In March, two Mother Jones videographers and I stood outside the Space Center Houston and watched Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, order abortion pills online.
We were shadowing Hawkins through Texas for a profile, documentary, and radio story about her role overseeing one of the anti-abortion movement’s most influential organizations, which now claims 1,700 chapters nationwide.
On that spring day, we watched as Hawkins and a Students for Life spokesperson, Lydia Taylor Davis, attempted to show just how easy it was to obtain abortion pills in Texas, despite its stringent laws, in the hopes that state and federal officials would do more to stop the pills.
Now, Hawkins has been sued over the stunt, under a 2025 state law she and her team publicly lobbied for that was meant to target abortion providers and advocates.
On Tuesday, a 26-year-old Texas woman who says she was forced to carry two pregnancies to term because of the state’s abortion bans sued Hawkins, Davis, and two other Students for Life staffers in state court. The woman, who uses the pseudonym Maria Puerto, claims that the stunt Hawkins staged in the Houston parking lot not only broke the law, but “mocks” Texans like her who have suffered life-altering harms from the state’s draconian laws, which ban abortion under virtually all circumstances. The lawsuit cites Mother Jones’ reporting, along with Students for Life’s social media posts about the stunt.
“Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women have not experienced a free Texas. We have no ability to decide about our own bodies, our own families, our own lives.”
“Our client came to us because she has had a very difficult few years since Roe was overturned,” Molly Duane, litigation director of Amplify Legal, the litigation arm of Abortion in America, which represents Puerto, said in an interview Tuesday. “On the one hand, she loves being a mother, she has two beautiful children that she loves very much. On the other hand, she was forced to become a parent long before she was ready.”
The suit details how two unplanned pregnancies disrupted Puerto’s life. When she became pregnant the first time, in 2022, she was attending college on a scholarship, but she was forced to quit school when her financial aid was revoked because she missed class due to severe morning sickness. She was also fired from her job at a convenience store.“I lost everything, my job, my career. Everything,” the lawsuit quotes Puerto as saying.
With her second pregnancy, in 2024, Puerto became depressed, especially when she discovered she was having a girl. “Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women have not experienced a free Texas,” she says in the complaint. “We have no ability to decide about our own bodies, our own families, our own lives.”
According to the lawsuit, Puerto and her two kids share a bed in a small room in her mother’s home, and she has been unable to find a job that would allow her to cover childcare costs.
“Where is universal childcare? Where is paid family leave? Where is food and housing support for people that struggle to make ends meet?” Duane said in the interview. “Texas has helped her with none of that.”
With “nowhere else to turn for assistance,” the lawsuit says, Puerto’s lawyers decided to sue Hawkins and members of her Students for Life team who participated in the pill-ordering stunt, though the organization itself is not named as a defendant. Puerto is seeking $459,782—the average cost of raising two children from birth to age 18 in the state of Texas, the lawsuit says.
In a statement, Students for Life deemed the lawsuit “misplaced” but called the allegation that their legislative work is stopping abortions a “backhanded compliment.”
“I feel so badly for this child who will forever have it in writing” that Puerto “wished them dead,” Hawkins wrote on X. “It’s child abuse. Texas CPS should be called on this mother asap.”
Duane said the attacks by Hawkins are “disappointing” though “not surprising,” and defended Puerto’s treatment of her children. “I’ve never met a better mother, actually, who’s kinder to her kids,” Duane said.
The 2025 law at the heart of the case, HB 7, allows private citizens to sue anyone who mails, transports, delivers, prescribes or provides abortion pills to any person in Texas, or intends to do so. People who order the pills for themselves and use them to have an abortion cannot be sued, although Duane noted it’s unlikely Hawkins and her team would qualify for that exemption.
“Where is universal childcare? Where is paid family leave? Where is food and housing support for people that struggle to make ends meet?”
“The one thing that we can be sure of is that people who are categorically opposed to abortion didn’t take the pills themselves,” Duane said.
HB 7 was strongly supported by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now running for US Senate, and his anti-abortion allies around the country, who have been irate that telemedicine providers have been able to circumvent red-state abortion bans despite the end of Roe in 2022.
Duane, formerly of the Center for Reproductive Rights, has been involved in several high-profile cases challenging Texas abortion laws, including a lawsuit aimed at forcing the state to clarify its “medical emergency” exception. Last month Amplify and Duane sued Paxton, as well several doctors, on behalf of the family of Tierra Walker, a Black woman who died from preeclampsia in 2024 after being denied emergency abortion care.
“Obviously, I have represented many clients with obstetrical complications during pregnancy,” Duane said. “Those are common, sure, but that is not the vast majority of people who are seeking abortion and can’t get it.”
“The vast majority,” she said, “look like Maria Puerto.”
Mother Jones is a nonprofit American progressive magazine that focuses on news, commentary, and investigative journalism on topics including politics, environment, human rights, health, healthcare and culture. Clara Jeffery serves as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Monika Bauerlein has been the CEO since 2015.
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