Kristi Hamrick answers several questions for The Abortion Museum and this is the raw footage of our interview. This footage will assist us in creating a series of museum exhibits on the truth/history surrounding abortion.
Transcript
The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.
Jacob Barr :
Welcome to the pro-life Team Podcast my name is Jacob Bar and in this episode we are sharing raw footage, raw interview footage of Kristi Hamrick that was captured for the Abortion Museum so.
Jacob Barr :
Tell us a little bit about yourself, your expertise and experience, and what brought you to the topic of abortion.
Kristi Hamrick :
Ok, well, I was a reporter i started off covering Crime and Punishment, which is a really good place to begin if you’re interested in abortion, a lot of crime and a need for punishment of the abortionists, not women. So I was a Pulliam fellow i worked in Indiana and then I came to Washington, DC with the with CBN News covering. Again, always crime and crime ends up in politics. I worked a political campaign for governor and then Focus on the Family hired me when there was only 10 people at FRC to help build that organization. So I have either been a working journalist or talking to journalists on behalf of conservatives and social conservatives from Family Research Council to Focus on the Family to Concern Them for America, American Genital for Life, Now Students for Life of America. And then I’ve done a lot of private consulting work so in regards to the issue of abortion, on a personal note, as a journalist I was always a Christian. When I got into journalism. I never met another Christian reporter while I was a reporter. So you’re really in a mission field but it. And even though I was already pro-life it was the stories of friends of mine who’d had abortions that showed me what a significant evil and a terrible harm abortion is to women in particular. We know it ends the life of a baby, but the harms of abortion just don’t go away. And so it was friends of mine who had abortions and the pain that they suffered that really convinced me that it was an issue worth investing more of my time in.
Jacob Barr :
Awesome. When does human life begin? From your experience, and yeah, from your viewpoint, when does life begin well?
Kristi Hamrick :
We don’t need my experience on that, although I’ve had four kids thanks for asking. Science is very clear that life begins there’s a unique set of DNA that occurs when sperm and egg unite and now we have the X and Y or XX and, you know how that goes. So we understand Biblically that we are created unique in the image of God but scientifically it’s just as clear that we are created unique and that we will never be duplicated. So the science of it is it is absolutely obvious, but clearly denied by so much of our culture.
Jacob Barr :
Tell us about students the, you know, the students world when it comes to abortion, When it comes to, yeah, talk about students in abortion.
Kristi Hamrick :
Sure. Well, the roughest. I’ll start this again the rough estimates are that a quarter of this generation has been lost to abortion. So this is a group of people who have grown up targeted for abortion, knowing that they’ve lost family members, living in a culture that basically says that you are expendable. You’re expendable, depending on the circumstances of your money, of your birth, of your conception, of the characteristics which you have no control over. It really makes them vulnerable, and they have to grow up with that vulnerability. And instead of even saying to people at school or at work, you know, we want to help you achieve all that you can at school, at work, at home, and your relationships, we say to women in particular the incredibly misogynist message that you know what? The Victorians were right? They said that women could not work and have a family and they’re 100 % right, you should stay at work, as opposed to the Victorians, which said women can’t work and have a family so stay at home. So we there’s women are constantly sold short and then sold an abortion and it’s very limited and you see Fortune 500 companies investing in abortion not because they’re so enlightened, but because it’s cheaper than training a new person. It’s less expensive with the insurance. They can just keep someone chained to their desk throughout their career without anybody to go home to, and then that’s a win for corporate America. So I find it astounding not just the failure of the feminist movement to stand up for women, but the deception that has really seeped into the culture in regards to students thinking that, well, i can’t have a career and a family and I have to choose where i have four children i have worked my entire life and I’m surrounded by wonderful role models for that. But that’s the kind of role model that we really need to share with women, because the message of abortion is one of failure. You can’t do it. You’ll never be able to do it. And so let’s just sell you this abortion, solve this problem for you but you know, the day after you have an abortion, you have all the same problems. If you’re in an abusive relationship, you’re still in an abusive relationship. If you need money for your schooling, you still need money for your schooling if you need a job, you still need a job. It doesn’t change any problem of your problems, it just subtracts a child from your life. And so again, we’re selling women short by not addressing problems of sexual violence or the need for better educational support. We’re just telling them, well, we don’t care enough about you to help solve your problems, but we’re willing to take away that child so you know you can keep working at the things that are bothering you.
Team :
Can I stop batteries?
Jacob Barr :
Oh, yes. Ok so the next question was top misconceptions that students often have about abortion.
Kristi Hamrick :
I think students in most Americans have one tremendous misconception about abortion, which was that there were limits that were permitted by Roe V Wade through Roe V Wade and Dovey Bolton, the 1973 cases that together really set up abortion in America. It allowed for abortion through all nine months, for any reason whatsoever, sometimes with taxpayer funding. And now, in a world in which we don’t have the Born and Live Infants Protection Act up to and including infanticide. Because what that particular bill does is say that you need to offer medical care if an infant is born during an abortion. We know children are born during abortion we have abortion survivors around us. We also have things like the infamous House of Horrors with Doctor Kermit Grinnell. We also have things like Doctor Kermit Gosnell’s House of Horrors in Philadelphia in which children were killed after birth and he kept them in his freezer or threw them out in the garbage. So there’s lots of evidence that indicates that late term abortions happen, and you’ll see it on television. You’ll see people like Andrea Mitchell argue on television that Roe had all these limits in it didn’t. That’s not only a lie, it is confusing to people because when we’re out there talking about the legal framework of abortion in the US, you can get an abortion in the US through all nine months of pregnancy. There are places in Colorado and New Mexico and now in Maryland, in the Washington, DC area, Washington state in California. So does every abortion vendor end people’s lives up to birth no, but that’s because of their choice. And the choice is such an abortion buzzword, but it is possible and it is legal so you go on college campuses and you’re talking to in Ohio right now for example, with a ballot initiative saying that the current ballot initiative, if it passes, will not allow any limits on abortion at all, even on viable babies. And people are like, well, I don’t think that’s true, but it is that is the legal framework of abortion in America. Just because every abortion vendor doesn’t do it and just because it doesn’t happen in your state per southeast, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. So that’s a huge misconception that people had either that Roe allowed for limits or that you can’t get abortion up to the point of infanticide because you absolutely can. Then there’s lots of misinformation about how harmful abortion is. It can expose you to infertility and injury and death. There’s all kinds of complications from it. We see tremendous increases in things like preterm birth, which is one of the after effects sometimes of abortion that’s the number one cause of infant dead death in the world. Preterm birth, that’s a problem. We’re all kinds of people are being basically sterilized by the so-called abortion care that they’re getting, either because they don’t deal with RH negative status or you’re not treating this as some horrific surgical event that you forced on a woman’s body and maybe she didn’t recover well from it. And like I said, I’ve had four children. So they monitor you through your pregnancy, you have the baby, they come and check you after. There’s a lot of people there to make sure that you go through this experience safely, where with abortion, it’s a place of a medical abandonment. And probably one of the more recent and seriously irritating lies the abortion industry tells is that if we don’t have abortion, women won’t get life saving care or care for ectopic pregnancies. Which is 2 lies, but the same that same lie all rolled up together that somehow we’re going to let women die. Number one, every pro-life law in the country has life of mother exceptions. And if you are trying to save a woman’s life, that’s not an abortion, because an abortion is by its very intent designed to kill one person. That’s the goal where in a life saving procedure you wish you could save 2, but you can potentially only save one. And most of the time in life saving situations, and I’ve been in difficult pregnancies myself. If a woman is in a life threatening situation in a pregnancy, they deliver the baby quickly, maybe with AC section, try to provide any care possible for the baby, but then rush to save the mother. You don’t do what is a typical late term procedure of days and days of ripening the womb and trying to force this forward. Taking a needle, putting in the woman’s belly, giving the baby a heart attack, and then delivering a dead baby. That’s not handled as an emergency an emergency is generally AC section. So the language of life of the mother abortions is false because if you’re trying to save 2 lives, your intent is an abortion and the legal reality is false. But ectopic pregnancies is a great other place where you see lots of lies. You don’t deal with an ectopic pregnancy with abortion, and Planned Parenthood’s very own website said that they only scrubbed it after the Dobbs decision to make that less clear and I think that’s shocking. We have the screenshots of Students for Life, if you want to see what they used to say about it. But a woman’s life, if it needs to be saved, will not be saved with an abortion in an ectopic pregnancy that’s not what they’re going to do. But what’s so funny about that is in terms of current lies, the number one means of abortion death right now in America is chemical abortion pills. It will not end an ectopic pregnancy because it’s not in the womb. It’s outside of the womb, it’s outside of the uterus. So you force a woman to bleed and you do all these things to disrupt the placenta, and nothing is where you think it is. So if you wanted to make sure women didn’t die of ectopic pregnancy and you were selling chemical abortion pills, you would bring that woman in and you would do an ultrasound. But in the no test online distribution of chemical abortion pills, which we’ve set up with the Biden administration instead, we’re willing to risk women’s lives if they have an ectopic pregnancy, because they do need care and they don’t care enough to check. So those probably are the lies that irritate me the most. And then I talked to the reporters about, most significantly, awesome.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah thank you for sharing all those perceptions. It may like, straighten your blouse a little bit, sort of. There you go. And how’s the audio is it, was it bumping up against the blouse or is it OK? Oh, perfect.
Team :
Ok, this is a.
Team :
Little trickle, but usually in between.
Jacob Barr :
Ok.
Kristi Hamrick :
So hopefully my handwriting is legible. Oh, perfect, I read over it make sure none of it’s confusing.
Jacob Barr :
Ok, so question two, we’re still rolling pro-choice abortion choice, people often say.
Kristi Hamrick :
That say, so that line means or pro-choice or abortion choice every time at that line or yeah, ’cause I don’t know how a person identifies some people say what pro lifers have different choices, but abortion choice is a bit more clear. It’s just not. I don’t know which term people prefer. Sure, OK, I’m pretty flexible i talk to reporters. I’m evil so as long as I’m not evil, I can deal with it.
Jacob Barr :
So pro-choice or abortion choice, people often say that abortion helps women finish school, succeed in their careers and achieve their dreams. What would you say to a young woman who believes this?
Kristi Hamrick :
I would say that I am wounded that she is so inculcated with misogynist messages that she doesn’t understand that she can do more than one thing, that she doesn’t have to do one thing at a time, and in fact, they’re pro-life people, pro family people, ready to help you. No woman should have to choose between her child and her education, and our educational system really needs to support them i don’t think most people know that one in four undergrads is pregnant or parenting, and one in three graduate students is pregnant or parenting. Many people are balancing career and family. It’s very dismissive of them. And to say that you can’t do both. But also, I think what you really see is a sales pitch. The abortion industry wants to sell fear and then sell abortions you can’t make it you can’t succeed. You’ll never be smart enough or strong enough. That is misogyny, pure and simple. But also it’s illegal. There’s the Pregnancy Non Discrimination Act there are Title 9 protections and a Students for Life we’re there to help you. So if you’re getting those messages, come to us maybe what you need is a good lawyer awesome.
Jacob Barr :
Question three What are some of the special opportunities and obstacles pro-life or space, when doing on campus pro-life activities?
Kristi Hamrick :
That’s a big one. When you are a pro-life student or pro-life organization, there are a lot of barriers to entry to get on campus. They try to put you in free speech jail, like in an area outside of student traffic where you nobody can find you or get to you. They have means where you have to file for permits and ask for permission and go to a student council maybe or go to an administration or student affairs. So there’s a real gamut to be run in terms of getting the correct position. I mean, sorry, there’s a real gambit to be run in terms of the correct paperwork and the correct permitting, finding the correct location did you notify the police and the school and the city and who knows, you know, what else you need to do. And so it’s, there’s what we call it, and there’s a heckler’s veto, too, in which someone could say, oh, you’re bringing a pro-life group to campus we’re going to protest if you come and they’ll be like, oh, it’s too dangerous now so there’s a heckler’s veto you’re going to be canceled because it’s going to be too stressful. And if we let one event in, we have to let in another event in well, whether you have multiple events, that’s on you. But the fact that students want to speak and other people want to talk about what’s happening is not, should not be a barrier to free speech. And then we also have more and more onerous speech fines in the form of security fees, so that you’re going on campus and you have run the gauntlet of the permits and you found the little jail cell that they’re going to put you in where they’ll let you talk and you don’t have. You’ve got maybe some protesters coming in, but they’re ready to handle it with security that they’ll charge you for. We’ve had to pay for bomb dogs. We’ve had to pay for security fees to schools, to local police. It gets crazy we just won a lawsuit recently where they charged us more than 5000$ as a security fee and we got that money back. But those are the kinds of things that we’re dealing with fines, permits and the slow walk where they basically hope that you’ll graduate or, you know, lose interest before you ever get permission. So you’ll have students that come in maybe at the beginning of a freshman year and say they want a pro-life group. And by their senior year we’re still fighting, still trying to get permission for them to be a recognized group with rights on campus to talk about their issue. So that slow walk to nowhere is another barrier to entry that we kind of have to go through so we keep lawyers busy. We feel like if you can’t use your free speech rights, they don’t really exist. So we have to fight back on all those kinds of obstacles.
Jacob Barr :
Wow, follow up.
Kristi Hamrick :
Question to that if it’s that difficult having pro-life activities on campus, why even bother why not just push your pro-life activism off campus and have an easier time? Well, we tend we want to go as Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action we want to be where the students are and a vast majority of them are on campus and in that highly indoctrinated space in which up is down and down is up and abortion is good and women are weak, which is very irritating. Somebody has to say no, somebody has to stand up somebody has to fight back. It’s the principle of the thing. But also like I said, our groups on campus, we are advocating for pregnant and parenting students. We are trying to be a voice for them. We do a lot of all our groups have to do supportive services so whether it’s a fundraising drive to get diapers for pregnant and parenting schools and students, sorry. You know, Anyway, you’d see what I’m saying, that we have to get it for the for the students or we raise money for scholarships for the students and then we meet the students and get to know them from their campus work to provide them some additional funds to stay in school. So we’re trying to be where people are. The number one path out of poverty is an education when you look at the socio economic details. So we want to help pregnant and parenting students stay in school. We want to help them achieve the kind of trajectory that will help them take care of themselves and their families that’s really the most profoundly thing we can do. But also somebody really has to confront the hostility and the anti baby bias of campuses. I It’s offensive and it affects a lot of people.
Jacob Barr :
That’s good answer.
Kristi Hamrick :
I hope it might have laughter didn’t come across too. I smirked when you said diapers for students and I was like, yeah, they would probably be pacified yeah, exactly, exactly. I know it’s amazing how diapers are a big thing i mean, if you have kids, you know that you go through them like water yeah.
Jacob Barr :
It all adds up.
Kristi Hamrick :
It really does.
Jacob Barr :
Do you have any pro-life stories from your time with Students for Life of America?
Kristi Hamrick :
Well, I spend a good bit of my time talking to legacy and mainstream media or what Rush Limbaugh would have called the drive by media. That is an audience that I’m very much working with. And I think the thing to remember there is reporters are people too. You know, it’s easy to demonize people and to see them as other, even in the context of the work that we’re all doing. But reporters have their own abortion stories and their own family stories and so I do find that to be a very fulfilling place to advocate for life and for free speech there are principles at stake here, both journalistic principles and societal principles and on the whole journalists are interested in culture building activity. And I think too when you deal with politics, so many people make a very cynical and self-serving and non principled argument where we are saying based on the humanity of people in the womb, we’re going to stand up for them whether we win or not every time, whether people laugh at us or not, you know whether we need to call our lawyers or not. We’re not going to be deterred from the human rights issue of our day and over time, I do think that you can build a respectful and real engagement with people when you are making a principled stand. And you do have an answer ready for every reporter, man or woman and slight change in the scripture there. But that’s the point, to be ready and willing to make a case and so we train our students to be ready and willing to make a case on campus we’re not trying to a lot of organizations are top down and the head of the organization does all the interviews and gives all the speeches and is the what you see all the time. We’re bottom up. We are training people to go out throughout culture and whether it’s Twitter or Instagram or on campus, we’re trying to empower people with apologetics and programming to make a difference in their communities, in their schools and in their jobs, and to know their rights and when you look at the lawsuits that we’re facing, lawsuits like buffer zones where you can’t stand near the door of a pregnancy, you know, of an abortion vendor or a place of government, you know, it’s funny. And I’m not making a comment about the border, but the border was open and there was razor wire around the Capitol. There’s a lot to be seen in the juxtaposition of these two pictures where we’re shutting people out of government. We’re confining them on campuses we’re keeping them away from abortion vendors as though free speech is dangerous and maybe it is. Maybe it’s so powerful that somebody stands up and say there’s another person here and I’m not afraid to stand up for them. That that’s so powerful that it is mind changing and life changing. And that is a lot of the model, the pro-life movement, because you have people trying to save lives every day, one person at a time, because fundamentally abortion happens in the heart of a of one person impacting another.
Jacob Barr :
Awesome question five. What is chemical abortion?
Kristi Hamrick :
Sure. Well, in the United States, there are two pills that are used to end life in the womb, and that’s the way it’s been since 2000 Mifeprestix and mifeprestone, they come together the first drug designed literally by someone with roots to the Nazis, starve the child of progesterone, and so the placenta feeds the baby. The first drug blocks the food to the baby. That’s drug number one drug number two stimulates contractions and expels the child, sometimes alive. You’re not necessarily killing the baby when you’re starving the baby you’re being disruptive to the pregnancy and you’re destabilizing the pregnancy and then you start contractions and many women report to us that the baby’s born alive. That’s very traumatizing. Britney Spears just wrote very openly in her book about what a horrible experience it was. And painful and bloody and terrifying. This is becoming the most common abortion story in America of being alone and then how much blood is too much blood? You’re at your home, you’re bleeding, and unless you’re a DIY physician, there’s no such thing as a DIY abortion and we’ve seen a 500 % increase in visits to the because women are bleeding out and they’re scared. So what is astounding about this is chemical abortion exposes women to injury, infertility, death, and abusers. We already see partners, hostile partners, getting a hold of these drugs and giving it to women without their knowledge or consent. If you don’t do a blood test for RH negative status, you can become sterilized if there’s an exchange of blood. Women just have died on the pills just taking them, and who cares about that? Everybody should care about that. And then these kinds of things can trigger injuries to the body and infection and sepsis, which can scar your uterus. And I think that’s something that people need to understand is that the abortion industry is willing to risk women’s lives for the purpose of facilitating a quick sale and walking away from all of their responsibilities. They’re not responsible, follow up, care for testing for what happens to you after you buy those pills. They’ve walked away from their responsibilities. Do we want to pause this and I can go ask them to maybe close the door while they’re vacuuming? I don’t know if you hear any of that I.
Jacob Barr :
Didn’t hear the vacuum until you just.
Team :
Mentioned it but.
Team :
I couldn’t hear anything you mentioned it either, but I’m sure we.
Kristi Hamrick :
Did you hear any of their talking ’cause?
Jacob Barr :
I heard a little bit, but i think her voice was plenty loud i don’t think it was.
Kristi Hamrick :
As you spoke loud enough, that might have covered it.
Team :
You said 500 % increase yeah.
Kristi Hamrick :
I can send you all the data points if you need it. It’s crazy. I mean, honestly it because, you know, and that’s funny i had bleeding in my pregnancy. I’m not a doctor i went to journalism school. So you’re bleeding. How much blood is too much blood you don’t know. You just don’t know so of course you go to the doctor and you call you’re freaked out. And I wasn’t trying to have a miscarriage. And you know, it’s just it’s terrifying. Chemical abortion just seems like it just furthers the escalates the negatives and just pushes women into a more misogynistic little chokehold there because they it says this isn’t something that you get professional help on. They’re just mailing it to, they’re mailing it in, and then you have to administer it yourself so you’re not, you’re abandoned by your family. You’re abandoned by your boyfriend now you’re abandoned by your doctor, right and you have to have an abortion all by yourself, right and if you’re RH negative, you probably just sterilize yourself. You got to have you got like 24 hours to get a rhogam shot? I had a ton of them i’m RH negative fifteen percent % population is RH negative it’s not uncommon. So if there’s an exchange of blood in birth, miscarriage or abortion, antibodies form in your body, which will attack a future pregnancy, and you’ve got about 24 hours to neutralize those antibodies i’m not a doctor, so I don’t know why there’s not a longer window, but there isn’t. So I was even an A Fender Bender at seven months pregnant with one of my children, and they gave me the shots as a precaution in case my placenta bled. It’s crazy. So you. So the abortion industry says, well, we don’t want to stock Rhogam and make it part of this started the part of the standard of care sorry, because number one the law doesn’t make us because number two maybe they don’t need it early we don’t know nobody’s tested but maybe. And number three they said because maybe women want to be sterilized, which not a kidding, because they said, but the only way you could want to be sterilized is if somebody told you if you take this and your RH negative and you don’t get this shot, you might never have a child again. And you see all these women after an abortion. Christy Teigen, ask him if they can close the door. Christy Teigen vacuum in.
Team :
The hallway.
Team :
John Legend’s.
Kristi Hamrick :
Wife, right? Happy to have all these blood transfusions because she was losing a baby, right?
Team :
What’s the? I mean this is more off.
Kristi Hamrick :
Topic while they’re she.
Jacob Barr :
Directed me the hallway. So we’ve always stop.
Kristi Hamrick :
I thought she might have just left the door open and she was backed up. And I think you need both. We’ve done a lot of interesting polling and when something is illegal, people do tend to think, well, that’s probably a bad idea. So as we go state by state to rebuild a legal structure for a culture of life, I think that will have an impact that, well, that’s something we shouldn’t do. That’s against the law. But hand in glove with that, you have to increase the service and the level of love and support at the same time we have Standing with You, which is a program to connect people to services, community, government and otherwise, at the local, state and federal levels, because you’re going to need that. But from our own experience, nothing really can be substituted for a loving person right there in that moment. The loving person at the Pregnancy Care Center, the Students for Life group leader who is a loving friend i mean, we have so many stories of that where someone gets pregnant and seeks out of Students for life friend, you know, on campus to tell their troubles, to knowing that the first word out of their mouths will be, that’s great i’m so glad you’re pregnant how can I help rather than you got to get rid of that? And that is, I think, part of the responsibility that we all have through our church, through our communities, through our pregnancy care centers to be frontline loving and not distantly loving. Because if you’re really scared and you really do feel alone, you’re looking for somebody who’s there. And if you don’t feel support from your partner or your family, then hopefully it’s from your friends and community. So I think that’s a responsibility we all have but I would argue one step further, that we have a responsibility each every one of us to try to exhibit a loving family and a caring social framework. Our culture demonizes marriage and family it says that career is better than kids. And you really see a powerful eugenics movement that has poisoned our culture. And we see all these articles, Elon Musk is quite eloquent about the contracting culture and that society is going to end, you know, not with a boom from a bomb, but from a whimper and diapers and adult diapers. That’s one of his lines and we do see contracting populations but why is that? It’s because we are encouraged to give up on parenting, on motherhood, and we’re really encouraged to put ourselves 1st and to act in fear when someone becomes pregnant. So just I really believe personally that our personal responsibility to be loving family members and then to take that love and let it ripple out into our communities and into our work is really important. Because they will know you’re Christians by your love and they will see the love and hopefully nowhere to come for loving support. But not if we’re quiet about it. But it is uncomfortable to go outside of abortion vendors or on campus or all kinds of places where we’re not welcome. So what? You know, if we can’t be afraid to stand up for the person who has no voice, and frankly, that often includes a child’s mother who doesn’t think that anybody’s going to fight for them, so they may as well give up. And that’s a problem.
Jacob Barr :
Awesome all right well, I think that’s a wrap thank you.