Can there be such a thing as a “pro-life feminist”? The question gained new currency just as the Trump presidency began, when Women’s March organizers dropped the New Wave Feminists, a Texas-based group led by libertarian-leaning pro-lifer Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, as partners—because the apparent oxymoron that puts the “new” in New Wave Feminist freaked out a few too many Twitter activists.
Herndon-De La Rosa and crew marched anyway. And media coverage of their idiosyncratic appeal to women caught in the middle punctured the budding #Resistance movement’s self-described “big tent.” Ten months ago, NWF and their ilk made us wonder, “Can you be feminist and pro-life?”—and realize: Yes, obviously. But since then, they’ve found an ideological home away from either camp.
“Once this became more of a national discussion, we had more women come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Here’s our common ground,’” Herndon-De La Rosa tells me. That common ground: supporting women in crisis, to whom only one choice seems clear. “I don’t care about Planned Parenthood and what they’re doing.” What matters more than the abortion behemoth’s political power is how effectively pro-lifers counter the organization—which, for New Wave Feminists, means offering women a “nonviolent alternative” to abortion. “Providing women with the support they need is going to happen at a community level,” not through political gamesmanship, she adds.
Still, pro-life feminism’s coming of age has meant owning up to the root of the mutual exclusivity that stumped so many who heard the words “pro-life feminist” for the first time back in January. However seamlessly their women-centered missions seem to mesh, the two movements will be politically incompatible for as long as their differences remain politically useful to both sides.
“Trump really opened my eyes to the fact that it’s all a facade—he’s not really pro-life. It’s all an illusion. No politician actually wants to get rid of this issue because it’s what gets people into the voting booth.” Such false fronts from opportunistic politicians don’t help pragmatic groups like Herndon-De La Rosa’s to fight the mainstream stigma of the pro-life label.
She described a recent scene of three prominent women—heads of influential women’s rights organization, who are personally but not publically pro-life—shielding their faces from a documentarian’s shot. Appearing in a film about the pro-life feminism would put their work at risk, because public alliance with the pro-life movement could easily alienate liberal donors. “Standing up for the most innocent and vulnerable human beings in the human family is considered so radical that it would taint these other good efforts that these women are doing,” Herndon-De La Rosa says.
Soon she’ll have another opportunity to tilt those in the #Resistance to her cause. The Women’s Convention, led by the many of the same organizers as the Women’s March, will take place in Detroit this weekend. Herndon-De La Rosa weighed the pros, cons—and costs—of attending: “I would feel really guilty spending $1,000 when that’s $1,000 that could go toward helping a real woman through a crisis pregnancy,” she explained. But when New Wave Feminists marched among the pink-hatted masses in Washington, as participants not protesters, women approached them—Planned Parenthood signs in hand—to say, more or less, We may disagree, but you deserve to be here, and it’s wrong that they kicked you out. “This kept happening over and over again,” Herndon-De La Rosa tells me. And in Detroit, ten months later, one expects she’ll only encounter a greater curiosity about her group and its idea, evidence of common ground growing under the surface.
Then she decided, with one day left to buy her pass to the Women’s Convention, that New Wave Feminists ought to say for themselves whether their spokeswoman belongs in the intersectional mix at Detroit’s Cobo Center this weekend. A Facebook screed from a former colleague, who now refers to herself an ex-feminist, inspired her to ask them.
When the pro-life Radiance Foundation shared the woman’s post—an embittered argument that, per Herndon-De La Rosa’s summary, “Feminism was toxic, and we need to stop trying to make pro-life feminism a thing”—she bristled at first, but then “turned that into rage fuel.” The pro-life movement appeared to her more closed off, more of an echo chamber even, than the Women’s March. So why not go to their convention in Detroit and see about starting some conversations? She turned on FaceTime and asked NWF’s followers. Their response: a burst of donations, enough to cover her airfare and convention ticket within a matter of hours.
“Maybe I’m pissing off all the right people,” she wonders, “Or maybe I’m doing it totally wrong. I don’t know, it’s a weird experiment.” At least she knows her supporters want her to challenge the dominant formula for intersectional feminism, with an obvious and yet revolutionary intersection of ideas: “We talk about intersectionality, that means women with different backgrounds and different beliefs and if we’re not able to share those different beliefs and how we came to those conclusions, is this really intersectionality?”
But she’s not going to rile a one-minded opposition. In fact, she’ll probably steer clear of the Planned Parenthood events altogether, aiming to make much more than a fuss. Leading a progressive activist or several to reconsider the problem on which our political poles depend—that leaves a lasting impression. “If there’s one woman I can just start a dialogue with, just explain some of these ideas and where we’re coming from, that’s worth it for me.”
She’ll meet more than one. Lately NWF hasn’t needed to leave its Facebook page to win ever-wider notice for its non-violent, pro-woman brand. A stirring post after Hugh Hefner’s death described his cruel and little-remembered exploitation of vulnerable megastar Marilyn Monroe, purchasing and publishing in Playboy nude photos she’d posed for years before as a struggling upstart. “Bob Bland, one of the founders of the Women’s March, shared our post on her personal Facebook page. So it’s completely come full circle in a matter of 10 months.” Every viral post helps: “The more people hear our message, it debunks whatever stereotype they have in their head for what pro-life meant. They realize that we really do just want to support women in making nonviolent choices.”
Herndon-De La Rosa had her first child at 17 and decided against an abortion, just as her mother—19 when she had a daughter and named her Destiny—did before her. She knows how far before conception her current work has to start. “Most pro-choice feminists acknowledge that no woman wants to have an abortion,” she says. “If she feels like she doesn’t have a choice, we need to look at how societally we have failed that woman.” Plus, “If you don’t feel like you have a choice—that’s not pro-choice.”
The cultural climate might just be right for a new sort of unconditional sisterhood, with walls of women’s “Me Too” statuses following the flood of Harvey Weinstein exposés. That’s not to mention the disheartening tenure of a president, nearly a year in, whose self-described depredations inspired a knitting craze. Maybe the middle, that lonely field between uniform ideologies, is filling out. If so it’s best fertilized at the grassroots, according the New Wave Feminist in chief—on campuses best of all, she tells me. Students routinely invite her to speak at their colleges, where she sees the concept that confused hardened commentators click with young women.
At Texas A&M, where the campus pro-life group hosted Herndon-De La Rosa last Monday, “One of the girls raised her hand and said, ‘I just think it’s so cool I’m allowed to be a feminist now.’” It was a moving moment in pro-life feminism, the sort of revelation that suggests a future for the anti-abortion movement beyond blow horns and gruesome posters. For this girl and those like her, “[Feminism] broadens her activism. She doesn’t have to focus only on the fetus.” Actually making abortion obsolete asks more of us—“How can I better advocate for women? And not just when they’re pregnant.”
