Latinas focus on maintaining abortion access despite financial and logistical challenges
This election has been a divisive one mainly because Donald Trump has demonized immigrant communities.
Latino organizations have geared up for this election as the rhetoric coming from the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has sought to demonize many of them as people who came here unlawfully.
Women in those communities have the added challenge of dealing with reproductive barriers as well. More than 6.7 Latinas live in states with abortion restrictions.
Ann Marie Benitez, Senior Director of Government Relations at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, spoke to me about how all the challenges create a major problem for Latinas.
“When you add all of those elements together, it makes it really hard and creates a huge chilling effect for somebody to receive care,” Benitez said. “That kind of environment also allows for misunderstanding, miscommunication, misinformation, because it’s an environment in which a lot of confusion gets created.”
In addition to logistical challenges, women who come here from Latin America have to seek medical care from professionals who often don’t speak Spanish. That’s been a significant point of emphasis in advocacy for Latino people leading on reproductive issues. When the Affordable Care Act was written, lawmakers included a provision to ensure that Latino people had recourse if a provider couldn’t speak Spanish.
“Irrespective of what kind of care you're getting, including abortion, one cannot be discriminated against in terms of their language and should be able to get the information that they need,” Benitez said. “So that could be under like telehealth, that could be in a hospital, that can be in a clinic.”
Every abortion provider can’t speak Spanish, and so when telehealth is provided, the number of bilingual doctors isn’t what it should be. Luckily, some artificially intelligent programs and services can be used in Zoom, like Wordly. I’m including that for people who want to improve their services if they haven’t been aware of the programs.
A critical moment in reproductive rights history we have dealt with is the case of Rosie Jimenez, a Chicana woman in the 1970s who died from complications of a back alley abortion after she couldn’t get Medicaid to pay for a legal procedure. That became one of the central points in the argument against the Hyde Amendment, which forbids government money from being spent on abortion care. That case should continue to be an example of why we must eliminate it.
Benitez wanted to stress that maintaining abortion as a legal right differs from making abortion accessible to all women regardless of class, race, religion, or ethnicity.
“The right is just a theory, and people cannot actually exercise the right if they can't afford it, if they can't find a clinic nearby, if they can't get to their clinic,” Benitez said. “There's all these other elements that prohibit somebody from getting to a clinic or being able to use telehealth in their homes because of broadband issues.”