By Holly Gatling, Executive Director, South Carolina Citizens for Life
Editor’s note. This appears in the March issue of National Right to Life News. Please share with your pro-life family and friends. If you have thoughts on the issue, please send them to me at daveandrusko@gmail.com.
When Amy Baker attended the National Right to Life Academy in 2022, she tapped deeply into the training on Hispanic outreach. In college, Amy minored in Spanish with the goal of being able to speak the language in Latin American countries for Christian Missions. Her life took a different path, however, and for years she didn’t use her Spanish language skills. That’s all changed now with the campaign she developed for South Carolina Citizens for Life called Love the Baby Humans.
In her donor relations and development position with SCCL, Amy is acutely aware of the need to reach the younger generation with a pro-life marketing message that resonates with the young adult age group. She attended the 2023 March for Life and was inspired by the tote bags that young adults carried evoking a softer and kinder pro-life message using an environmental theme and applying it to humans. She loved the delivery of the message of baby turtles holding a sign that says, “Save the Baby Humans.”
Thanks to a generous donor, Amy was tasked with developing a matching gift fundraising campaign. Using her background in media sales, she created a campaign called “Love the Baby Humans” for a social media promotion that took off like wildfire centered around the baby turtle messaging with a February love theme. Then it struck her to find out how such a campaign would resonate with the Hispanic community on social media. Her Spanish language skills were no longer dormant, and the results were stunning.
To date there have been nearly 200,000 social media responses from the Hispanic Community. Hispanics are family oriented, Amy notes. “Faith is important to them,” she said. “Within a seven-day time frame, we reached 85,000 Hispanics who were engaged in our first message that was simple and straight forward: “Ama a las bebéshumanas. ¡Ellas no puedenhablarporsímismas!”
The metrics showed the strongest response, almost 70 percent, within the25–44-year-old population. “Seeing those in their 20’s and 30’s engaged in our messaging was so exciting! Not only did the Hispanic community like our messaging, but we also saw that they were 60% more likely to share and advocate for Life than their non-Hispanic counterparts,” Amy said. The strong response from the Hispanic community in turn caused the non-Hispanic campaign to trend higher.
With that encouragement, the next campaign featured Austin Cherry, a former NRLC intern and president of Florence County (SC) Citizens for Life, who is fluent in Spanish. This campaign called “Save the Babies SC” is a call-to-action social media campaign encouraging the pro-life grassroots supporters to contact their state senators to support the Human Life Protection Act. The Human Life Protection Act has already passed the South Carolina House by an overwhelming vote of 83-31. Now the fate of our brothers and sisters waiting to be born in South Carolina is in the hands of the State Senate.
Years ago, when Amy aspired to work in missions in Latin American countries, she never lost her heart for reaching the Hispanic community. Now she is using her Spanish language skills to draw enthusiastic Hispanic young adults by the thousands into South Carolina’s strong pro-life movements.