Being bumped from the partners list for the Women’s March on Washington was “one of the best things that ever happened in my career,” said Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of the pro-life feminist organization New Wave Feminists. Blatant hypocrisy on the part of the inclusive movement’s organizers brought these pro-life feminists mainstream notice. Curious attention to their banner—a perceived oxymoron—came just in time for Friday’s March for Life to commemorate Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that created abortion rights.
At Friday’s March, Vice President Mike Pence, a devout evangelical, will be the first presidential cabinet member to address the March for Life in person. Unlike most of the thousands expected in D.C. on Friday, New Wave Feminists marched last weekend too—and because of her group’s well-known dismissal, they had “an incredibly positive experience.” Women carrying Planned Parenthood signs approached them, perhaps recognizing Herndon-De La Rosa by her bright purple hair, and thanked them for coming.
Pro-life and pro-choice women agree on more than they realize, believes Herndon-De La Rosa, herself a mother of four. The best place to start is, as ever, by just showing up, open-minded and more or less uncensored, because otherwise, “You’re not going to change my mind, and I’m not going to change yours.” New Wave Feminists, along with their frequent partners at the Life Matters Journal, preach a vaguely spiritual “consistent life ethic,” a lifelong opposition to war, assisted suicide, capital punishment—violence or aggression at any stage of the human experience. (Predictably, many are also vegan.)
No woman wants an abortion, but she may believe that she needs one in order to carry on with her life, to keep up her GPA, to continue in her professional duties, to keep her parents’ roof over her head: Pro-choice women will say it’s a necessary evil. But if men and women were truly equally privileged, pro-life feminists would counter, would an abortion ever seem necessary?
Their appetite for equality in some ways surpasses that of pro-life liberal Mary Winter, who founded Women Concerned for the Unborn Child in 1970, proclaiming abortion “the ultimate violation of woman.” “The anti-life mentality is so foreign to the feminine mentality which, I believe, is biologically, instinctively geared toward the protection and nurturing of the young and the helpless,” Winter is quoted in Daniel K. Williams’ Defenders of the Unborn, a history of pro-life activism before Roe v. Wade.
Today’s pro-life feminists also ask for a more radical equality than their pro-choice counterparts. Abortion allows a woman to be almost as infertile as a man, after all; and in that sense it reduces rather than elevates her to an equal footing with her male competitors. “A lot is lost when we settle for just equality,” said Herndon-De La Rosa, seeming at first to echo Phyllis Schlafly’s barnstorming opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. “Equal rights are vital,” she qualified, “but at the end of the day, if we’re trying to make the male body normative—if we’re trying to settle by saying I’m not going to accept this unique, amazing thing, this ability I have as a female to create this brand new life, then we’ve lost something.” A woman should not “settle for equality,” in other words, when her reproductive capacities are so much greater than a man’s.
What if, pro-life feminism asks, we protected unplanned pregnancies from the consequences of stigma instead? An unplanned, out-of-wedlock pregnancy in a just and equal society shouldn’t mean the end of a mother’s career, just as it shouldn’t disgrace her family or scandalize her neighbors.
And she absolutely shouldn’t have to drop out of college, according the pro-life group Students for Life. Their Pregnant on Campus Initiative works with administrators to arrange accommodations for student-mothers, not unlike those afforded to student-athletes. Pregnant students and new mothers need flexible semester schedules, childcare, and safe spaces of a different sort: lactation rooms.
“We are all about empowering women and showing them they are strong enough to be a mother,” said Reagan Barklage, the Western Regional Director for Students for Life of America. “Being a parent and student is difficult but possible,” the Pregnant on Campus Initiative advises. By promoting practical supports to help them continue their studies, they open an option otherwise inconceivable, if not terrifying, to many college-age women.
At the end of the day, as Herndon-De La Rosa would point out, Planned Parenthood and pro-life feminists are asking the same question: “How do we take the crisis out of unplanned pregnancy?” Pro-choice and pro-life feminists just come up with different answers.
Pro-life feminists also prefer to present their cause as apolitical—or anti-political, really. “I actually think the most dangerous thing we ever did was make it a partisan issue,” said Herndon-De La Rosa. Both sides of a decades-long political battle over abortion failed generations of women caught in its crossfire, these pro-lifers believe.
What were previously progressive but are now mainstream parental leave and childcare policy platforms—recall the Ivanka Trump plan—are essentially pro-life feminist. And, much like the bipartisan revulsion over Lena Dunham’s confession she wishes she’d had an abortion, these common policy platforms just go to show, “When you’re being truly pro-life, that’s what you see—you see people from both sides saying, ‘This is common sense.'”
Herndon-De La Rosa and her allies tend to diverge from the mainstream pro-life movement, a socially conservative voting bloc in the so-called “death grip” of the Republican party. Pro-life feminists don’t all want to make abortion illegal—overturning Roe is not necessarily priority one. What they most want is to make abortion unnecessary, and unthinkable. Absent entrenched partisan affiliation, an open mind hears the heart. These women take it on faith that no woman, in her heart of hearts, really believes abortion is a public good. And only a society ruled by men could ever have produced a philosophy of equal rights that would decree to women the “right” to abort the unborn.
Reintroducing the right to life to an open-minded generation will mean cleansing the movement of its partisan taint. And, the first step should be diminishing the role of religion, according to Kelsey Hazzard, president of an organization called Secular Pro-Life. Hazzard sees millennials’ prevailing ethic of inclusivity, and calls it high time someone recast abortion as a violation of human rights. In a world where theological debates rarely wander over into mainstream consciousness, “We must not allow abortion to be reduced to a mere matter of theological debate or partisan box-checking.”
And, Hazzard observes, an increasingly secular pro-life movement would be historically consistent: “You’d have to be foolish not to recognize the incredible contributions Christians made to the abolitionist and civil rights movements,” she said. “But religious sentiment is not, by itself, sufficient to justify public policy.” To follow her logic—fifty years from now, one wonders, will we remember pro-choice Democrats the way we today think of the 1960s’ segregationist Dixiecrats?
Changing enough minds to change policy, history teaches, has taken more than claiming for your case a theistic moral authority. It ought to help that the future of the pro-life movement is also reorienting its best appeal to women: Apart from faith and politics, the biological imperative to protect babies has the weight of primordial truth. The Women’s March last weekend drew a big crowd and big names together under the official banner of Planned Parenthood. But, meanwhile, in what might actually amount to a history-making moment, the New Wave Feminists’ exclusion from its partners list drew attention to what would have seemed, to many women, a strange but deeply sensible perspective.
