Ipas | Leading and learning about Latino health challenges

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November 1, 2005

The more health professionals know about Latinos and the more adept they become at navigating cultural barriers, the greater their chances of lessening health disparities.

Photo courtesy of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Faced with the fastest growing Latino population in the United States, North Carolina’s health professionals are taking their education into their own hands. The more they know about Latinos and the more adept they become at navigating cultural barriers, the greater their chances of lessening health disparities.

The national and state-specific rates of adolescent pregnancy, unintended pregnancy and transmission of sexually-transmitted infections are disproportionately high among Latinos when compared with other ethnic groups.

While Latinas report having substantially fewer abortions than other demographic groups in North Carolina, Ipas’ community-based research has found that abortions are occurring among the state’s Latina women through both the formal and informal health-care systems.

That finding is part of Ipas’s recently released report, The sexual and reproductive health of Latinas in North Carolina: A five county needs assessment. In 2005, Ipas conducted an assessment of sexual- and reproductive-health care for those areas’ Latina residents. Ipas conducted in-depth interviews with 20 key informants in counties with burgeoning Latino communities.

“Ipas’s report builds on NC Latino Health, 2003 by deepening our understanding of access to sexual and reproductive rights for Latinas living in our state,” said Rivka Gordon, Ipas U.S. Country Program Director. “For a variety of reasons – including increasing political restrictions — the barriers to healthcare highlighted in the N.C. Institute of Medicine’s 2003 report are multiplied when Latina women seek abortion care,” she said.

Participants in the Ipas assessment noted that:

Latinos address their reproductive-health needs via the formal medical system, informal care and self-medication. Informal care includes the services of alternative healers.
Contraceptive use varies and depends on cost, availability, education and cultural norms.
Abortions are occurring in North Carolina despite the commonly held belief that Latinas don’t have abortions because of their cultural or religious backgrounds .
Their Latino clients hold of a variety of beliefs concerning reproductive health.
Barriers to care include transportation, language, lack of knowledge and cultural norms.

In addition to the Ipas report, some health-care professionals have taken research a step further: They went to Mexico.

In September, Ipas’s U.S. Program Associate Robyn Schryer joined 19 other health professionals on a weeklong study trip to the Central Western Mexican state of Michoacan. According to the Mexican Consulate in Raleigh, Michoacanos make up 9.6 percent of North Carolina’s Latino population. Of all Latino immigrants living in North Carolina, 65 percent are originally from Mexico (Silberman et al., 2003).

Sponsored by the Center for International Understanding, this Latino Health Coalition trip is part of a yearlong initiative designed to build state and local leaders’ capacity to respond to the challenges presented by rapid growth of their communities’ Latino populations.

“Our visits with women in Michoacan’s rural communities and their health-care providers reminded me that all women – regardless of home country – want to take the best care of themselves and their families, ” Schryer noted.

“Despite Mexico’s restrictive abortion laws, I was surprised by the extent to which women, some members of the health-care community and several community-based organizations were working to increase access to human rights – including sexual and reproductive rights,” she said. “I hope that the North Carolina delegation will remain inspired by that activist spirit.”

Based on the Ipas assessment and contacts made during the delegation’s trip, Ipas plans to work collaboratively with partner organizations to foster a statewide network of advocates for Latino sexual and reproductive rights. During the next year, this work will include:

Collecting stories directly from Latina women in North Carolina about their experiences in accessing reproductive health care. These stories will become part of Ipas’s VOICES database – a global sexual and reproductive rights advocacy tool.
Building advocacy capacity within several of North Carolina’s Latino community-based organizations through the implementation of Gender or Sex: Who Cares? — a skills-building curriculum designed to increase understanding of how gender affects access to sexual and reproductive rights.
Providing technical assistance to the N.C. Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities’ Lay Health Advisor Curriculum Development Team.

Bibliography

Silberman, Pam, Andrea Bazan-Manson, Harriet Purves, Carmen Hooker Odom, Mary P. Easley, Kristie K. Weisner and Gordon H. DeFries. 2003. North Carolina Latino Health, 2003: A Report from the Latino Health Task Force. Durham, N.C., North Carolina Institute of Medicine. Available online (last accessed May 21. 2007).

For more information, contact media@ipas.org