Anti-Abortion Lawyer Defends Crisis Pregnancy Centers at Federalist Society Event

Lawyer Erin M. Hawley spoke about her work representing anti-abortion organizations against recent legal challenges at a Tuesday event organized by the Harvard Law School Federalist Society, a conservative student group.

Hawley — who leads the Center for Life and Regulatory Practice at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy organization — defended crisis pregnancy centers, organizations that often advertise themselves as clinics but attempt to dissuade women from receiving abortions.

Though critics have blasted crisis pregnancy centers as deceptive and harmful, Hawley dismissed that line of criticism at the event.

“Pregnancy care centers are simply organizations that seek to help women, offer them choice,” she said.

Hawley is married to Sen. Josh D. Hawley (R-Mo.), who co-sponsored a recent bill to introduce a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

She applauded the Alliance Defending Freedom’s success in blocking state-level efforts to prevent anti-abortion groups from promoting largely unproven abortion reversal procedures.

“We got a preliminary injunction against the New York Attorney General just last week, with the district judge writing, this is a viewpoint discrimination, it’s content discrimination, and the centers have a right to provide potentially life-saving information to women who want to hear about it,” she said.

Medication abortions typically involve doses of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol. Anti-abortion centers have encouraged women who have taken a dose of mifepristone to take progesterone, a hormone that supports maintaining pregnancies, instead of the follow-up dose of misoprostol.

Hawley cited a 64 to 68 percent success rate for the procedure, known as “abortion reversal.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists describes abortion reversal as “unproven and unethical,” arguing that existing research does not provide evidence that the techniques are effective.

Hawley also discussed other abortion-related litigation following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned the constitutional protections on abortion previously enshrined by Roe v. Wade.

She criticized the Supreme Court’s June decision to preserve access to the abortion pill mifepristone against a challenge by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, an anti-abortion organization she represented in the case.

She said the ruling, based on the argument that the plaintiffs lacked standing, failed to address the central issues in the case.

Hawley also described the Biden administration’s argument in another high-profile case — claiming that a state ban on abortions in Idaho violated the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — as an example of federal overreach.

The Supreme Court dismissed the case in June, keeping in place a lower court’s order that temporarily allowed Idaho hospitals to provide emergency abortions.

Hawley said she hopes that legislators will prioritize bills giving women financial and social support to raise unplanned children, rather than those simply restricting access to abortion.

“I’m hoping that’s changing,” she said. “I’m hoping we’re seeing legislators that are really recognizing the value of supporting these women in addition to just protecting child life.”

Second-year HLS student Jorge A. Plaza, who attended the talk, said he appreciated Hawley’s focus on abortion litigation beyond temporal cutoffs.

“The Dobbs decision itself pushes the issue of the actual time requirements for abortion to the states,” he said. “But that doesn’t answer things like abortion pills. It doesn’t answer care that has to do with abortion-related issues.”

Akhil Rajasekar, also a second-year student at the Law School, said he admired Hawley’s ability to elucidate the mechanics of abortion law.

“It was nice to hear from the woman who’s litigated it at the court, and is neck-deep in all of this work, and where she sees the future of standing for these cases, and what she thinks about the merits too,” he said. “It’s complicated medical stuff that’s usually hard to get as a layperson.”