You can see it clearly. You can say it plainly. You can prove it.
I'm Yamicia Connor. I'm a physician — I deliver babies. I'm also a trained engineer. I founded the Labora Collective because the women's health crisis in this country is not what most people think it is, and I've spent the better part of a decade figuring out what it actually is.
There are so many things to talk about right now. It can feel like a mess of spaghetti in your head. Bad thing after bad thing after bad thing. A lot of what I spend my time doing — as a thinker — is figuring out how to bucket things. Because I'm a physician, yes, but I'm also a trained engineer. And engineers do one thing relentlessly: we simplify.
So this is the way we are simplifying it. A mental model. It walks you through the moral philosophy, the history, what's happening politically, what's happening legally, and how it's going to affect your health — step by step, between now and the midterms.
Before we tell you what we know, let us tell you how we know it. Because you're going to be told this is opinion. You're going to be told it's partisan. You're going to be told, "how do you know?"
We know because we did not look once. We looked thirty-three times. Our flagship report — The State of Women's and Children's Health — analyzes 33 dimensions of women's and children's well-being across all 50 states, cross-referenced against federal policy, judicial rulings, clinical outcomes, and historical patterns going back to Comstock, 1873. We built causal maps. We built dismantlement timelines. We walked through the case law. We watched maternity wards close in real time. We read the actual text of the legislation.
We have turned this over and over again, trying to unexplain it. Trying to find a more innocent reading. A benign cause. A different shape. Each time, the same shape emerges. That is how we know.
Three things. They've never been quiet about it among themselves — only in mixed company.
Not metaphorically. Literally. A society where a woman cannot lease an apartment without her father or husband's signature — which was the law in most U.S. jurisdictions until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Female economic independence not as a right, but as an accident.
Voting rights gutted — Shelby County v. Holder, 2013. Affirmative action ended — SFFA v. Harvard, 2023. And in 2025–2026, the word Black itself stripped from federal health language across HHS, CDC, and HRSA.
Not earned — restored. The operative word is unchallenged. They're still winning by every economic measure. The grievance isn't losing. The grievance is being challenged. That's the unbearable thing. The work is to make sure it can't happen again.
Because they believe it. This is the part most polite analysis refuses to say plainly: they believe these things. Not as code. As theology and as worldview.
They believe women are responsible for the destruction of society. Pastor Dale Partridge published a book in March 2026 called 19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment. Pastor Joel Webbon preaches that wives should vote how their husbands tell them to. The Secretary of Defense reshares these sermons approvingly. This is no longer the fringe. This is the operating belief of the men writing the laws.
They believe in the inferiority of Black people. Not as a historical artifact — as a present operating principle. Every dismantlement of federal civil rights infrastructure is the policy expression of a belief.
They believe the antisemitic tropes. That Jewish money controls the world. Globalist. Soros. The elites. They believe it.
Two arms working in concert. The political arm builds. The legal arm cements.
Powell Memo, 1971. Heritage Foundation, 1973. Moral Majority, 1979. Federalist Society, 1982. They wrote the model legislation. They funded the candidates. They captured the state legislatures. Texas HB 7. Louisiana warrants for New York doctors. One statute at a time. That track has its own name: Manufactured Healthcare Crisis — already published, linked below.
Forty years of judicial pipeline produced the most anti-democratic Supreme Court since Reconstruction. Shelby, 2013. Hobby Lobby, 2014. Dobbs, 2022. SFFA, 2023. Loper Bright, 2024. Purl v. HHS vacating HIPAA reproductive privacy. That track launches next: Bring The Bolt Cutters — twenty-four receipts, one every Friday, until the midterms.
This is the question I care about most as a Catholic, a physician, and a thinker. And I want to be honest about it — there are parts of their argument we actually agree with. Just not the conclusion.
Because the original pro-life position was not what the religious right turned it into. It was a serious moral philosophy. Let me start at the beginning.
Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth century, building on Aristotle. The claim: there is an objective moral order woven into reality itself, and human reason can know it. Human dignity is not a feeling. It is a fact about what we are.
From that foundation: if human dignity is real, you cannot defend it selectively. Every threat to human life is forbidden by the same logic. Abortion. Capital punishment. War. Poverty. Racism. Segregation. You can't pick. Eileen Egan coined the phrase in 1971. Cardinal Bernardin formalized it at Fordham, December 1983. The original Catholic position was progressive on economics, anti-coercion, anti-death-penalty, anti-war, pro-mother. It was bipartisan. And it is everything the modern political "pro-life" movement is not.
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963:
An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.
That is King. Citing Aquinas. By name. In jail. Black Baptist preacher in 1963. Italian-American Catholic Cardinal in 1983. Same foundation. Same logic. Same garment.
Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell sat down to build a political movement. They needed a respectable cover story. What they were actually defending was the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University — revoked because Bob Jones banned interracial dating. "We want our segregated schools back" was not, by 1979, a slogan you could run on. So they reached for the Catholic anti-abortion cause that was already lying around.
Jerry Falwell did not preach a single sermon against abortion until February 1978 — five years after Roe. The Southern Baptist Convention passed pro-choice resolutions in 1971, 1974, and 1976. Paul Weyrich admitted it on record at a 1990 religious-right conference.
They kept the slogan and threw the reasoning away. They kept "abortion is wrong." They dropped "capital punishment is wrong, war is wrong, segregation is wrong, poverty is wrong, mothers must be supported." They built a pro-life movement that is anti-mother. They kept the punishment. They dropped the safety net.
We fight back the same way they built it: patiently, structurally, in public, with receipts. The Roberts Court tied us to the tracks. They forgot we brought bolt cutters.
Three tracks. One umbrella. One destination — the midterms.
Register. Donate. Run for something. Call your sister. Call your mother. Call the woman who taught your daughter to read. Talk to the women in your church and the women who don't go.
The train is coming. We are not the ones getting hit.
The mental model above is the map. The essays are the territory — each one walks a single thread all the way down. New essays land between now and the midterms.
On the natural-law tradition the religious right buried — Aquinas to King to Bernardin — and what it would mean to bring it back.
Read the essay → 02 Live now Essay Two · The Medical TrackWhat the laws and rulings actually do to bodies. The medical lane — Crisis to Care — and the body count being assembled now.
Read the essay →Each track is a complete body of work. Together they map the whole — political, legal, medical. Built to be shared. Built to be acted on.
Sixty years of legislation laid bare. Powell to Heritage to Federalist to Texas HB 7 — the political pipeline that built the crisis, one statute at a time.
Legal Track · LiveTwenty-four receipts. One every Friday, until the midterms. Each names a court ruling, the body it lands on, and the data underneath. The Roberts Court catalog.
What it means for your body, your daughter's body, your mother's body. The clinical reality of the policy choices — and the practical playbook for navigating them.
The SAVE Act (H.R. 22) would have required a birth certificate matched to a same-name ID to register to vote — making the 19th Amendment effectively unenforceable for the roughly 69 million married women whose names no longer match. On June 4, 2026, the Senate knocked it down 48–50. Two votes short of law.
They tried it. They will try it again — under a new number, folded into some unrelated bill. That is what the receipts are for. The first drops Friday.
One piece of work per week between now and the midterms. The umbrella, the receipts, the medicine. Enough to walk through it with anyone who asks.
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