If you are a pro-life activist, you have several reasons to be discouraged at the moment. Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court's most vociferously anti-abortion justice, died in February. Then in June, in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the most sweeping abortion decision since 1992, the court struck down parts of a 2013 Texas law that placed restrictions on abortion clinics under the guise of women's health and safety; similar laws in Alabama, Mississippi, and Wisconsin rapidly fell in the wake of the 5-3 vote. As the Catholic writer Michael Brendan Dougherty summed it up this summer, "2016 is turning out to be the worst year for the pro-life cause in at least a generation."

Normally, an election season would bring the promise of a restart: the possibility of a Republican ally in the White House, and a Supreme Court justice or three following in his wake. But Republican nominee Donald Trump called himself "very pro-choice" as recently as 1999 and has been downright incoherent on the issue during the past year. Even if you believe his conversion to the anti-abortion cause, he has shown almost no grasp of its language or the ideas behind it. As evangelical writer Matthew Lee Anderson put it in July in an essay titled "There Is No Pro-Life Case for Donald Trump," Trump is "someone who in his personal life has not merely lived in, but reveled in the moral atmosphere and commitments that stand beneath our abortion culture." The video of Trump boasting about sexual assault was just a visceral reminder of a well-known truth: The Republican candidate's private moral code is built on what you might call anti-family values.

Despite recent setbacks, however, the demographic outlook for the pro-life movement looks anything but bleak. On issues from race to sexuality to drug law, Americans are used to seeing each new generation become more progressive than their parents; with abortion, it's not happening: In a 2015 Public Religion Research Institute survey, 52 percent of millennials said the label "pro-life" describes them somewhat or very well, a number that roughly mirrors the general population. A 2013 poll showed that 52 percent of people aged 18 to 29 favored bans on abortion after 20 weeks, compared with 48 percent overall. Pro-choice activists now worry about the "intensity gap" among young people: A poll commissioned by NARAL Pro-Choice America in 2010 found that 51 percent of anti-abortion voters younger than 30 considered the issue "very important," but for pro-choice voters the same age, only 26 percent said the same.

With these numbers in mind, it's possible that the pro-life movement is in a moment of transition, not retreat. This impression is only reinforced by talking to the leaders of the movement's next generation, who look very little like their elders. Many are skeptical of the movement's long-held ties to the GOP and the Christian right. Instead, they are using the language of feminism, human rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement to make their case for a new culture of life.

"There's a little bit of truth to the old pro-choice saying that the movement is a bunch of old conservative white men," activist Aimee Murphy told me. "But I really have seen a massive shift with the youth, to ensure that our solutions are women-centered and that we're being consistent and nonpartisan, inclusive and opening and welcoming."

Aimee Murphy, founder of Life Matters Journal

Murphy was a pro-choice 16-year-old in California when an abusive, on-off boyfriend raped her. When the rape resulted in a pregnancy scare, Murphy's rapist wanted her to get an abortion, and threatened to kill her and himself if she didn't. A decade later, she still chokes up when she talks about that time in her life. But the threat was also clarifying. "In that moment, something clicked," she said. "I could not use violence to get what I wanted in life. I realized that if I were to get an abortion, I would just be passing oppression on to a child."

Now 27, Murphy is the founder of the Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Life Matters Journal, which describes itself as a "human rights organization dedicated to bringing an end to aggressive violence." The organization and its flagship publication oppose abortion as well as torture, the death penalty, and "unjust war." Murphy says the modern conservative movement doesn't grasp what she calls the "intrinsic worth" of every human life, echoing Catholic theology. "And if they do understand it," she said, "they're making a lot of exceptions."

Kelsey Hazzard, founder of Secular Pro-Life

In her talks on college campuses, activist Kelsey Hazzard, founder of the organization Secular Pro-Life, likes to point out that millennials are both the "pro-life generation" and the least religious generation. The 2013 Pew survey showed that 25 percent of nonreligious Americans believe having an abortion is morally wrong; as the nonreligious population, or "nones," continues to grow, the number of pro-life "nones" will grow, too. A 2014 Pew survey found that 18-to-29-year-olds make up a disproportionate 39 percent of anti-abortion "nones."

But these would-be activists had trouble finding each other without church-based institutions to coalesce around, according to Hazzard, 28, who works by day as a civil litigation attorney in Naples, Florida. She started Secular Pro-Life as a student at the University of Miami, initially just as a place for nonreligious pro-lifers to connect online. Although Christian churches served as convenient organizational bases for the first decades of activism in the post-Roe v. Wade era, those spaces can be alienating to nonbelievers who might be otherwise sympathetic to the anti-abortion message. Hazzard sees the internet as an alternative infrastructure for the next generation of pro-life activists, who have different moral assumptions and different political concerns than the old-school Christian right.

Maria Oswalt, leader of the University of Alabama's Students for Life chapter

Oswalt, a 22-year-old college senior, gets frustrated when pro-life advocates vocally oppose, say, transgender bathroom bills -- the kind of issue that she sees having no inherent connection to abortion and that serves only to make the movement look intolerant. Her Students for Life chapter focuses on abortion, but it also opposes the death penalty and assisted suicide; Oswalt sees these issues as naturally connected to abortion in a way that gender and sexuality are not. "Let's just focus on life issues, and not try to pull these other nonrelated issues into it," she said.

As Murphy and others told me, moral consistency matters a great deal to their younger compatriots in the movement, whose pro-life ethic means concern for life "from womb to tomb."

Lila Rose, founder of Live Action

One stereotype of the pro-life movement is that it is dominated by men, and old men at that. Last year, when the popular conservative site Newsmax compiled a list of the Top 100 most influential pro-life advocates, only five of the Top 20 were female, and one of those was the soon-to-pass-away Phyllis Schlafly. But that's starting to change. Lila Rose, now 28, is the founder of Live Action, a brash organization that has produced several news-making exposés of Planned Parenthood; Rose is now arguably the most famous young pro-lifer in America. (David Daleiden, the 27-year-old who filmed last year's undercover video of a Planned Parenthood executive discussing tissue donation, got his start at Live Action.)

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists

Women aren't just leading the next generation of the pro-life movement, many of them are doing it using the language of feminism, which would have been anathema to the old guard of pro-life activists. If you believe, as sociologist Kristin Luker suggested in her influential 1984 book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, that opposing abortion is really just a stealthy way of controlling women, the notion of an anti-abortion feminism will sound either absurd or morally outrageous. But the idea that pro-lifers are simply out to oppress women was always an oversimplification, and it's especially imprecise as a description of the next generation of activists.

Herndon-De La Rosa, who is 33 and lives in Richardson, Texas, does not fit the stereotype of a pro-life activist: She has neon pink hair, and she calls activists who use graphic posters of aborted fetuses "the turd in the Kool-Aid." She founded New Wave Feminists in 2007 because she "wanted to see a change not only in the feminist movement, but in the pro-life movement." Herndon-De La Rosa wants to smash the patriarchy, but she sees it in unexpected places: in "douchebags" who "treat fertility like a disease" by expecting their partners to be on chemical birth control and to get an abortion if they do get pregnant, for example. "I don't understand how more radical feminists don't see that," she said.

Ruth Graham is a writer for Slate, which first published this column. Twitter: @publicroad