Can you be feminist and ‘pro-life’? The women who say yes.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of the “pro-life” organization New Wave Feminists, would seem at the cusp of hard-won victory.

She’s a resident of Dallas, and in 2021 her state passed the so-called heartbeat bill, which essentially prohibits women in Texas from getting an abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy – a law celebrated by the anti-abortion movement nationally. 

Now, less than a year later, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which is expected any day, could roll back the constitutional guarantee that allows women in all 50 states to seek abortions up to fetal viability. 

But the activist says she doesn’t feel like the winner here. Even if the Dobbs decision returns the abortion debate back to the states – likely resulting in about half of them prohibiting or severely restricting the right – she says she sees it as a small battle won in a war she’s still losing.

“We’re not trying to defund Planned Parenthood. We’re not trying to overturn Roe. Our work actually isn’t going to change one bit if Roe is overturned because our whole point is not necessarily in regards to legality. It’s about the reality women are facing,” she says. “I see leaders taking away options, but they’re not necessarily supplementing them with other options for women.”

The anti-abortion and abortion-rights camps have been pitted against each other, perhaps like never before, as the Supreme Court decision nears. But the position of New Wave Feminists shows how complex the reproductive environment will become – with no clear winners and losers. At the same time, perhaps optimistically, some see hope that complexity may carve out space for cooperation to help all women, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Sparked by a billboard

We meet over Zoom, since I’m in Toronto and Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa is in Dallas. She shows up in a black T-shirt reading “Dad Bod” falling off her shoulder. She fits the part of an organization that bills itself as “Badass. Prolife. Feminists.” 

We start with the term “pro-life feminism,” which many feminists scoff at. (In fact, when I wrote a cover story asking “Can you have women’s rights without abortion rights?” the vast majority answered with a resounding no.) 

That doesn’t surprise her. New Wave Feminists was briefly a sponsor of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington until it was uninvited over its anti-abortion views. Yet Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa does sound like a feminist – one whose raison d’être isn’t just opposing abortion – as she rails against “the patriarchy.”

New Wave Feminists was formed on a fluke. Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa remembers driving down a Texas roadway with her 5-year-old son in the early 2000s when they passed a billboard advertising a restaurant, using women’s breasts in the form of chicken wings. “My feminist rage just went off,” she says. She and two friends penned a furious letter to the city council, signing off as “New Wave Feminists” to add gravitas. They scored their first victory: The offensive part was painted over.

Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa says she’s always been “pro-life.” She found herself pregnant at 16 and kept the baby. 

With regard to New Wave Feminists, though, “the pro-life part came after the fact. And I debated it,” she says. 

She finally included it as a main platform for the organization after realizing how little room the feminist movement gave to anti-abortion voices. “I knew it was going to be unpopular. I had no idea it was going to be quite so unpopular.”

Since then her views have evolved to advocate a “consistent life ethic,” a movement opposed to violence of any kind – from abortion to unjust war to capital punishment – that was popularized in the 1980s by the Roman Catholic Church.

I had never heard the term, so I looked it up and was struck by how its top issues sounded a lot like those of the reproductive justice movement, which I’d just reported on. In particular, the groups’ stances against police brutality and violent discrimination against vulnerable groups overlap. The main difference between them: One supports access to abortion and the other doesn’t, and that’s a gaping difference, especially for those who fall on the hard line of either spectrum. 

Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa told me they work with a consistent life ethic group called Rehumanize International, which is based in Pittsburgh, where New Voices for Reproductive Justice, featured in my earlier story, is also based. So I called Herb Geraghty, executive director of Rehumanize International. He says he hasn’t worked with the reproductive justice group but knows of it and certainly would collaborate in many areas, like against police brutality, despite its abortion-rights position.

The “Venn diagram” of abortion attitudes

Rehumanize International and New Wave Feminists dispel stereotypes that all anti-abortion groups are church-attending Evangelicals or conservative Catholics. Geraghty started to understand his position against abortion in high school, around the same time he began to identify as a member of the LGBTQ community and as an atheist. “I sort of became reluctantly pro-life. I definitely wasn’t happy about it. I did not think it was cool,” he says.

New Wave Feminists counts college students, pacifists, independents, and agnostics in its ranks, as well as a religious following (although Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa says she lost many Protestants after she publicized her stance as “a very vocal ‘Never Trumper’”). She also says some abortion-rights activists work with her in Texas. They look away from her anti-abortion position, while providing “car seats and cribs and strollers and wipes and formula and diapers to women in need,” she says.

Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education, and politics at the Third Way in Washington, which seeks consensus on tough issues, says politics fails to capture the “Venn diagram” of attitudes about abortion. “People’s feelings around these issues are complex, and politics makes them overly black and white. And so we put people in different categories, and the policymakers that represent them have very little overlap and are much more polarized than the general population.”

Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa, formerly Republican and now an independent, says she found herself stuck in the “Republican/Democrat binary,” in which she couldn’t find space to talk about humane treatment for immigrants, for example. She blames politicians for weaponizing women’s reproduction for their own political gain, starting in her home state. 

“Texas could have invested in creating a true life culture that made it possible for women to choose life. And instead, it just pushed through a restrictive heartbeat bill,” she says. “One of the first things that I said [when it was passed] was, ‘I don’t think that this is going to save babies. I think it’s going to save politicians.’”

Now Ms. Herndon-De La Rosa says if Roe is overturned, handing abortion decisions back to states, it will split the country further between states that offer abortion sanctuary and those that pull “trigger laws” to effectively end it – with all the resources from the anti-abortion camp heading to the sanctuary states to fight the practice.  

“The problem with that is there are still going to be pregnant women in states like Mississippi, Texas, or Louisiana. There’s women in those states who need housing, transportation, child care, and health care, especially in rural areas.”