6-12-05, 7:40 am

From Choice USA

Luis Torres-Rivera was awarded Choice USA’s Sex Educator Award for his work to educate and empower young people in Washington DC to make healthy decisions about sexuality. Luis Ricardo Torres-Rivera, 28, is the project director for Have Faith in Youth, the Youth Leadership Task Force, Teen Town Hall meetings and the Coalition on Boys and Men. He has been with the DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy for over three years. Prior to his work with the DC Campaign, he worked for the Multicultural Projects Department of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice where he developed La Iniciativa Latina, a project to address sex and sexuality within Latino/a cultural and spiritual perspectives.

Choice USA: There are always young men at Choice USA’s trainings and in our chapters, but a lot of people are surprised when they see men working in reproductive rights. How did you get involved in the issue?

Luis Ricardo Torres-Rivera: I have a very clear memory of being in Catholic school, and coming back home after they’d been talking about abortion and contraception and stuff like that. So I was given a 'good catholic boy' approach to those issues. In an argument around the table And I remember a family member telling me that she had an abortion talking to my stepmom about that, and that’s when she told me she had an abortion. She said, 'I had an abortion because of you -- it was a choice I made so I could take better care of my family.' I realized that abortion is sometimes a sacrifice people make to be responsible and take care of others. That night I understood that the decision of having an abortion can only be taken by the woman whose responsibilities and aspirations will determine the context in which the decision is made. And I realized that all reproductive choices can be responsible choices.

When I went to college, I started getting involved with campus groups. - It was difficult, because most of the people around me were coming from one place and I was really coming from another, doing something that was not expected of me. I started a chapter of FMF (Feminist Majority Foundation) on my campus at the same time as I was pledging a latino fraternity. I wanted to have the most diverse approach I could.
After school, I ran into the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and they hired me to be an assistant to their multicultural program. I was like, you want me to do what? And you’re going to pay me?

Choice USA: Where did you go then?

Luis: I was with the Religious Coalition there for around three years. I started out doing some administrative stuff but I became got involved with a project working with black churches. I then using lots of the lessons learned from working with black churches, to put lessons and ideas from that work to those into ideas of how to involve latino churches and communities in the issue of reproductive choice. So we organized a conference in California -- which was two days after 9/11. So, because air travel was shut down, nationwide attendance was impossible. But people from different churches in LA came together and started talking about the issues. If there was a specific idea that came out of those conversations that really resonated, it was the way the issue is dealt with at the personal level -- going back to the first interactions I had with reproductive health, it was something I had to deal with in the context of family, my stepmother, and the choices women make for the people they love.

The conference was beneficial because it wasn’t about big national organizations, it was about the people working out there, in the communities and towns. I saw realized that it had to be about a personal, one-on-one conversation, and I decided to give up national work and go into local organizing. Brenda Rhodes-Miller asked me to work at the DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, to work more intensely with churches.

Putting reproductive rights into a spiritual context means that any message dealing with sexuality has to be put in the a context of concern for the whole person. When you talk about teen pregnancy, you’re not really talking about sex, you’re talking about the whole world in which young people make their choices. We can provide a view context in which they can be successful and make the choices that are right for them.

Some of DC Campaign’s work connects teen pregnancy with youth violence issues. You have to look at when and why teen pregnancy can be a rational choice. For someone who is 16 and doesn’t expect to live to 30, sometimes it makes sense for them that person to become pregnant or cause a pregnancy. It does not make sense to wait, for someone who sees a person who is 10 years older and has the same employment opportunities as they have now. Then it makes sense for people to become pregnant. They don’t see the need to make a clear decision about abstinence or contraception, because there’s nothing different in the future, nothing to work toward and look forward to.

We’re trying to implement that perspective with churches. We try to replace the traditional message based on theory with one based on the lives of teens. We want to move from that message into one that is about young people. That is only done with developing personal interactions with people in community.

So, we’ve been able to get DC churches really involved with teens in their neighborhood. Even though churches are already very committed to their people, a lot of people only drive into the city for Sunday services and then leave until the next week. So there was a disconnect there. Now, we help the church open once a week to welcome local teens in, and sit down have a meal together. Not to talk about sex ed or teen pregnancy, but just about, how was their day? That way we’re building relationships that are really about the well-being of teens.

Choice USA: What do you think is the most important political issue facing young people?

Luis: I feel like, once you start getting into politics... Young people sometimes feel like they don’t have any direct voice in the political process, so there’s no possible partnership.

When you hear about the politics of teen pregnancy, it’s not really about teens. It’s about 'out of wedlock' births, it’s about morality. I feel like a lot of it is more about what women are doing, but since politicians can’t tell women who are 21 or 30 years old how to live their lives, they divert it into an issue where they can talk about 'the children.' The greatest political challenge for youth is to honestly engage not only their peers but also their parents and other adults in honest discussions for their concerns. Only through this engagement will a space be created for a discussion that includes the whole lives of young people.