The Women's Marches around the world were an amazing example of the power ordinary people can wield. Women, LGBTQ individuals, people of color, disabled folk, and many more banded together to peacefully protest the presidency of Donald Trump. People knew their rights and peacefully exercised them in order to stand up for human rights and to convey to Trump that their rights would not be taken away during his presidency.

I enjoyed watching and participating in the marches because they were an example of female solidarity, which is often lost due to internalized misogyny. Instead fighting over who could appeal to men the best, we put our differences aside to peacefully campaign for a larger goal—equal rights. However, only a few days after the marches had taken place news articles surfaced about pro-life feminists being willfully excluded from the marches.

Why? I thought women were supposed to unite. Apparently, a pro-life stance runs contrary to a pro-choice stance. I think this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of each stance. A pro-choice stance can encompass a pro-life because a woman can choose to either have an abortion or keep the child. It is her choice, and she should be able to have every option in front of her. However, this does not mean that the pro-life stance is without its problems. Some pro-lifers call for defunding Planned Parenthood and actively preventing women from safe and accessible abortions.

This is not pro-life because it is actively putting the mother’s life and her unborn child’s life at risk because she may seek an illegal, unsafe abortion, where an infection can kill her. If the mother has the child, both of their lives can be put in jeopardy if the mother does not have either the money or resources to take care of it. Then, the same pro-lifers refuse to fund adoption programs and free vaccinations for the child. Attempting to deny women the choice of an abortion in the case of unwanted pregnancy is not pro-life it is an infringement on reproductive freedom.

Some feminists argue that one cannot be pro-life and feminist. Granted, there are extremists who wish to take away reproductive freedom from women because of old-fashioned gender roles. But that does not mean every pro-lifer is like that. It is certainly possible to be pro-life and feminist because it starts with a choice between every option for dealing with an unplanned pregnancy.

These feminists have chosen to promote life, which is a valid idea to strive for because an abortion does not have to be the only option. I think the pro-choice feminists forgot that a big tenet of feminism is that a woman’s choices can be dictated by her brain, not her gender. Excluding pro-life feminists from the Women’s March does not help women’s rights because it indicates that there is only one form of acceptable feminism when there is not.