Introducing My Work: Why Language Access Matters in Abortion Care

Welcome to my blog!

This is a place I hope to use to give some insights on my work, share its impact, provide thoughts on current events, and sometimes just vent to the world.

For my first post, I thought I'd share a bit about my current dissertation research. For the past several years I have been researching what happens when Spanish-speaking Latine patients try to access abortion care in New York City, and specifically how and when language becomes a barrier or a bridge. I've interviewed clinic workers, volunteer escorts, interpreters, providers, and organizers, people who are often mediating the gap between a healthcare system built on exclusion and patients who are navigating some of the most consequential decisions of their lives in a language the system was not designed to accommodate.

I think most people, when they picture language access in healthcare, picture something fairly menial. A "translator" (they're actually called interpreters) in the room sitting between two people translating whatever is said from one language to another. The may picture a second stack of documents translated into another language for patients. While these are present, they are also poorly understood and far from the end of the story. What I have found in this research is that language access issues are rarely just a technical problem of translation accuracy.

Interpreters spend a great deal of time learning about and mediating culture, emotion, and many other aspects of language. Not only that, but many langauges like Spanish are actually highly diverse - just like there are many different words and phrases between UK English and American English, Spanish is even more varied across the countries it is spoken in. Spanish speakers often have to learn about these variations in a context where anyone could be from anywhere.

Language access goes beyond interpreters in an examination room, too. Language impacts access when patients call to make appointments, visit clinic or other websites for information, call insurance companies, learn public health information... Even when encountering anti-abortion protestors who accost them on the street while trying to get to their appointment.

This is part of why I approach the project through a reproductive justice framework. Reproductive rights, as a legal and political tradition, tends to center the right to access a given procedure. Reproductive justice, developed by Black feminist scholars and organizers, asks a broader question: what social, economic, and structural conditions actually allow a person to make and carry out decisions about their own body and family. I argue that language access is more than a question of rights, but a fundamental reproductive justice issue. A right to abortion care that a patient cannot fully understand, consent to, or navigate in their own language is functionally meaningless.

I also draw on intersectionality as a framework, as theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw and developed critical feminist scholars later, which examines how multiple intersecting identities (such as race, gender, class, and immigration status) do not operate as separate, additive categories but combine to produce distinct experiences and discrimination. Navigating abortion care in NYC as a Spanish-speaking Latina is not simply a question of needing an interpreter. It is about navigating a complex and fluid set of overlapping positions, as a woman, as a person of color, as someone who may or may not have secure immigration status, as someone speaking a language other than what the systems were built for, and those positions interact in ways that shape how much credibility, patience, and care she receives. Interpreters and bilingual staff who recognize this, even peripherally, end up doing a huge amount of invisible labor as a result, not just translating vocabulary but managing all of the social weight that gets attached to who is speaking and how.

I've seen some of the ways this presents as a clinic escort, standing outside clinics and helping patients get from the sidewalk to the door safely, past protesters and past whatever confusion the morning has thrown at them. In doing this work, I've seen first-hand how protestors will even use manipulation tactics based on how they perceive the individual - if a woman even has brown skin, the assumption is they are Spanish speakers and the common phrase shouted is "matan bebes aqui" ("they kill babies here"). They even target men by suggesting that "real men don't kill their babies" and Black men by equating abortion to slavery in the same sentence. These are deliberate attempts to manipulate by preying on intersectional identity.

This is my project, in a nutshell. I am trying to understand language access as an integral part of reproductive justice and intersectional identity. Future posts here will get into some of the specific experiences I've had, frameworks I use, and progress updates. I wanted to start with an introductino to my dissertation work to set the tone, though. Go check out my website for more info on me and my other work.

Anthropologically, River