She helped kill Roe v Wade - now she wants to end abortion in America

When Kristan Hawkins was 23, she started sleeping in her office.

It was years before her organisation, Students for Life of America (SFLA), would become one of the largest, most influential anti-abortion groups in the country. And it was more than a decade before she would stand outside the US Supreme Court to announce to her triumphant supporters that the nationwide right to abortion had been undone.

But back then, in 2008, the SFLA headquarters were in Arlington, Virginia, and the closest town where Hawkins and her husband could afford to buy a house was 90 minutes away.

At first, she tried the commute, leaving home at 5am and returning at 8pm. But the drives became too much, gas too expensive.

So she bought a cheap loveseat from Ikea, figuring she could put in 30 hours of work over two days before driving home for a night. She used a nearby Gold's Gym for showers, the new couch for naps. When Hawkins found the office was also inhabited by cockroaches, she bought an eye mask and started sleeping with the lights on to keep them away.

But Kristan Hawkins was relentless. And she had a job to do, she was going to see the end of Roe v Wade, overturning the national right to abortion that had been protected for nearly half a century.

Last June, she was successful. Pro-choice advocates say that her activism since then has already helped cut off abortion access for around 20 million women, and pushed the country into a public health crisis.

But Hawkins has a new, more ambitious goal: she wants to make abortion unthinkable and unavailable across the US.

In the year after Roe was overturned, Hawkins has gone into overdrive, growing the size and reach of SFLA and using that power to push state legislatures to pass increasingly severe bans.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65923956