3rd place — 2026 First in the Family essay contest: Anastasia Gonzalez
FFRF awarded Anastasia $2,500.
By Anastasia Gonzalez
How many mathematicians, writers, doctors, scientists and activists of color have had their souls drowned by men who force them down like waves in the ocean?
Centuries of rape of women of color have been fueled by a view that our dreams are disposable — and therefore we can be used. Black and Indigenous women across North America are more vulnerable to rape because politically dominant white Christian nationalists have subjected them to poverty and abandonment by the justice system. Historically, because Indigenous women were not white or Christian, they were viewed by conquistadores as commodities for subjugation.
My family is originally Nahua, an Indigenous group of central Mexico. As girls surviving deeply rooted poverty in a small village, even my mother and aunts faced intimidation through sexual violence countless times. Rape was also inflicted on enslaved Black women to forcefully bear more enslaved children. Today, daughters of these Black and Indigenous women in the United States continue to have their autonomy stolen.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a manifestation of Christian nationalism and a cloaked weapon of white supremacy. Abortion bans, fueled by Christian ideas infiltrating political power, dwindle the socioeconomic advancement of and kill many Black and Hispanic women. Black and Hispanic women seek abortions at higher rates than white women. Historical discrimination by whites and Christian nationalists skewed the proportion of minorities living in poverty. This increased our vulnerability to sexual violence, while decreasing health insurance coverage of contraception and sex education.
Furthermore, immigrants are very likely to face sexual assault upon migration and/or during detention. The greatest victims of this imposition of Christian doctrine on our laws are Black and Hispanic women. As a young Mexican woman in Texas, my heart aches as I watch more and more girls like me being robbed of their autonomy by Christian nationalists. Family planning clinics are vanishing around my community. In states with total abortion bans, disproportionately high numbers of Black and Hispanic women are forced to carry children of their rapists. Raising children further traps these women in cycles of poverty by preventing our career advancement, increasing expenses and reducing our ability to pursue higher education. These burdens on socioeconomic mobility compound with the generational wealth gap white supremacists and Christian nationalists left on our families.
On top of this, Black and Hispanic women die from pregnancy complications that could’ve been preventable with abortion at significantly higher rates in these states. Criminalizing abortion also only increases the incidence of unsafe abortions, leading to more deaths of women of color desperate for autonomy over our lives and bodies.
Once again, women of color are subjected to the choice of oppression or death. These sickening abortion laws not only control our bodies, but our socioeconomic mobility. No true American patriot would let the separation of church and state, a Bill of Rights amendment, be undermined. Yet, we watch these precedents be broken for white Christian America at our expense — again.
Anastasia, 19, attends Harvard University.
“My dream is to become a biomedical researcher,” she writes. “I have worked in research labs for three years. I am a research assistant in the Golub Lab at the Broad Institute working on Parkinson’s disease. Last summer, in collaboration with a nonprofit organization for seniors, I started a project at a local care home interviewing residents and writing their memoirs to share with their families. I have had a small art business for seven years, creating portrait commissions and painting live at weddings.”
