The Labora Collective is a medical publishing and community platform focused on reproductive health, justice, and survival. We combine clinical education, investigative reporting, systems analysis, and community engagement to help people understand—and navigate—the realities shaping women’s health today.

Is the Labora Collective a medical practice?

No.
The Labora Collective provides education, analysis, and tools for understanding and navigating healthcare systems. We do not provide diagnosis, treatment, or individualized medical care.

For full clarity, see the Medical Boundary Statement.

Is the content medical or legal advice?

No.
All content is educational and informational. It is intended to support understanding and informed participation—not replace medical care, legal counsel, or emergency services.

Are the journals free to read?

Yes.
The three Labora journals—Women’s Health, In Her Name, and Blueprint—are publicly readable.

What does Labora Collective membership provide?

Membership supports the work behind the journals and unlocks deeper access across the ecosystem, including:

• Extended analysis and member-only content

• Tools, resources, and educational materials

• Community discussions and live sessions

• Early access to new projects and initiatives

Details are available on the Membership / What You Get page.

How is member content delivered?

Member content is delivered through paid posts, linked resources, member pages, and direct email. Events, recordings, and tools are accessed through designated member links.

Who is Labora Collective for?

Labora is for:

• Patients and families seeking clarity about care and systems

• Clinicians, birthworkers, and healthcare professionals

• Researchers, advocates, and policy-engaged readers

• Members willing to engage thoughtfully with complex material

You do not need to be a medical professional to participate.

What topics does Labora Collective cover?

Our work focuses on:

• Reproductive and maternal health

• Medical accountability and systems analysis

• Law, policy, and patient safety

• Cultural and structural forces shaping care

• Healthcare innovation and systems design

Coverage varies by journal and project.

How is the Labora Collective different from other health publications?

We do not isolate medicine from context.
Clinical care is examined alongside law, policy, economics, racism, and power—because that is how health actually works in real life.

How do you handle safety and sensitive topics?

We approach sensitive topics with care, clarity, and boundaries. Content warnings are used when appropriate, and community participation is governed by clear guidelines.

If you are experiencing an emergency or are in immediate danger, seek urgent care or emergency services.

Can I contribute or write for Labora Collective?

Yes.
We welcome contributions from clinicians, birthworkers, researchers, policy experts, and others with relevant expertise or lived experience.

See Write for Us for details.

How are community discussions moderated?

Community spaces are moderated to maintain safety, respect, and clarity. Violations of guidelines may result in content removal or loss of access.

Full expectations are outlined in the Community Guidelines & Boundaries.

Who leads the Labora Collective?

The Labora Collective is founded and led by Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH, founder of Diosa Ara.

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I still have questions. How do I get in touch?

For general inquiries, partnerships, media, or operational questions, use the contact links provided on the site. Messages are routed to the appropriate place.

A Labora Collective publication
Part of the Diosa Ara ecosystem

This is not a news feed. It is a reference shelf.

What This Library Is

• A curated collection of educational and reference materials

• A starting point for understanding rights, care pathways, and safety considerations

• A supplement to Labora’s journals—not a replacement for them

Resources here are selected for accuracy, relevance, and ethical grounding.

What This Library Is Not

• Not individualized medical or legal advice

• Not an emergency response service

• Not a comprehensive directory of all possible resources

When in doubt, use this library to orient yourself, then seek appropriate professional or emergency support.

Core Resource Areas

Reproductive Health & Clinical Education

• Evidence-based explainers on reproductive and maternal health

• Guidance on interpreting symptoms, tests, and diagnoses

• References aligned with Women’s Health coverage

Legal & Policy Context

• Know-your-rights materials related to reproductive healthcare

• Policy explainers tied to current laws and enforcement practices

• Resources that contextualize legal risk without providing legal counsel

Patient Safety & Care Navigation

• Guidance on preparing for medical appointments

• Documentation and self-advocacy considerations

• Understanding consent, refusal, and escalation pathways

Pregnancy & Postpartum Support

• Reference materials related to pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care

• Safety considerations and warning signs

• Resources centered on equity and maternal outcomes

Crisis & Support Resources

• Links to crisis hotlines and emergency services (external)

• Support resources for sexual violence, domestic violence, and mental health crises

If you believe you are in immediate danger or experiencing a medical emergency, seek urgent care or contact emergency services immediately.

How to Use This Library

• Use this page as a starting point, not a final answer

• Follow links to primary sources and professional organizations

• Pair reference materials with relevant journal articles for deeper context

This library is periodically updated as laws, standards, and available resources change.

Boundaries & Responsibility

The Labora Collective provides education and context.
We do not provide diagnosis, treatment, or legal representation.

Please review the Medical Boundary Statement and Community Guidelines for full clarity on scope and limitations.

Related Labora Spaces

• Women’s Health — clinical interpretation and care navigation

• In Her Name — policy, law, and accountability

• Blueprint — systems design and innovation

A Labora Collective publication · part of the Diosa Ara ecosystem

I want to tell you something I am not proud of.

When the first Epstein stories broke—when the Miami Herald published Julie K. Brown’s investigation in 2018, when Epstein was arrested again in 2019, when Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021—part of me remained skeptical. Not about whether sexual abuse had occurred. I believed the survivors completely. But the scale of the conspiracy—the network, the island, the politicians, the royalty, the scientists, the billionaires—felt almost too large to be real.

It felt like the kind of story that gets embellished. The kind that, in the retelling, becomes something larger and more organized than it actually was.

I was wrong to feel that way. And I think a lot of people who consider themselves thoughtful, skeptical, evidence-based thinkers felt the same way.

In that gap—between the documented reality that is almost too terrible to credit and the conspiracy theories that are too easy to dismiss—accountability disappears.

Keep Reading

Also in this series

The Epstein Files · Part One

Stop Doing Pedophile Math

Stop letting clinical terms become an escape route for abusing children. Read →

The Epstein Files · Part Two

They Are Girls. And They Were Treated Like Currency.

The documented record of how a trafficking operation turned children into currency. Read →

The community is open

You’re not subscribing. You’re co-founding.

A guided map through the whole of women’s health — and our work dropped where you see it first.

Come inside the community →

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

At the turn of the twentieth century, about half of all births in America were caught by midwives — and across the rural South, most of those midwives were Black women, working within community networks that had carried maternity care through slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. By 1935, midwife-attended births had fallen below thirty percent. By 1970, below one percent.

That collapse was not a market choice. It was a coordinated thirty-year campaign — state licensure laws, public-health authority, and professional-society lobbying, run largely through the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 — and it eliminated the only maternity provider that had ever served Black women in the rural South at scale. What it left behind was an absence.

A hundred years later, that absence still hasn’t been filled.

I’ll make it personal, because it is. I’m a physician. If I’d been born a hundred years earlier, none of that training would have mattered — the Flexner Report had already shut down five of the seven Black medical schools in the country. I wouldn’t have been the doctor in this story. I would have been the midwife — until the state licensed her out of existence and called it progress.

You can see the inheritance in today’s data: Black women die in childbirth at roughly 2.6–3× the rate of white women, and the map of America’s ~1,104 maternity-care deserts falls, with eerie precision, on the same Black-belt counties where the granny midwife was once the only provider. Essay Two traces exactly how it was done — and why it’s happening again right now.

Read Essay 2 — The Midwife Purge

New here? Start with the Introduction and Essay 1:

• The Long War, Introduction — We Can Read Too

• Essay 1 — Comstock, 1873

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

Abortion access is fragmenting by state. Maternal mortality is climbing. Healthcare equity is collapsing. Waiting periods are extending. Gestational limits are tightening. And most people have no idea what’s actually happening in their state — or what to do about it.

The Reproductive Rights Action Plan Workbook (7 worksheets)

They’re not just informed, they’re prepared. They know their state’s laws. They’ve mapped their contraception access. They have their resources written down. They have a plan.

Seven worksheets. Fillable. Printable. Built for you to move from knowing to preparing. Understand your state’s laws. Map your contraception access. Identify your resources. Build your support network. Create your scenario plan.

This is yours. Free. Download it now.

Get the Action Plan Workbook (Free

The Crisis to Care Health Guide (9 chapters, 73 pages)

Everything from understanding reproductive justice frameworks to state-by-state legal landscapes to how to navigate barriers to care.

The workbook is yours free. The guide?

That’s where membership begins.

Members are reading the guide today. They’re filling out the worksheets. They’re preparing informed.

The workbook is powerful. You’re preparing. You’re writing things down. You’re moving from anxiety to action.

But imagine preparing with the full picture. Understanding why the laws are the way they are. Knowing the frameworks of reproductive justice and health equity that explain what you’re navigating.

The worksheets are your action plan. The guide is your understanding. Together, they’re complete.

Join the Collective:

Upgrade the Subscription - Be a Member

Or Buy the guide standalone:

Get Crisis to Care - $29)

What you’re actually choosing: The workbook alone is preparation. The workbook + the guide is power.

Members get both, plus every tool we build going forward.

Reproductive autonomy isn’t something you handle alone. It’s something you build — informed, prepared, connected.

Start with the workbook free. Join us for the whole picture.

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read about reproductive rights anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names.

What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE FRAMEWORK — a permanent scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to.

The reason abortion access is fragmenting by state. The reason maternal mortality is climbing in your county. The reason your contraception access just got harder. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural areas.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s what the Crisis to Care guide shows you. That’s what the action plan lets you do something about. That’s what membership means — not just reading about it week after week, but understanding it, preparing for it, building against it together.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the framework.

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

Here’s what you’re ge…

Read more

Part Two is live.

Last week, we published Part One. We named the permission structures. We traced how clinical language became an escape route.

Part One spread because people knew it needed to be read.

Now we’re going deeper.

The January 2026 DOJ release didn’t just confirm what happened. It made the girls visible. Three million pages. One hundred eighty thousand images. Two thousand videos. What emerged was documentation of a trafficking operation—but more than that: documentation of what happens when society refuses to see girls as children.

Part Two: They Are Girls. And They Were Treated Like Currency.

This is not about the powerful men surrounding Epstein. This is about the children. The ones recruited at 13, 14, 15 from high schools and shopping malls. The ones paid to feel special and complicit. The ones whose bodies were used, whose reproductive capacity was exploited, whose pain was dismissed.

The ones who are still alive.

reads the clinical notes in the files. She reads what physicians saw and didn’t report. She reads what the system did—and what it enabled. She reads what the government did to these girls a second time when it released their private trauma without adequate protection.

And she asks the question medicine has been allowed to skip:

Who held the licenses? Who signed the charts? Who knew?

This is the clinical accountability argument. It has been absent from this conversation. It belongs in it.

They Are Girls. And They Were Treated Like Currency.

Read Part 2

Read it. Share it.

The girls are waiting for a reckoning that fully sees them.

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

We’ve been sitting on this for too long.

The window is closing. After the January 2026 DOJ release of over 3 million pages of Epstein files, we can’t wait any longer.

Part One of “More True and More False” is now live.

Part One: Stop Doing Pedophile Math

In this first essay, examines how clinical language has become an escape route for abusers. When Megyn Kelly parsed the ages of Epstein’s victims into categories of harm, she wasn’t being clinically precise. She was building an escape route. This piece shows how—and why we can’t let it happen.

Part One names the permission structures. Part One explains the DSM-5 debate that created space for minimization. Part One traces how a well-intentioned clinical decision leaked into public discourse as justification for harm. And Part One refuses to let girls disappear into language.

Read Part One:

Stop Doing Pedophile Math

Parts Two through Five are coming.

The companion materials and toolkit will follow.

But right now—Part One is ready.

It’s the foundation. It’s where we start. Read it. Share it. Use it.

The time for delay is over.

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

I did not train as a historian. The opposite, in fact: I trained as an engineer, then as a scientist, then as a physician. I came to this work counting things — measuring, modeling, looking for the mechanism beneath the symptom. But the longer I have done it, the more I have come to believe that history is one of the most precise instruments we have. It is another lens, sitting alongside the legal, the medical, the cultural, and the societal lenses we already use — and it brings into focus something the others cannot.

It shows you that the present is not an accident, and not a surprise. It is a pattern.

And a pattern, once you can see it, can be named — and what can be named can be fought with more precision.

So before this series walks you through a hundred and fifty years of American reproductive control, I owe you an answer to a fair question:

Because the attack on women is not new. None of it is new. It is so deeply rooted in the American story that you cannot understand what is happening in an emergency room in 2026 without going all the way back to the structures that made it possible. We say it constantly — none of this is new — and The Long War is the name for exactly that continuity. What looks like a sudden emergency is only the latest turn of a very old machine.

History is also useful here for a sharper reason: the conservative legal movement weaponizes it. Roe, and then Dobbs, were argued on “history and tradition” — and on the question of a woman’s authority over her own body, that history-and-tradition story is, to put it plainly, bullshit. Justice Alito reached into a selective, deeded version of the past and called it the whole record.

But what they forgot is that we can read too.

We understand history as well as they do — better, in the places they would rather we not look. They do not own it, and they do not get to decide where the record begins and ends.

The real history and tradition

Women’s reproductive health used to be the domain of women. It was midwives; it was mothers; it was a body of knowledge held, practiced, protected, and passed between women. And when men found a way to make money from it, they did two things, in this order: they pushed women out of the profession, and they criminalized and punished the behavior they did not like. That is the actual tradition — not the sanitized version now being sold back to us.

Ask the counterfactual: if OB/GYN were a more male-dominated profession, would it be under this kind of attack?

It would not.

Read Horatio Storer, the nineteenth-century physician who led the medical campaign to criminalize abortion, and his demographic anxieties ring with an unmistakable echo of the panic being voiced right now. The target is different. The argument is the same exact cycle: rinse, wash, and repeat.

The profession owes women an apology

I’ll say it plainly, because the profession will not: physicians are responsible for where we are. The AMA holds a tremendous amount of it. The AMA owes women an apology. We would not be here without those framings, without the deliberate destruction of midwifery, without these political forces being given professional cover. People may be allies now — but we cannot forget where this profession was born, because it still carries the markers of the history that produced today’s crisis. And its leadership is not stepping up.

The job, right now, is to be in front of Congress. The response has been more practice bulletins. It is genuinely tragic that a self-funded team of about ten people is making more noise than organizations with far more money, access, and authority.

Why the old traps stay on the books

Why do conservatives leave statutes like Comstock on the books for a century and a half without repealing them? These dormant laws are not oversights. They are traps — a standing check on society, ready to be reactivated. When they say “rights,” they implicitly mean citizens — and they do not regard women, or people of color, as full citizens. In their minds there is no contradiction, because we were never part of the discussion in the first place.

Draconian, then dystopian

These laws were always draconian. In the age of AI, they become outright dystopian — because AI makes complete surveillance possible. The thing that used to keep constant surveillance impractical was cost: watching everyone meant paying people to physically read everyone’s mail. AI removes that limit. And we already know the government wants the capability — the fight between Anthropic and the Department of Defense was about exactly this. What keeps us free is not that we don’t break laws; it’s that most laws are never prosecuted. Full-enforcement capability hands the state a precise coercion lever. That is game over for our freedoms — and it’s why every American, on every side, has a stake in limiting it.

What you can do — Project 28

We end the way we should end every essay: with what you can do. Where they wrote Project 2025, we are writing Project 28 — a concrete, stackable, ready-to-govern agenda for the work that has to start now. Voting rights have to be in it. Reproductive rights have to be shored up in every manner available under the law — we have to stack the law, so that if and when we come back into power, these things are ready to go. And we have to strengthen the medical profession’s own infrastructure, so it can respond to the crises it helped create instead of pretending they’re someone else’s job.

That is the work. This is the doorway.

It starts in 1873, with a dry-goods salesman who walked into Congress with a bill in his coat pocket and walked out with the authority to read America’s mail.

The law he wrote was never repealed.

In 2026 it’s being loaded again.

Read Essay 1 — Comstock, 1873

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

🗂️ This Week’s Evidence

The Signal named the exodus. The Briefing named the levers. Today’s Viva Voce is the case.

📋 What the Data Shows

A forty-two-year-old. A fourth cesarean. A spinal that failed. The plan changed across the drape. The team was there to catch it.

⚙️ The Mechanism

Four highly trained clinicians. Four different decision trees. A twenty-minute window. Any one of them could have been the rate-limiting step on the patient’s survival.

🩺 From the Bedside

What I do not think about during the case is the workforce composition that put the team in the room. What I think about, an hour later, writing the operative note, is who would have done the case if the team had not been here.

The team was there today. That is not a guarantee. That is, for now, a fact.

Read the full Viva Voce

From Earlier This week:

The Signal: The OB/GYNs Are Leaving. The Replacements Aren’t Coming. — Twelve years to make one. Five years to break the pipeline. Idaho is the case study.

The Signal

The Breifing: When the last OB/GYN leaves a rural county and the hospital closes its labor and delivery unit, here is what happens to the pregnant woman who lives there.

Read the full Briefing

Read the full series:

Series 1 · Quiet Dismantling

Bring The Bolt Cutters just dropped 3 more receipts.

Receipt #2 : Federal agencies have scrubbed “Black” from health data. You cannot fix a crisis you cannot name.

Receipt #3: Texas passed a bounty law—$100,000 to sue anyone who supplies abortion pills to a Texas resident.

Receipt #4: Louisiana indicted a New York doctor. This is the first cross-state criminal prosecution of an abortion provider since Dobbs. It is the template.

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

🗂️ This Week’s Evidence

Wednesday’s Signal told you the OBs are leaving and the replacements are not coming.

Today’s Briefing maps what to do about it.

📋 What the Data Shows

1,104 U.S. counties are now classified as maternity care deserts. 116 rural hospitals have ended labor and delivery between 2020 and 2025. The pipeline that feeds the next generation of OB/GYNs is twelve years long. The decisions being made about where to train in 2024 are the workforce reality of the 2030s and 2040s.

⚙️ The Mechanism

There are specific, named, existing federal tools — funded, with bipartisan precedent — that could begin to rebuild this. The Briefing names them. The challenge is not policy design. The challenge is which states will use them, and which ones will not.

🩺 From the Bedside

When the last OB/GYN leaves a rural county and the hospital closes its labor and delivery unit, here is what happens to the pregnant woman who lives there. She drives. Or an ambulance drives. And the next clinical decision is made by a team that has never seen her.

That is what a maternity care desert is. It is not a policy label.

— Dr. Yamicia Connor, OB/GYN

Read the full Briefing

Yesterday’s Signal :

The OB/GYNs Are Leaving. The Replacements Aren’t Coming. — Twelve years to make one. Five years to break the pipeline. Idaho is the case study.

The Signal

Read the full series:

Series 1 · Quiet Dismantling

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective

🗂️ This Week’s Evidence

It takes twelve years to make an OB/GYN. The single strongest predictor of where a physician practices for the rest of their career is where they completed residency. The pipeline is what we call the workforce. It cannot be rebuilt in a budget cycle.

The pipeline is breaking now.

📋 What the Data Shows

OB/GYN residency applications in ban states are already negative — two cycles running. In Idaho, an estimated 35% of obstetric physicians stopped practicing between 2022 and 2024.

The replacements are not coming.

⚙️ The Mechanism

Dobbs did not just ban abortion in certain states. It introduced felony-prosecution risk into the practice of emergency obstetrics. The medicine does not change. The fear does. The fear is what drives the exodus — and the exodus is what closes the labor and delivery unit two counties over.

🩺 From the Bedside

What I do not think about during the case is the workforce composition that put the team in the room. What I think about, an hour later, writing the operative note, is who would have done the case if the team had not been here.

The team was there today. The Signal is about whether that is still true in 2032.

Read the full Signal

Read the full series:

Series 1 · Quiet Dismantling

✊🏽 WHY SUBSCRIBE

You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.

The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.

THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.

That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.

Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.

— YC

Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective