A Season of Questions and Answers
By Rai Rojas

As director of Hispanic outreach for the National Right to Life Committee, I am often the recipient of some fairly interesting e-mail. I've opened my mail to find anything from queries as to how to begin a local Hispanic outreach program, to help in translating difficult stem-cell language into Spanish, as well as finding recipes for flan and where the best salsa dance lessons are.

I take them all in good stride and try to respond to most. Every year around the time of the Roe v. Wade commemoration, my e-mail folder really fills. This year was no exception.

I received an e-mail from an NRLC supporter in Oklahoma expressing concern about the number of Hispanics she sees attending pro-abortion Democratic candidate events. She finishes her note by asking, "What can we do?"

My response to that question has been the same for many years: We must educate, educate, educate.

We must educate ourselves, the media, and the Latino community. In the days leading up to the commemoration of the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I had the opportunity to do just that. I spoke at a pro-life event in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was overwhelmed and heartened by the eagerness of the people there wanting to reach out to the ever-growing Hispanic population in that state. I spoke with teens at National Right to Life's Youth Summit and I gave a lecture at Catholic University of America at a conference held by Students for Life of America.

I spoke repeatedly about one of the basic tenets of the pro-life movement: The more a woman knows about abortion the less likely she is to have one. And that the same is true of the Hispanic community: the more they know about candidates' pro-abortion positions the less likely they will be to vote for them. We have to not only educate the Hispanic community on the life issues, but how voting for pro-abortion candidates can negatively impact them.

They need to understand that to guarantee the safety of our community's youngest members, Latinos need to look for candidates who want to build a wall of protection around the unborn child. Those are our candidates, the ones who truly represent the moral and cultural values we Hispanics bring to this country.

As elections near, the purveyors of abortion will urge Hispanics to vote for pro-abortion candidates. But Hispanics have to realize that these pro-abortion candidates offer nothing but disdain for Latino life at its youngest stage of development.

The NRLC Hispanic Outreach program also helps organizations in Latin America help safeguard their protective abortion laws. We helped the local Mexican pro-life group in unsuccessfully trying to keep abortion out of Mexico City.

Immediately after National Right to Life's January 22 press conference a reporter writing for a Mexican daily asked me how could I possibly argue that it wouldn't be beneficial for the 90,000-plus women in Mexico who are having illegal abortions to want to have them legally?

I told him that his question was almost unanswerable because it had two incorrect assertions. One assertion was stated and the other one implied. He didn't understand, so I tried to clear it for him.

I told him that he was quoting abortion numbers from a developing Latin American country where resources are limited and Internet technology is very much lagging. These countries have a difficult task just keeping up with births; how could they possibly know the number of illegal abortions being performed?

I explained to him that we live in a world where the media is held to little or no accountability, and that it was his responsibility to go to the organizations feeding him these numbers and asked them how they came up with these numbers. They won't be able to, I told him, because they are pulled out of thin air.

These numbers are propaganda at best, outright manufactured lies at worst. The media should not allow these international organizations' "facts" to go unquestioned and that he should not let conjecture be treated as Gospel truth.

I could almost see a light bulb going off over his head. I then told him that the second part of his question, the implied part, was also very ill conceived because it implies that Latinas are clamoring for abortion on demand. I let him know that from my dealing with Latinos all over the world and from personal experience that abortion on demand is not even a minor blip on the minds of a vast majority of Hispanic families.

Hispanic women in developing countries, I told him, want clean potable water, they want health care for their family and an education for their children. Shame on those who try to tell us that abortion is the panacea for the women of the Americas.

A place where children still die from malaria and malnutrition--and the abortion industry wants to convince us that abortion is the answer. They spend millions upon millions of dollars promoting abortion and yelping about how "pro-woman" they are, yet are blissfully ignorant as to what the women of Latin America want and most importantly what they need.

The next day I read his column and was pleasantly surprised at how balanced it was.

This season of Roe v. Wade was one filled with questions for me, from the rallies, youth summits, college sessions, e-mails, and even reporters. It shows a very welcome increased interest in reaching out to Hispanics at a time when we are most under attack.

To my friend who wrote in from Oklahoma I say to fear not, to be strong, and to get the word out to the Latino community no matter how small that local community may be.