is the time to abolish abortion in our lifetime. Now is the time we need to move. We need to move from movement to revolution. From reducing to eliminating. From fighting to winning.
Kristan provided three steps to achieving the goal of ending abortion in our lifetime:
First, we need to see it in our mind’s eye: What our nation will look like when there’s no legal abortion. And then we need to believe it is possible.
Next, we have to transform our thinking from telling to recruiting. Look, we’ve told our friends and family about abortion. I know what people say when they see me coming in Washington, DC: There’s that crazy lady coming with a bullhorn and there’s a child strapped to her chest. This is awkward. That is what they see when I walk into Capitol Hill. Because they know I am there to tell them about the greatest human right stragedy the world has ever known. Do your friends and family know that’s what you’re going to talk about when you walk in? If so, it’s time to start recruiting them to join you.
Finally, after we have envisioned our mission and we have recruited our friends… we have to go and win this revolution. And we can win it in every campus and in every community. To find the resources and establish the support that she [a mother in crisis] needs, that she needs the day abortion is made illegal in this country… What’s the practical things we have to provide for her? And in the process we are going to end up shutting down the rest of those abortion facilities. We’ve got to take hold of Students for Life’s Pregnant on Campus mission, to challenge our administrations to support our pregnant and parenting students… With this, we can transform our culture. We can transform our nation from the campus outward.
Men and women, this fight has been going on for four decades. And make no mistake about it: it’s going to go on for a lot longer. Revolutions are not something you do in a night. Revolutions take time. But this is a cause worth winning for. We must abolish abortion in this lifetime, so that every child is welcomed in life and protected by law. So that every woman is loved and cared for. So that every man knows he has a place with his family, and every family can be made whole.
