The Labora Collective 🌱
A Personal Awakening to a National Crisis
There are moments when something you thought you understood gets turned completely upside down. When you realize that, despite all your knowledge, all your work in the field, there’s this massive blind spot you didn’t even know existed.
I had one of those moments scrolling through LinkedIn, of all places. It was about a young Native American girl—maybe ten, twelve years old—walking home from school.
Something so ordinary, so everyday. And then she was murdered. Her case remains unsolved.
But that wasn’t the part that floored me. What floored me was learning about the epidemic that followed. How common it is—if you’re a Native American woman—for people to just...try to kill you. How there is this conversation that Native American parents need to have with their daughters, the same way Black parents need to have “the talk” with their sons about the police.
And I sat there thinking: I do this work. I’m a women’s health provider. I think about these problems every single day. How did I not know this?
More than four out of five Native American women will experience violence in their lifetime. If you gathered five Native American women in a room, four of them would have stories of violence. Stories that most of us have never even heard.
The Crisis We’re Not Seeing—And Why It’s Getting Worse
This awakening came at a time when the very laws protecting women from violence are under unprecedented attack.
As I write this in 2025, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are systematically dismantling the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)—the cornerstone federal law that has protected survivors for over 30 years.
They’re hoping we don’t notice.
Senator Elizabeth Warren recently sounded the alarm: the administration is “trying to kill a key part of the Violence Against Women Act—and they’re hoping you don’t notice.” Through quiet policy changes and funding restrictions, they’re making it harder—sometimes impossible—for the most vulnerable women to get help.
Here’s what’s happening right now:
New restrictions on VAWA funding now require organizations to certify they won’t help undocumented immigrants or serve transgender survivors. Shelters must choose between losing critical funding or turning away women in desperate need.
Programs can no longer discuss the root causes of violence—concepts like toxic masculinity or systemic inequality are now branded as “gender ideology.” Prevention programs that actually work are being defunded.
Law enforcement is being prioritized over survivor services. The focus has shifted from protecting and healing survivors to a pure “law and order” approach that many women—especially women of color—fear will make them less safe, not more.
A federal judge temporarily blocked some of these restrictions in August 2025, calling them “arbitrary and capricious.” But the fight is far from over. With the government currently shut down, Congressional Republicans are pushing to cement the restrictions into law—using the shutdown as political leverage.
When the Personal Becomes Political
As a women’s health provider, I’ve learned something fundamental: the decision of who you partner with might be the most important decision of your life. More important than where you go to college, more important than your career, more important even than whether to have children.
For women, failure to choose wisely—or being deceived by someone who misleads you—could mean life or death. Or it could mean spending the rest of your life in prison because you defended yourself against an abusive partner. At least half of the women in our carceral system for violent crimes are there because they were defending themselves.
We’ve literally put women in a lose-lose situation.
And now, in 2025, we have a government actively making it worse. We have leaders who don’t even feel basic kindness toward women and children. Who see women’s pain and just...don’t care. Who are rolling back protections while women are dying from preventable causes.
The Invisible Becomes Visible
What I learned from that LinkedIn post about the murdered Native girl extends far beyond one community. The same systems that create a legal void allowing non-Native men to assault Native women with impunity also create healthcare systems that dismiss Black women’s pain until it’s too late. The same politicians now gutting VAWA are the ones who overturned Roe v. Wade, forcing women to stay tied to abusive partners through unwanted pregnancies.
Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women—and six times more likely to be murdered. Hispanic women navigate violence while fearing that calling the police might result in their own deportation. And now, the very programs designed to help them are being stripped away.
The statistics are staggering:
84% of Native American women experience violence in their lifetime
Nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States
Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in America
Over half of female homicides are committed by intimate partners
But these aren’t just statistics. They’re mothers camping for weeks at rest stops searching for their daughters. Families hiring private investigators when the FBI refuses to investigate. Communities dragging rivers when police won’t act.
Why This Series, Why Now?
I’m writing this series because we can’t afford to have blind spots anymore.
Not when violence against women is being normalized.
Not when the protections we fought for are being quietly dismantled.
Not when women are dying while we scroll past their stories.
This isn’t just about Native American women, though their crisis opened my eyes. It’s about Black women dying in delivery rooms while their husbands plead for help. It’s about Hispanic women trapped between violence and deportation. It’s about how all these struggles are connected—threads in the same web of systematic failures.
Throughout this series, we’ll examine:
The crisis facing Native American women and the jurisdictional nightmare that enables violence
How Black and Hispanic women face compounded vulnerabilities in healthcare and safety
The broader landscape of intimate partner violence, femicide, and sexual assault
How reproductive rights and violence intersect in the post-Roe era
What solutions actually work—and what we all need to do
A Call to Action
The conversation about violence against women isn’t complete without talking about ALL women.
The fight for reproductive justice isn’t complete without addressing the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Our understanding of safety isn’t complete until it includes the young girl walking home from school who should never have to worry that being Native—or Black, or Hispanic, or trans, or undocumented—makes her a target.
The current administration wants us to stay silent. They’re counting on us not noticing as they chip away at protections in the fine print of funding guidelines. They’re betting that we’ll be too overwhelmed, too divided, or too discouraged to fight back.
They’re wrong.
This is the conversation we’re not having—but we’re going to have it now. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once we all see it, we can stop it.
In the next article, we’ll dive deep into the crisis facing Native American women—a crisis that reveals how violence thrives when legal systems fail and communities are forced to search for justice alone.
Author’s Note: I write this as both a women’s health provider and someone who believes we must do better. The research and statistics in this series come from federal databases, academic studies, survivor testimonies, and community organizations on the front lines. Every number represents a life. Every policy change affects real women. This is about all of us.
The violence, the laws, the barriers to care—these aren’t separate from your work. They ARE your work. Come for the evidence, stay for the revolution!
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What you’ll get:
Comprehensive tracking of issues like VAWA rollback
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Latest research on addressing medical racism
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