This week I voted for Beto O'Rourke and might have ruined my career. The jury is still out, but as an anti-abortion-rights activist, I broke the one golden rule within our movement: Vote Republican.

For years, I bought into this belief. After all, without the right to life, all other rights are useless. Chronologically speaking, we have to protect humans at their weakest and most vulnerable stage, and so 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.

And this killed me. I'm a consistent life ethicist, meaning I oppose all forms of violence against other human beings, including war, torture, the death penalty and abortion. That means I'll never fit perfectly into either party.

Still, I spent so much time compromising my beliefs within the GOP that there was very little compromise left for the other side.

And then Beto O'Rourke entered the race for Senate, and he seemed different. He talked about working with Republicans and independents alike. He talked about finding common-ground solutions that we can all get behind when it comes to nonpartisan issues such as the veteran suicide rate.

If you ask almost any of my pro-life peers, they will tell you that O'Rourke is a "radical pro-abortion candidate." After I posted pictures of my husband and me attending an early-morning rally for O'Rourke in Richardson this past Saturday, friend after friend on Facebook began posting links to his NARAL and Planned Parenthood ratings. They shared op-eds about him blocking bills to limit abortions, and they voiced their horror over someone like me, a supposed leader in the movement, supporting such a monster.

Here's where I think many of us differ though. I run a large pro-life feminist group, not just a pro-life group. We were the ones removed as sponsors from the Women's March back in 2017 because of our stance against abortion rights. And that was a real shame because while I am 100 percent pro-life, I'm also 100 percent feminist, and I saw the way Trump treated women as an absolute deal-breaker. Sadly, we were one of the few pro-life groups that took this position.

However, during that election I started to see, as an independent, just how deep the GOP had its hooks in the pro-life movement. I saw the way these politicians used unborn children's lives to get out the vote but then oftentimes forgot about those lives soon after. 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. And why? So they could get their Supreme Court seats.

And then I watched as they got two of those seats, and how they boasted that all of their compromise had been worth it because we now have a "pro-life" advantage on the Supreme Court and could possibly overturn Roe vs. Wade. All the while, Sen. Susan Collins was explaining that she voted yes to Kavanaugh only because he assured her Roe was "settled law."

This was the last straw for me. That's when the blinders came all the way off. This idea of eliminating abortion by simply making it illegal is far too low of a bar to set. Abortion must become unthinkable and unnecessary if we want to eradicate it from our culture. And the only way that will happen is by creating a post-Roe culture while Roe still stands.

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. 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? Then start by addressing the very things that lead so many of them to that desperate choice in the first place.

I do not believe Beto O'Rourke or honestly most pro-choice people are "pro-abortion." They almost all know it's a very difficult choice because it takes a human life. Science tells us that. But I also think many of them view abortion as a necessary evil that will keep permeating our culture until we start offering women better alternatives, and I believe O'Rourke is someone willing to work with the other side to do just that.

That's why I, as a pro-life feminist, voted for Beto knowing full well it might be the end of my career, because women and children are worth that to me.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa is founder of New Wave Feminists. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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