Debunking the Myth That Latinos Are Anti-Choice

*Something new to talk about, post-election. As non-Latino politicos strain to understand Latino culture and politics, they’d do well to know that with Latinos aren’t what they appear to be. Where do Latinos fall on the pro life/choice axis? Is it that clear cut? Does it follow a religious/moral expectation? … so many questions. VL

By Miriam Zoila Pérez, Colorlines

I spent Valentine’s Day 2007 at a community center in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. I was there with a colleague from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) where I was working as an organizer. We’d come to facilitate a reproductive justice advocacy training with a group of local women. They varied in age from early 20s to 50s, and had been gathered by a group of local promotoras—health promoters—who had been working in rural, isolated trailer park-like communities (known as colonias) with no municipal resources (running water, sewer systems, trash collection).

At this point the organization had done five such trainings in different parts of the country, but we knew this one would be different. It was our most rural effort to date, and it was also going to be entirely in Spanish. The women who made up this group of 25 were mostly recent immigrants from the Mexican towns just miles away across the border. We were unsure how the conversations, in particular the one about access to abortion, would go.

When we talked about abortion access, the first comments were, not surprisingly, about religion. One woman shared that her priest spoke against abortion during mass. But it didn’t take long for other kinds of comments to come forth.

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[Photo courtesy of National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health/Colorlines]