You can’t condemn racism while hanging out with hate mongers at your biggest event of the year.

The March for Life in Washington, D.C. is the anti-abortion movement’s flagship annual event, bringing together thousands of activists and reliably attracting national media coverage. Abortion opponents try to harness this spike in public attention to attract new supporters, particularly high school and college students. That’s why it’s especially troubling that Students for Life invited and celebrated the participation of alt-right pundit Jack Posobiec—a Trump ally known for “promoting antisemitic and white supremacist content”—at its marquee summit the following day.

The yearly National Pro-Life Summit is sponsored by Students for Life of America, and it’s a day filled with speeches and breakout sessions featuring anti-abortion lobbyists, influencers, and politicians. And while it’s expected that the summit serves as a hub for promoting disinformation about reproductive health and policies, this year’s summit went even further, with Posobiec invited to give a keynote address.

Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins gleefully announced Posobiec’s participation by writing on X, “We’re thrilled to welcome this warrior for Life.”

For those with unfamiliar with Posobiec’s promotion of conspiracy theories, white supremacist and antisemitic ideologies, and troll-style bigotry, here’s a sampling:

• There are plentiful instances of Posobiec meeting with, giving a platform to, or sympathizing with white nationalists, and embracing antisemitic memes and messaging.
• Posobiec previously promoted the white-supremacist “Great Replacement Theory,” which suggests the population of white people in the U.S. is being systematically diluted to weaken their political power and replaced with non-white immigrants. The conspiracy theory is attributed to giving rise to racially motivated mass killings such as the 2022 Buffalo, New York mass shooting targeting residents of a Black neighborhood and 2019 supermarket mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.
• A 2024 book co-authored by Posobiec referred to his political enemies on the left side of the political spectrum as “unhuman.”
• Posobiec undermined the violence of the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by right-wing, election-denying extremists, stating that a photo depicting a flash grenade and tear gas was “doctored to look as if the Capitol was on fire.”
• At a 2025 conference, Posobiec urged a crowd of pro-natalist conservative attendees to have more children to defend “the West,” a term often used interchangeably by extremists in place of whiteness.

By warmly embracing Posobiec’s participation in anti-abortion movement spaces, Hawkins and Students for Life are tacitly endorsing Posobiec’s virulent rhetoric, sending the message that racism, antisemitism, white supremacy, conspiracy theories, and the dehumanization of political opponents is welcome in their movement. In fact, Hawkins referred to Posobiec—verbatim—as “my friend” in a post from this year’s March for Life. Reciprocally, Posobiec wrote “GOD BLESS STUDENTS FOR LIFE” in an X post featuring a video of his interview with Hawkins for the right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice.

Ironically, Hawkins has spent the last few weeks publicly condemning conservative activist Nick Fuentes—whom the Southern Poverty Law Center designated as a “white nationalist livestreamer”—and his followers for lobbing sexist insults at Students for Life’s female members. A February 25 X post from Hawkins reads: “Serious question: Why are so many Gen Z men drawn to influencers like Nick Fuentes & Andrew Tate, even when those voices promote racism or openly degrade women?”

Yet when Posobiec suggested that the Civil Rights Movement “enshrined racial discrimination” or attacked successful women online, Hawkins failed to ask her “friend” the same question.

Hawkins’ double standard doesn’t end there. At Students for Life’s 2024 National Pro-Life Summit, guest Calvin Robinson—a now-defrocked priest—infamously gave a Nazi salute while speaking to a laughing and applauding audience. Hawkins reacted to an Instagram post of Robinson’s speech with glowing approval and later dismissed public ire against Robinson, stating, “I’ve been called a Nazi more times than I can count.”

And with this year marking the white nationalist group Patriot Front’s 7^th straight annual appearance at the March for Life to recruit new members, the failure of the event’s organizers to take meaningful action to dissuade the hate group from returning speaks volumes.

Anti-abortion groups have long complained about Republicans’ electoral losses. Over and over again, these groups have warned the GOP that they will continue to lose the crucial anti-abortion voting bloc unless Republicans embrace abortion restrictions—despite the reality that limiting health care access is fundamentally unpopular.

A word of advice for anti-abortion leaders and groups: associating with extremists who espouse white supremacist ideology is not the way to win over anyone besides white supremacists. Abortion opponents who are concerned about their public image face an uphill battle if they continue to embrace proponents of white supremacy—as if the challenge to change the opinion of the majority of Americans who support legal abortion in all or most cases isn’t hard enough. These activists’ election woes will not get any better by embracing hate mongering extremists. No matter how leaders try to reframe limiting bodily autonomy as righteous and humanitarian, anti-abortion leaders flirting with white nationalist causes is an unmistakable red flag. When anti-abortion leaders and groups tell you who they are, you ought to believe them.