Arizona sees rising support for abortion rights among Latinos

It’s 108 degrees outside as Mayra Rodriguez guides her Winnebago into the parking lot of a Hispanic grocery store in North Phoenix, a few weeks before election day.

“You get sweaty. It is hot, right?” Rodriguez, 48, muses. “And this is what I tell my children and any people that complain about this heat: If you don’t like the heat, then imagine hell.”

Rodriguez is the state director for Moms for Arizona, an anti-abortion group campaigning against Proposition 139, a ballot measure that would expand access to abortion in the state. Her Winnebago is a roving billboard, emblazoned with warnings about what she believes are the dangers of abortion — English on one side, Spanish on the other.

Rodriguez exits the RV and begins passing out flyers to shoppers, imploring them in Spanish to vote against Prop 139. She’s deliberately targeting fellow Latinos because of their voting power, constituting almost 25% of the electorate here in Arizona — a big enough bloc to help decide the outcome of the ballot measure, which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution if passed.

Yet, Rodriguez faces an uphill battle. Recent polling — which categorized ethnicity as Hispanic — suggests around 60% of Hispanic voters in Arizona support Prop 139, a greater proportion than white respondents. That mirrors national trends, too. Pew Research Center polling shows that 62% of Hispanics in the U.S. believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Twenty years ago, only around a third of Latinos supported abortion rights. So, what accounts for the dramatic shift in opinion?

Rodriguez has one guess.

“Twenty years ago, people were more religious,” she says. “Latino people, you know, they were more active as Catholics. As you can see, the Catholics have really dropped.”

Several national polls in 2023 showed a considerable drop in the number of Latinos in the U.S. who identify as Catholic over the past few decades.

Related: Most young Oregonians believe abortion should be legal, poll finds

Rodriguez has a unique perspective on the transformation of Latinos on the issue of abortion. For 16 years, she worked at Planned Parenthood in Arizona. Her opinion began to change as she rose in the organization and gained more exposure to its abortion services. Once she left, she became an activist for the other side.

“My son says, ‘Mom, you’re swimming against the current,’” she says. “When I was on the abortion side, most Hispanics were against abortion. And now, I’m on the pro-life side and a lot of Hispanics are going in the opposite direction.”

Arizona’s abortion policy has been on a winding journey since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022. In April of this year, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that an 1864 law banning nearly all abortions — passed before Arizona became a state — was enforceable in the absence of federal protections for abortion rights. Around a month later, the Arizona legislature repealed that law, leaving in place a 2022 law allowing abortions up to 15 weeks into a pregnancy.

If Prop 139 passes in November, abortions will be legal up to the point of fetal viability, which is generally considered to be around 22 weeks.

The threat of those rights being taken away in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision may also explain the rising support for abortion among Latinos.

“I was really mad,” says Raquel Salas, a 47-year-old educator in the Phoenix area, who emigrated from Hermosillo, Mexico in 2011. “Why are you taking away more rights for women?”

Salas grew up in a Catholic family that never spoke about abortion. But she drifted away from the church after coming to the U.S., and her views on abortion have become more complicated over time.

“Still today, if you ask me, ‘Do you agree with abortion?’ If I need to answer that question in one word, I would say ‘No.’ But it’s not a white and black thing,” she says. “And the way I see it right now is you don’t take the right away from everybody just because some people will use it as a contraceptive, which is what I’m really against. But I know there’s many different shades.”

Salas even went to an abortion rights rally at the state capitol with her daughter, Rebeca, after the Dobbs decision. She believes other Latinos are also beginning to support abortion because of a perception that rights have been eroded more generally since the Trump administration.

“After Trump’s presidency, a lot of people got scared,” she says. “Many of our rights were being endangered. And when they start limiting rights, they’re affecting the most underserved population. And if you did this to my neighbor, what’s coming next?”

Other immigrants from Latin America can point to their home countries for reasons to support abortion rights in the U.S.

“I know what’s coming for you now,” says Margarita Acosta, 69, who emigrated from Colombia in the ‘80s. She now lives in Cochise Stronghold, a narrow canyon of craggy granite 90 minutes southeast of Tucson.

Acosta was 29 and living in Bogotá when she found out she was pregnant. Abortion was illegal in Colombia at the time, and being caught in a clinic could be punishable by jail time.

“When you realize you are pregnant, now what are you going to do? Who are you going to call? How are you going to do this?”

Acosta eventually found a secret clinic and made an appointment. When she arrived, the doctor told her she wouldn’t be given any anesthesia because she had come alone, and would need to walk out on her own.

“It was painful,” she says, recounting the experience. The doctor warned her not to return to the clinic even if she began to bleed excessively. “It was very sad, you know, to be alone and in silence. So of course it was very hard.”

Four years later she moved to Arizona, and didn’t speak publicly about the experience for almost 40 years. But then, in 2022, Colombia and the U.S. each saw upheavals in their respective abortion policies. In February of that year, Colombia’s Constitutional Court legalized abortion up to 24 weeks; four months later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Related: Abortion access is settled law in Oregon. So why are advocates worried?

Acosta now speaks publicly about what she went through. She believes that the liberalization of abortion policies around Latin America — the so-called Green Wave — has led to greater support among Latinos for abortion rights in the U.S. too, especially because people like her know what’s at stake.

“When something is illegal, you have to go underground, and there’s a lot of people waiting to take advantage of that,” she says. “You have to pay attention.”