By Maria Teresa Garcia, Right to Life of Michigan Multicultural Outreach Support Staff. To access this article in Spanish, please click here.
September 15 marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month. During this celebratory month, our Multicultural Outreach Department is taking the opportunity to explain what a privilege it is to work closely with the Hispanic community.
In the Hispanic community in Michigan, we can find strong cultural values towards family and life. Although there are marked differences in culture and language, Right to Life of Michigan offers a movement that unites people of all ages, languages, races, religions and ethnic backgrounds in a common purpose: to protect and celebrate life at all stages.
Our focus in educational outreach within the Hispanic community is primarily to educate on vital issues, including abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and assisted suicide. It is important to educate on these issues because, although Hispanics have strong family and life values, we are having a disproportionate number of abortions. In fact, 25% of abortions in the United States are performed on Hispanic women.
In showing these statistics to the Hispanic community there is great surprise as many people are unaware of this information. We’re looking for ways to identify the reasons why there are so many abortions within the Hispanic community, and some of the reasons are lack of information, language, family problems, lack of resources and, above all, the fear of facing an unplanned pregnancy.
In the Multicultural Outreach Department, we are working hard to close those gaps. We have been adding more Spanish language information to the website (see here) and our educational tables. We are sure to include Spanish resources to cover most of the needs that a pregnant woman may have.
We focus on providing help to everyone who needs it, not just women. Because this is an issue that concerns us all. Sometimes we think that abortion will only affect the woman but, it affects the whole family.
Our experience within the Hispanic community has been very gratifying because, thanks to the information and resources we have been able to share, this opens a new panorama for many people, and more and more women are deciding to go ahead with their pregnancy and decide to say “yes” to life, because they feel that they are not alone, and that there is help for them.
It is very important to continue our work to educate and show each person of any age, race, color, ethnicity, religion or language the infinite value that he or she has.
It is also worth mentioning that this work would not be as fruitful without the help and support of our volunteers as they are an essential part of helping us to personally encounter more people within the community.
Working within the Hispanic community is always well rewarded as the people are very warm and welcoming. We enjoy each opportunity to engage with the people and build relationships.
Right to Life of Michigan’s work within the Hispanic community goes even further with the granting of financial aid to the pregnancy resource centers.
We hope that more people will join us in supporting pregnant mothers and celebrating the life of every beautiful baby that needs our care, love and protection.
For information on prolife presentations in Spanish from Maria Teresa Garcia, please contact [email protected].