"They Don't Know the Meaning of Cruel".(abortion)

As director of Hispanic Outreach for the National Right to Life Committee I receive my fair share of media requests during any given year. When the media department at NRLC fills out the request and either faxes, e-mails, or hands it to me, the sheet always has a "topic" line which is used to designate what aspect of the life issues this program wants to focus on. The form also tells me what the format of the show is, if it is radio or television, and how long it will last.

Usually the topic line is filled with a very specific request. They range from talking about the Terri Schindler Schiavo case or a new survey of Hispanics, or discussing a recent election result, legislative outcome, or court decision. Rarely is it just to talk about abortion in general. Last month, I fulfilled one of those raritiesI participated in a show whose topic was "abortion in general."

It was a broadcast on the Hispanic Communications Network (HCN), on a program called Epicentro (epicenter). The host was a gentleman named Jose Lopez Zamorano and the other person who would share the airwaves with me was Soraya Galeas from the National Organization for Women (NOW)always a fun bunch.

The show airs out of Washington, D.C., and I went to the studios of Western Michigan University's School of Broadcasting where they hooked me up to all the appropriate microphones and ear pieces and it was just as if I were there in the DC studio with them.

Unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties in the DC studio and the woman from NOW could not hear meand not just metaphorically. She literally could not hear me. It took about 40 minutes to fix the problem, but after the young people at my end instructed the folks in DC what to do, it was a go.

Anyone who has done any number of these shows knows that details are hard to pinpoint after the fact, but there are always highlights that you can't forget. The first question was innocuous enough and I answered in kind. The NOW representative threw out some questionable statistics. I politely interrupted her and asked her to back them upshe couldn't. The host steered her out of trouble by asking her another fairly vague question and then she said something that set me off.

(An important digression: This interview, as are almost 99% of all the media I do, was in Spanish. It is also very noteworthy that Hispanic television, radio, and print are much less queasy about what they discuss or show. Where English language American ...