Arizona’s ballot measure could shift the narrative on Latinas and abortion

Jennifer Arenas-Cardenas, 8 months pregnant, plays with her son Geal Aranes-Cardenas, in their home in Tucson, Arizona, on Oct. 2, 2024. Photo by Kasia Strek for The 19th

GUADALUPE, Arizona — This small city south of Tempe, rife with front yard shrines to the Virgen de Guadalupe and heavily Latinx, was on the list for door knocking. It was the first weekend in September, and the first official day of on-the-ground campaigning for Arizona’s ballot initiative to guarantee abortion rights in the state constitution.

As the team of canvassers gets ready to go, Diane Lundahl, 50, a volunteer, says she’s curious to find out if the religion she grew up with — the Catholic Church has made its stance on abortion clear — will color voters’ reactions to the pamphlets she’s carrying, in the language spoken by more than half of local residents. “Si a la Proposición 139 para el Acceso al Aborto,” the pamphlets say. Yes on Proposition 139 for Abortion Access.

Nearly every house is adorned with a palm leaf cross, likely the remnants of Easter celebrations, and colorful nods to the people inside — dried flowers, a puzzle left behind on the front patio — remind Lundahl of the neighborhood where she grew up in Southern Arizona. Within the hour, Lundahl, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is outside a single-story stucco home, talking to an older woman named Francis. The woman, who says she is planning to vote, asks her to walk through the information in Spanish; Lundahl explains it will “protect the rights of women.” Soon after, Francis looks up and says firmly that she “supports women’s rights.”

The abortion rights referendums in Arizona and other states with sizable Latinx populations are testing the long-held assumption that religion and traditional cultural norms make Latinas less supportive of the right to abortion. In survey after survey, a majority of Latinas, including many who hold religious beliefs, have said they support the right to abortion and oppose strict restrictions on the procedure. When ballots are counted this November, these referendums could help reframe the public’s understanding of one of the fastest-growing groups of voters in the United States.

The success or failure of the ballot measure has significant implications for Latinas in Arizona. Sixty percent are of reproductive age, and half of that group reports being economically insecure. Even before Roe, they struggled with access to reproductive health care because of costs and compounding factors like distance to clinics or lack of child care. The ballot measure won’t change that.

Lundahl grew up in a Jesuit community in the Tucson area, under the influence of a mom who instilled in her traditional Catholic values and a teacher-turned-mentor who practiced liberation theology, a Christian movement that emphasizes a moral duty to care for the oppressed. Lundahl, who works as a teacher in an area known as East Valley, in the Phoenix metro region, identifies as Catholic and also champions the effort to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

“Faith is a choice, and I don’t see my beliefs as something to impose on others,” Lundahl said. “But on top of that, I also do not feel that measures that would save a person’s life are against my religion either.”

Sometimes, her position creates friction in her Catholic circles. “Sometimes [I] definitely get a, ‘No sé quién la crio,’” Lundahl said jokingly. I don’t know who raised you.

Surveys suggest that Arizona’s abortion ballot initiative could receive more votes among Latinx voters than Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made nationwide abortion rights a central pillar of her campaign. Latinx voters in the state have shown high rates of support for the measure but have tended to rank abortion as less of a priority than the economy, health care and public safety. Nevertheless, about two-thirds of reproductive-age Latinas said in a spring survey that the initiative is one of the factors motivating them to vote.

Latinas are poised to be a decisive voice in the future of abortion rights in Arizona given their growing political power. Latinx voters make up a quarter of all eligible voters here, the highest share of any battleground state. Eligible Latinx voters here have doubled since 2000, and their growth is expected to continue outpacing that non-Latinos.

Latinas register and turn out at higher rates than Latinx voters overall — but less than women of other racial groups. They were key to President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state in 2020, and Harris will need them to back her to win this year. Guadalupe is one of Arizona’s heavily Latinx areas that went for Biden by big margins in 2020 but inched to the right between the 2016 and 2020 elections.

The success of the abortion ballot initiative will depend on getting Latinas who say they support the right to abortion to turn out, a task that requires overcoming barriers to the ballot box, the lack of information about what the measure would do and cultural pressures.

Monica Yelin, a longtime conservative consultant, is on the ground in Arizona reaching Latinx voters through phone calls and events urging them to reject Proposition 139. Back in the summer of 2019, before Roe. v. Wade was overturned, Yelin said in an interview with NPR that Latinos’ values align perfectly with former president Donald Trump’s values when it comes to social issues, specifically abortion.

“We’re speaking about pro-life values. Most Latinos, we don’t agree with abortion. We have religious values,” she said at the time.

Five years later, Yelin has been surprised by the number of Latinx voters, particularly those who identify as Catholic, who say they support the abortion measure or are at least open to voting for it. More than 70 percent of all Latinx registered voters identify as Catholic or Protestant. Of those, a majority of Protestants and two-thirds of Catholics say they believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a nationwide poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted in mid-September.

“Yes, I have seen it,” Yelin said, when asked about these voters. “I have spoken to people where I think, wow, this is your religion, and you’re still…,” she trailed off. Based on the conversations she has had, Yelin believes that many of these voters think abortions should be available when people find themselves in difficult “predicaments.” Arizona’s abortion laws have changed multiple times since the end of federal abortion rights, a swing between illegal and legal that has left some residents confused. Yelin has gathered that many of them think that a Civil War-era total abortion ban is in place, despite being repealed, or that the state’s current ban on abortions at 15 weeks of pregnancy is still too restrictive.

The official campaign against the proposal — “It Goes Too Far” and, in Spanish, “Va Demasiado Lejos” — is working with Latinx consultants like Yelin and volunteers to help mobilize the opposition. The campaign’s core message is that Arizona law already allows abortions up to 15 weeks of pregnancy and that the ballot measure goes too far by allowing for abortions after that point — or a “late-term abortion,” as they call it. The ballot measure protects access to abortion until fetal viability, generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy, and after that point in the case of medical emergencies. These exceedingly rare procedures, used in cases of severe risk to the fetus and the pregnant patient, follow medical best practice and legally cannot involve infanticide, despite false claims otherwise by some advocates.

Yelin said many of her conversations focus on the argument that most women already seek abortions before the 15-week ban, making the current law sufficient. Before the Dobbs decision, 96 percent of abortions occurred before 15 weeks of pregnancy, but ongoing state restrictions have had an impact on how soon pregnant patients are able to get care, complicating the data.

Yelin doesn’t support restricting abortions for victims of rape or incest — of those who support total bans, she said, “Some people are very unreasonable.” Still, she would like to see stricter bans than the current law, such as a ban on abortion outside of cases of rape, incest or medical need.

She is 48 and grew up in Colombia at a time when abortions were illegal. Her mother was strongly against the procedure, but in her circle of teenage friends, abortions were common. She remembers multiple friends seeking abortions in informal settings, including one who became septic after her procedure. At 17, Yelin’s best friend became pregnant. Yelin’s first thought, she recalled, was that the friend would need an abortion. Then, in her early 20s, a friend showed her a video of an abortion and, Yelin said, she became a “defender of life.”

Yelin went to Harris’ August rally in Phoenix looking to talk to Latinas about abortion. She said she was there out of personal curiosity, looking to inform her outreach work and not to sway them one way or another on the ballot measure. When she asked about their views on abortion and why they were supporting Harris, she heard an energized level of support for abortion rights that she wasn’t expecting.

“I was like, wow, this is how intense and intentional Democrats have been with messaging that so many people think that that’s the most important issue for them,” Yelin said.

The ballot measure campaign is also creating an opportunity for conversations between Latinas about a procedure that has long been a part of many of their lives. If Prop 139 succeeds, it’ll be in part due to Latinas who are shedding light on just how common abortion is and the circumstances that drive women to seek it, according to Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of an Arizona-based Latinx advocacy group.

In late September, at a storytelling event in support of abortion rights in Phoenix, Gomez stepped up to a microphone to share the story of her own abortion with 50 attendees, a majority of them Latinas. The event featured the color green after the wave of reproductive rights movements that have swept Latin America in the last two decades. It was only the third time she’d ever shared that story. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, three people knew she’d had an abortion more than 15 years ago: her best friend, her husband and a mentor.

Several reasons, many of which had to do with “shame and guilt,” had kept her from sharing openly.

When Gomez found out she was pregnant, she was in an unhealthy relationship, furloughed from her job as a counselor amid the Great Recession and helping support her father, whose work in construction had come to a halt. He was an undocumented immigrant and vulnerable to the immigration raids that Sheriff Joe Arpaio was carrying out in Maricopa County and, a federal judge ruled, specifically targeted Latinx residents. Once Gomez decided to seek an abortion, she found the procedure cost over $400, nearly half of the $996 she was bringing home each month.

“My story is the story of many Latina women, where we’re having to deal with life at the intersections of immigration, economy and what is happening around us,” Gomez said. There was also culture and religion to contend with.

“When I got to the clinic, a priest came up to me, dressed in complete black — black hat — and he was in my personal space, so close to my face, and basically in front of the door so that it was difficult for me to get into the clinic,” Gomez recalled. “And he basically said, do not do this, because you’re going to go to hell.”

Gomez considered herself a “cafeteria Catholic” — someone who identifies with the religion but who has distanced themselves from specific views promoted by the church — and that experience at the abortion clinic brought about a long-lasting sense of shame. Since coming forward with her story to loved ones and publicly, Gomez said she has been embraced with acceptance and healing.

The event Gomez participated in is part of a multi-stop Latinx storytelling tour with events in Florida and Nevada, two other states with abortion rights ballot measures and large Latinx populations. The tour was titled, “Aborto es Salud: Our Stories, Our Power.”

“What has been so powerful about the Arizona abortion access ballot measure is that … we’re finding that we all know someone that has had a challenging pregnancy, that has had an abortion, that has had a miscarriage, and those stories and the ability for us to share really helps bridge across the stigma that has been perpetuated around abortion,” Gomez said.

“It has been sort of like peeling back an onion and really sort of getting to the heart.”

Some of the storytelling is also happening privately between family members, in conversations about the kinds of complications that can unexpectedly lead someone to consider an abortion.

Jennifer Arenas-Cardenas, who lives in Tucson, agreed to talk to The 19th about her support for the ballot initiative after a difficult experience with an unviable pregnancy. Arena-Cardenas is a mom of 2-year-old twins conceived through in vitro fertilization after recurrent miscarriages. Last year, she found out she was spontaneously pregnant again, but at 14 weeks of gestation, learned that the fetus had tested positive for Trisomy 18. The chromosomal abnormality is fatal before the first year of life in more than nine in 10 cases and severely disabling otherwise. Her physicians counseled that Arizona’s laws might require her to leave the state to receive an abortion, which Arena-Cardenas says compounded the “surreal” feeling of the situation.

“I never thought that as a married mom, as a married woman, that I would ever have to be in that position, especially given how it had literally taken us thousands of dollars to create a family,” Arenas-Cardenas said.

Shortly after the appointment, Arenas-Cardenas miscarried. The experience affirmed her opposition to Arizona’s abortion restrictions and helped family members understand the kinds of complications that can lead someone to an abortion, and that because of Arizona’s laws, nearly forced her to seek care out of state.

“There’s some family members who know the situation we were put in, who know our circumstances and really understand, like, wow, this happened to my daughter, this happened to my niece, this happened to my cousin,” Arenas-Cardenas said. She said her experience helped bust a cultural myth about “who is actually accessing abortion.”

“Maybe if you’re married and you already have kids, you may not need access. And, nope, that’s untrue,” she said.

The abortion rights campaign in Arizona will also benefit from voters who don’t support abortions, but who will ultimately stay home on Election Day because they are not motivated to vote against it.

In the heart of Guadalupe is a large Catholic church painted white. The priest doesn’t mention abortion, but during the service, warns churchgoers that “moral depravity” is like a physical disability, emotionally weighing people down. In a stack of flyers by the entrance is a pamphlet for women facing unexpected pregnancies, directing them to a local anti-abortion counseling center.

Children play in the large square in front of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Guadalupe, Arizona, on October 3, 2024. Photo by Kasia Strek for The 19th

Outside, Amilda Roman, 68, who is from Puerto Rico and lives in Phoenix, said abortion was an important issue for her — she opposes the procedure — but she said wasn’t sure she would vote in this election. Voting for Trump or voting against the measure, she said, would have no impact on the decisions many people are making to have an abortion.

“My prayers are more effective, the rosaries,” Roman said. Previously, she had seen Trump as strongly opposed to the procedure but says he now seems “relaxed” about it.

“He’s saying we should leave it up to every state. Neither of these candidates or this proposition can guarantee there will be fewer abortions,” Roman said. “We just need to pray.”