Erin Hawley

Erin Hawley, an architect of litigation that has destroyed federal constitutional protection for abortion, is an anti-abortion lawyer and Senior Counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Project 2025 Advisory Board member. Hawley has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, asserting that the medication is a danger to women. Hawley has challenged the Biden Administration’s guidance that emergency room doctors have an obligation to protect patient health if they need abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, even if they are not on the brink of death. And Hawley played a key role in overturning Roe v. Wade. Hawley is married to U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO).

ADF is an anti-abortion group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, calling it “one of the most influential groups informing the [Trump] administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights” and one that “has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults.” Hawley worked on the 303 Creative case for ADF, which attacked anti-discrimination law through a manufactured claim that a religious anti-gay web designer might someday have to make a website for a gay couple, a claim the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court ruled for. (ADF has received major funding from the Servant Foundation and other donor-advised funds, plus from the Heritage Foundation and Charles Koch groups.) Through ADF, Hawley has been at the center of three Supreme Court cases attacking access to abortion, nationally and in the states.

First, she worked on the Dobbs case as co-counsel to the state of Mississippi, secretly helping to write the state law and coordinating the amicus briefs filed to support the state’s abortion ban. Despite her name not appearing on any of the amicus briefs (and ADF not publicizing which briefs she coordinated), an analysis of Hawley’s commentary on Dobbs in the months leading up to the Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade shows that the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court mirrored many of her claims.

Second, in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), Hawley assailed the availability of Mifepristone, an abortion medicine. She did so on behalf of AHM, a group that was created in Amarillo, Texas, seemingly to get a ruling from an anti-abortion Trump appointee, Matthew Kacsmaryk. (Kacsmaryk previously contributed $500 to Josh Hawley’s senate campaign in 2018, and Sen. Hawley voted to confirm his judicial appointment in 2019.) AHM is a Leonard Leo-tied front group of anti-abortion doctors trying to block access to the drug used in more than half of the abortions in the United States. Before the Court, Hawley made false arguments that mifepristone is unsafe, even though peer-reviewed research has shown it to be safer than Tylenol; it has been on the market for two decades. AHM also claimed its members might someday suffer a “conscience injury” by being “complicit” if a patient has complications after taking the drug and a doctor may have to choose between “helping a woman with a life-threatening condition and violating their conscience” by completing the abortion.

Third, Hawley signed the paperwork for ADF’s representation of the Idaho Attorney General in Idaho’s challenge to the Biden administration’s guidance that emergency room doctors have an obligation to protect patient health if they need abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) even if they are not on the brink of death, the exception to Idaho’s ban on abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court made what has been characterized as a “politically-motivated choice” to punt on the issue until after the election and dismissed the case. As reported by _Bloomberg: _“on the ground, across the states, the Supreme Court’s failure to resolve the substantive question before it will only add to the chaos and uncertainty facing doctors and pregnant people alike.”

Hawley has also repeatedly made the medically false claim that abortions to treat ectopic pregnancies–which can rupture if left intact and kill women or destroy their ability to bear children–are not abortions.

Hawley’s ties to Leonard Leo and the Koch network extend back to at least 2014, when she represented the Leo-funded “Independent Women’s Forum” (IWF) in an amicus brief arguing that employers should have a right to refuse providing healthcare coverage for contraception for their employees in the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case. By 2018, she was a senior legal fellow at IWF, a dark money group that has a history of taking anti-woman positions. IWF and its 501(c)(4) Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) have received over $5 million from Leonard Leo’s dark-money network, $100,000 from the Heritage Foundation, and substantial Koch funding.

IWF actively backed the confirmation of Trump’s far-right Supreme Court nominees handpicked by Leo from his leadership of the Federalist Society. In the past two years, Erin Hawley has spoken at at least a dozen Federalist Society events, many of which focused on Supreme Court cases she worked on. She joined the Federalist Society at Yale Law School.

After law school, she worked in the George W. Bush administration as counsel to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Hawley then clerked for right-wing federal judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the 4th Circuit and then for John Roberts when he was on the D.C. Circuit. After Roberts was elevated to the Supreme Court, she clerked for him as Chief Justice, where she met and started dating her future husband, Josh Hawley. They then worked as law professors at the University of Missouri Law School and in late 2013 and early 2014, they launched the Missouri Forward Foundation and the Missouri Forward Alliance. Filing amicus briefs and making public appearances via these groups raised Josh Hawley’s profile across the state to such a degree that ethics complaints were filed against him alleging he used the non-profit groups in order to jump start his campaign for Attorney General (the complaints were later dismissed). Tax filings reveal the Missouri Forward Foundation’s 2014 budget was almost entirely constituted of a $100,000 grant from the Leo-tied Judicial Education Project (now known as the 85 Fund), the same group that had arranged secret payments to Ginni Thomas in 2012.

As Sen. Josh Hawley, who “raised his fist in solidarity” to a crowd of protestors on January 6, continued to promote Trump’s Big Lie, Erin Hawley penned an opinion piece for Fox and IWF in February 2021 complaining about protestors outside their house and drew criticism for failing to speak about January 6th. In a Fox interview, she dismissed concerns that her husband was involved in encouraging rioters on January 6. She also filed a criminal complaint against an organizer of a protest held outside of their home in response to Sen. Hawley’s opposition to certifying the 2020 election results, which was eventually dismissed by a Virginia judge.