Anti-abortion activist votes for Beto O’Rourke because she doesn’t believe Republicans are actually ‘pro-life’

A self-described pro-life feminist says she's casting her first Democratic vote ever for Beto O'Rourke because she's tired of compromising her moral principles to fit into the Republican Party.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists, explained her decision to vote for O'Rourke, a Texas state representative, over the GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in a column for The Dallas Morning News.

"I am 100 percent pro-life, I'm also 100 percent feminist, and I saw the way (Donald) Trump treated women as an absolute deal-breaker," Herndon-De La Rosa wrote. "Sadly, we were one of the few pro-life groups that took this position."

Herndon-De La Rosa said she opposes abortion as a form of violence, just as she abhors war, torture and the death penalty --and booted former New Wave Feminist vice president Kristen Walker Hatten for embracing white nationalism after Trump's election.

"For years I reluctantly supported candidates who talked about making the sand glow in other countries with bombs and who advocated taking children away from their mothers, simply because unlike us, they hadn't won the geographic lottery," she wrote.

"And this killed me," she added. "I'm a consistent life ethicist, meaning I oppose all forms of violence against other human beings."

The 2016 election revealed how the GOP exploited the anti-abortion movement to mobilize voters, Herndon-De La Rosa said, and she also became disillusioned by the cynicism of movement leaders.

"I saw the way pro-lifers compromised so many of their own upstanding ethics and morals to elect a man thrice married, who bragged about his infidelities and predatory behavior," she said. "And why? So they could get their Supreme Court seats."

Herndon-De La Rosa, whose group was removed as sponsors of the 2017 Women's March over its anti-choice position, said she doesn't want to make abortion illegal, but unnecessary -- and she doesn't believe GOP policies will ever do that.

"Abortion becomes unnecessary when women have so much support from within their community that the one violent choice never even becomes an option in their minds," she wrote. "Abortion becomes unthinkable when women of color realize that having their children will not cost them their own lives because we have men like O'Rourke actually addressing the disproportionate number of minorities and children dying during childbirth."

"You want women to stop feeling pressured into abortion?" she added. "Then start by addressing the very things that lead so many of them to that desperate choice in the first place."