It was 2014, and Erin Morrow Hawley was fighting against the egg-laying hens of Missouri. Specifically, a new requirement that chicken cages have enough space for the hens to stand up, turn around and stretch out.
A law professor from five generations of ranchers and the wife of Senator Josh Hawley, Ms. Hawley joined a challenge to California, which required more spacious enclosures for hens laying eggs to be sold there. The state where she taught, Missouri, sold a third of its eggs to California, and Ms. Hawley believed that a blue state had no right to impose its values and rules on Missouri’s farmers.
She joined in a lawsuit against California’s attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris. A judge found that the challengers could show no direct injury and dismissed the case. Ms. Hawley continued teaching, and Ms. Harris became Joe Biden’s vice president.
Ten years later, Ms. Hawley, 44, is now at the center of one of the country’s most heated cultural battles about bodily autonomy, gender roles and abortion. On Tuesday, for the first time since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court will once again consider nationwide limits on abortion access. And Ms. Hawley is slated to be the woman standing before the justices, arguing to sharply curtail access to the abortion pill.
The case centers on the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a commonly available drug used in the majority of abortions in the country. Limiting medication abortion is a next frontier for the anti-abortion movement in the post-Roe era.
Ms. Hawley represents a group of anti-abortion doctors and an umbrella group of conservative medical associations that claim that the abortion pill — approved more than two decades ago — is a danger to women. The F.D.A. has pointed to substantial scientific evidence that the medication abortion is safe.
Ms. Hawley views the cause as similar to her fights against government interference, rooted in her experience of ranch life.
“You see how those regulations impact people that are really living on the ground, and sometimes for good and sometimes maybe not for good,” she said in an interview with The Times earlier this month. “And so being pro-life, and believing that every child, no matter how small, no matter if they’re not yet born, is invested with inherent dignity and worth — government action can have a lot to say about that as well.”
She argues that federal approval of the abortion pill went forward without enough consideration of possible side effects and dangers, and that subsequent changes to enable greater access have ignored health risks to women.
The government lawyers in this case, led by Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, have argued in court filings that Ms. Hawley and her legal team offered scant evidence of real injury, and that declarations from “seven identified doctors” were “often vague or conclusory.”
Ms. Hawley’s particular background makes her ideal for this moment. Her longtime interest in limiting the power of the administrative state is well suited to speak to the current court’s conservative supermajority, which has welcomed cases challenging regulations on everything from herring fish to machine guns and, now, abortion.
Ms. Hawley brings her credentials not only as a former clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. but as a millennial Christian mother. An evangelical believer who forefronts her identity as a wife and mother of three, Ms. Hawley works for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful conservative Christian legal group. She represents the ideals of womanhood many in the anti-abortion and conservative Christian movement seek to elevate.
Until now, Ms. Hawley has been best known as the wife of Senator Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who actively sought the overturning of Roe and has supported anti-abortion legislation.
In a campaign ad for him, Ms. Hawley starred as an everyday mom, playing with their children…
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