But what stayed with me wasn’t the money. And it wasn’t even really the food—though I truly was hungry.

What stayed with me was something harder to name in real time: the bodily sensation of being misread, of being treated as less legitimate than the facts of the situation required, and of watching how easily ordinary rules can stop applying when someone decides you are safe to disregard.

It took me a little time to put language to that distress, because the most modern forms of discrimination don’t always announce themselves with obvious hatred. They show up as misrecognition, as selective enforcement, as escalation—things that can sound abstract until you’ve felt them in your body. And the closer your proximity is to power—or to observing how power works—the more sharply you can feel the difference between how you are perceived and how you should be perceived.

This essay is my attempt to name what happened, and to name why it matters beyond one night and one restaurant. I’m writing it because these dynamics shape who is treated as enforceable in public life, who is granted the benefit of the doubt, and who is subject to escalation when a situation could have been resolved routinely.

I’m okay this morning. I slept. I’m steadier. For an OB, six hours is practically luxury. But being “fine” is not the same thing as something being acceptable—and that distinction is the point. The incident matters, and this essay explains why.

📍What Happened

On Christmas night, while I was still on call, I left the hospital during a brief window to do something I hadn’t been able to do since Tuesday morning: eat a real meal.

If you’re reading this without context: this is about a prepaid pickup order, a locked door, a refusal to hand over paid-for food, and a police escort—on Christmas night—while I was still on call.

Not “grab something when you can” food. Not crackers between pages. Not a protein bar swallowed in a stairwell. A real meal—the kind that reminds your body you are a person, not a machine that keeps working because the pager keeps chirping. My kids were sick at home, recovering from the flu, and I was already carrying the quiet grief that comes with missing a holiday you can’t get back. The day was so busy I kept having to remind myself it was even Christmas. People would say, “Merry Christmas,” and I’d have this split-second pause—oh right—before moving on to the next patient, the next urgent decision.

It was around 8 p.m. in a small-to-medium-sized town in North Carolina. On Christmas Day, most restaurants are closed, and the few that stay open advertise it like a badge of honor. Red Lobster was one of them—one of the few places openly claiming they were operating on normal hours. There weren’t many alternatives. That scarcity matters.

So I did what a reasonable person does in a limited-options situation: I placed a Grubhub pickup order and paid. The transaction was complete. They accepted my money. This wasn’t a dispute over whether I had paid. It wasn’t “we’re closed.” It wasn’t “we can’t make that.” Payment had already been accepted.

That detail matters because it eliminates the easiest storyline for people who want to dismiss this.

💢 I didn’t show up after closing demanding special treatment.

💢 I didn’t try to force a kitchen to produce something impossible.

I placed an order, paid for it, and arrived during the stated pickup window to retrieve what I purchased.

Grubhub sent curbside pickup instructions by text at about 8:06 p.m. It listed an expected pickup window—8:45 to 8:55 p.m.—and it provided a number to call for curbside service. I followed the instructions. My call log shows I called the curbside number at 8:40 p.m. for four minutes. I then called the restaurant line at 8:44 p.m. No one answered.

So I went to the door, because again: the order had been accepted, charged, and confirmed.

The door was locked. I entered only after another customer opened it. Inside, staff told me they were not accepting online orders.

💢 Read that slowly: not accepting online orders—after accepting and charging an online order.

In any functional commercial system, once payment is accepted, the exchange is no longer optional. If a business cannot fulfill the order, the correct response is to cancel it and issue an immediate refund with documentation. That is not a moral debate. That is basic commerce.

That is not what happened.

Instead, staff refused to provide the food and refused to provide clear, immediate refund confirmation in the moment. While I stood there being told they weren’t accepting online orders, I watched active service continuing in the restaurant. A man only a few feet from me received multiple bags of food. I saw additional trays of freshly prepared food coming out.

‼️ Food was moving.

‼️ Service was continuing.

‼️ I was the exception.

So I asked for the manager on duty and requested the only reasonable outcome: fulfill the paid order or cancel it and document the refund. Rather than resolve a routine consumer transaction, staff escalated by calling the police.

I did not simply walk out. I left escorted out by the police. ‼️

On Christmas night. While still on call. After days of not being able to leave the hospital to eat. In a town where most places were closed—which is why I ordered from one of the few restaurants claiming to be open.

That is the story. Those are the facts. I’m also pursuing the paper trail: I will be requesting the police report as a public record, because escalation should always be documented—not hand-waved away.

And if you’re reading this thinking, this is irrational, this is unbelievable, this makes no sense—you’re right. Which brings me to the point.

They took my money, withheld the food, and ended the interaction with a police escort—on Christmas night.

🔍 What This Actually Was

Most people misunderstand discrimination because they imagine it as an emotion.

They picture overt hostility: slurs, explicit hatred, someone who wants to take rights away and feels comfortable saying so. That version exists, but it is not the only form, and it is not the most common form many Black professionals are navigating.

Modern discrimination is often a technique rather than a feeling. It’s not always “I hate you.” It is often “I can do this to you.”

It is the unequal distribution of burdens—who gets denied, delayed, dismissed, humiliated, or escalated on—because someone has decided, consciously or unconsciously, that you have less leverage to make consequences real.

And one of the most powerful techniques is misrecognition: the refusal to recognize legitimate authority and standing when it appears in certain bodies, especially Black bodies, even when that authority has been earned through the most conventional pathways our society claims to reward.

We live inside power infrastructures. Everyone knows this, even if we pretend not to, because naming it makes people uncomfortable. Power comes in many forms: financial power, social power, institutional power, symbolic power. Certain roles carry standing because society depends on predictable recognition of legitimacy.

A priest may not have wealth but still be treated with deference because the role is coded as authoritative. A physician carries institutional legitimacy because medicine sits at the center of life and death. Leaders, founders, executives, people embedded in institutions are generally treated differently not because they are “better,” but because society assumes they are enforceable.

In a functioning society, power is supposed to travel with you.

Not as worship. Not as entitlement. As predictability. As baseline recognition that the person in front of you has standing that cannot be casually ignored.

But for many Black professionals, the defining injury is that earned power does not reliably translate. It does not consistently travel. Credentials become situational. Standing becomes optional. Black authority is recognized when it’s convenient—when it can be applauded, marketed, used, or admired—and ignored when it’s inconvenient.

That is the mechanism.

This is Black authority—ignored when it’s inconvenient.

And if this sounds “too big” to map onto one night at one restaurant, consider how familiar the pattern is at the highest levels of American life. A significant portion of the country could look at a sitting President of the United States—Barack Obama—and insist he was not truly American: not a U.S. citizen, not eligible, not “one of us.” That wasn’t a policy disagreement. That was misrecognition at scale: the refusal to let earned authority travel when it lived in a Black body. 

Or consider Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor, returning to his own home and forcing open a stuck door—then being arrested at that home after police responded to a break-in report. You can debate the personalities involved, but the structure is the point: Black standing did not function as protective legitimacy in the moment it mattered; escalation did. 

That line makes some people uncomfortable because it forces clarity. It refuses the soothing story that this is just “a misunderstanding” or “a personality clash.” It forces us to ask why the usual rules of legitimacy and deference did not apply.

Because if we are honest, what happened at that restaurant was not just that someone was rude. It was that multiple people behaved as if a completed transaction did not bind them, as if withholding paid-for goods was a reasonable option, and as if escalating to police rather than resolving a routine refund was normal. That’s not a customer service lapse. That’s a legitimacy decision.

Escalation is not neutral.

Calling the police turns a basic consumer dispute into a confrontation with a state-backed enforcement apparatus. It increases risk instantly. It shifts the question from “how do we solve this?” to “how do we remove her?” And in America, we all know that police involvement does not carry equal risk for everyone. Escalation is a tool. It is a choice. It is a way of imposing consequence on the person you believe is safest to punish.

That’s why this cannot be reduced to “customer service.”

If the restaurant truly was not accepting online orders, there were multiple non-punitive solutions available: cancel the order, refund it immediately, provide documentation, apologize, and move on. That is what happens for many people every day. The system has a script for this.

But the script I encountered was different: deny, dismiss, and escalate. And denial becomes especially powerful when the context is scarcity—when it’s Christmas night, the town is quiet, and options are limited.

And the question that clarifies why is the one people avoid because it forces them to admit how society actually works:

Does anyone credibly believe this sequence—prepaid order, refusal to fulfill, observed others receiving food, insistence on resolution, police called, customer escorted out—would have unfolded the same way if I were a white man? Most people, if they are honest, do not believe that.

This is what modern discrimination looks like: Black authority treated as optional, and escalation used when recognition becomes inconvenient.

⚖️ Why This Matters

It matters because public legitimacy is not a vibe. It’s infrastructure.

Public legitimacy is the social recognition that your standing is real, enforceable, and consequential. It is what makes institutions negotiate rather than dismiss. It is what makes people think twice before escalating. It is what makes “policy” suddenly flexible, and what makes a simple transaction resolve itself without drama.

And power is not only what you possess. Power is what other people believe you can use.

If people believe you can create consequences, they respond differently. They de-escalate. They resolve. They treat you as legitimate. If people believe you cannot, they test you. They stonewall you. They escalate on you. They treat you as socially unenforceable.

That belief does not stay inside one restaurant on one night. It travels.

It travels into workplaces, where Black executives are asked to “prove” leadership in ways their peers are not. It travels into hospitals, where Black physicians are undermined and Black patients are doubted. It travels into schools, where Black authority is treated as negotiable and Black children are disciplined for behaviors that read as normal in others. It travels into housing markets and courtrooms and boardrooms and police encounters. It becomes a pattern: whose legitimacy is automatic, and whose must be constantly re-earned.

And that is why this matters to everyone who claims to care about opportunity. Because opportunity does not exist in a vacuum. Opportunity requires enforceable legitimacy. It requires that earned power be allowed to translate into durable security.

This is where modern racism is often misdefined. People want to locate racism in language: whether someone used a slur, whether someone “meant it,” whether someone has the right feelings in their heart.

But the biggest racial harms in America are not sustained primarily by people saying the N-word. They are sustained by systemic failures of translation—the failure of Black education to convert to the same stability, the failure of Black income to convert to the same wealth, the failure of Black credentials to convert to the same presumption of competence and protection.

💢 That is how the racial wealth gap persists.

💢 That is how unequal outcomes persist.

Not only through overt hatred, but through the steady undermining of whether Black authority is allowed to become enforceable power. You can sanitize language and still preserve hierarchy if you keep making Black legitimacy negotiable.

And once enough people are trained to experience Black legitimacy as negotiable, bigger fantasies become politically possible: the fantasy that citizenship itself is something “we” can confer or revoke based on belonging, loyalty tests, or identity. That entitlement does not appear out of nowhere—it grows in the soil of everyday misrecognition, everyday selective enforcement, everyday escalation.

To be clear: U.S. law does not make citizenship infinitely revocable at someone’s whim. There are legal constraints, and denaturalization is legally bounded and contested. But the existence of formal constraints does not prevent a cultural drift toward the idea that some people’s status is inherently more precarious—more conditional—more available for punishment. 

And for those of us who are trying to make transformative change—trying to build new infrastructures of care, accountability, and protection—this is not an abstract insult. It is a structural constraint.

Because change requires power. And power requires legitimacy.

If a society can look at a Black physician-founder—someone working on Christmas while her kids are sick at home—and still treat her as a person whose money can be taken and whose presence can be policed, it sends a signal that does not stay local. It teaches the world, quietly, that Black authority is contestable.

That is why I will not treat this as trivial.

I am not asking for reverence. I am not asking for a special category of humanity. I am asking for the basic consistency the country claims to believe in: if you accept payment, you deliver the goods or you refund immediately; if you cannot resolve a transaction, you do not escalate to law enforcement to remove a customer who is requesting a routine remedy.

And I am naming the deeper truth behind why it happened at all: Black authority is recognized when it’s convenient and ignored when it’s inconvenient. ‼️

If we actually believe in opportunity, earned power must be allowed to translate.

Because legitimacy cannot be conditional.

It has to be real.

A society that treats Black legitimacy as negotiable will eventually treat Black citizenship, safety, and authority as negotiable too.

💭 A question: Have you experienced something similar? A moment where the rules that should have applied and didn’t? Where your standing was treated as negotiable?

If you have, I’d like to hear about it. Not for collection or spectacle—but because these patterns become clearer when we name them together.

Comment below if you’re willing to share. Even if it felt small. Even if you were told to let it go. The conversation matters. Your voice in it matters.

Last week I finished a call shift, came home, and did what I do when I’m trying to be faithful to the most basic ethic of medicine—reduce preventable harm. I got vaccinated. COVID and flu. My body responded the way bodies sometimes do when they’re asked to practice for an enemy: fever, aches, that bruised, heavy feeling like your immune system is running drills at full volume.

And because I can already hear the familiar chorus that shows up every winter: no, the flu vaccine did not give us the flu. That’s not how the flu shot works. Feeling crummy afterward is an immune response—your body learning, rehearsing, building recognition. What came after was the actual virus, delivered with the casual efficiency only children can manage, because kids are tiny, beloved vectors and they do not care about anyone’s timing.

My daughter got the real flu. Not the polite kind that makes you tired and then politely exits. The kind that makes a home feel like it’s under siege. Fever. Vomiting. That awful combination of lethargy and irritability that makes a child cling and fight at the same time. Then it moved through the rest of us in its own order, like it was checking names off a list.

🤒 Before you have children, being sick can contain a strange little permission slip.

You can lie down. You can call out. You can let the world proceed without you for a day or two while you surrender to the fact that you are a mammal with limits.

Being sick with kids—especially sick kids—comes with no permission. There is no sanctioned rest. Care doesn’t pause because you’re feverish. It doesn’t soften because your stomach is rolling. It just keeps arriving in new forms: another cup of water, another towel, another load of laundry, another child who needs to be held at the exact moment you feel least capable of holding anyone.

We have a soaking tub in our bathroom—one of those domestic fantasies that implies serenity if you ever live long enough to deserve it. This week it became a staging ground for wet linens and ruined blankets, an unintentional monument to the volume of mess that can be generated when three small bodies decide to revolt at once. My husband and I were both sick, both trying to keep the house upright, both searching for patience inside bodies that had none left. And toddlers, when they’re sick, can be astonishingly unkind—not because they are cruel, but because they are suffering and have no words for it. They need you. They fight you. They demand you. You love them fiercely and, if you’re honest, you also stare into the middle distance at some point and think: I cannot do this for one more hour.

We did what most families do when the situation is both frightening and exhausting: we escalated to whatever tools we had. Tamiflu. Fluids. Rest in fractured minutes we stole from the night. Two of the three kids began to improve. One lingered with fevers, flirting with that familiar pattern parents learn the hard way—when recovery is real, but incomplete, and a secondary infection tries to write its own sequel. Still, the trajectory tilted in the right direction. Christmas, in our house, got rescheduled. It turns out holidays are more flexible than we pretend. The kids will still get their magic; it just won’t arrive on the calendar’s schedule.

A traditional gratitude essay would end here. Chaos, then recovery, then a tidy moral about resilience and perspective.

But this year, gratitude didn’t arrive tidy.

🏥 Because while I was living through my own domestic collapse, I was also on call. I was also doing my job as an OB-GYN.

And I found myself—again—in one of the most ethically brutal spaces in obstetrics: the periviable window.

Details in the clinical vignette that follows have been intentionally altered and blended to protect patient privacy.

Periviability is the borderland. It’s the stretch of pregnancy where modern medicine can sometimes sustain life outside the womb, but not reliably, not without profound risk, and not without consequences that can reshape an entire family’s future. It’s where certainty becomes a luxury no one can afford. It’s where every sentence you say as a physician feels like it weighs too much, because the person in front of you isn’t asking for a lecture. They’re asking for a way to survive the next decision.

A young patient came in uncomfortable—scared, trying to be brave, trying to understand what her body was doing. She had a cerclage, a stitch placed in the cervix when the cervix begins to shorten too early in pregnancy. Cervical insufficiency is one of those diagnoses that reminds you how humbling reproduction is: we can describe the pattern and we can intervene, but we still can’t always explain why one body begins to change early while another holds steady. We treat with what we have—progesterone, cerclage, monitoring—knowing that sometimes the interventions slow the process and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the body keeps moving toward labor anyway, and all you can do is try to read the signals with enough honesty to keep people safe.

The work starts in the most human, unglamorous way. You ask permission. You explain what you’re doing. You go slowly because fear tightens everything. You tell her to hold your hand and you mean it. You collect swabs to look for infection, because infection can make the cervix and uterus “unhappy” and push the body toward labor. You try to determine whether membranes might be ruptured, because sometimes the water breaks before dilation becomes obvious. You watch the difference between mucus, medication residue, and amniotic fluid, knowing that at this gestational age, the difference is not academic. You speak carefully, because the wrong kind of reassurance becomes betrayal later, but the wrong kind of alarm becomes trauma now.

Then you run headlong into the reality that makes periviability what it is: time. Gestational age. Thresholds.

Not because babies are morally different on different days. Because physiology is. Because lungs and brains do not mature on a timeline we can negotiate with. Because NICUs—no matter how skilled—are limited by biology and by the capabilities of their particular institution. Many hospitals do not offer resuscitation under a certain gestational age. Some specialized centers will consider more earlier than others. Most modern facilities mark the mid–twenty-week range as viability in the practical sense: with intensive care, there is a reasonable chance of leaving the hospital with a living child. Between those numbers lives the gray—where outcomes vary, where facility policies differ, where one zip code can determine what “options” even means.

⚖️ In that gray zone, counseling becomes an exercise in ethical precision.

You have to explain the reality without making the family feel like they are being asked to play God. You have to name that there is no right or wrong choice in the abstract—only choices that align more or less with a family’s values, resources, and tolerance for risk and suffering. You have to tell them the questions they may soon be asked: Do you want everything done? Do you want interventions only when there is a meaningful chance of benefit? Are you trying to maximize survival at any cost, or are you trying to minimize suffering, even if that means accepting limits?

You also have to tell the truth that people rarely say out loud in public, because it makes everyone uncomfortable: sometimes “doing everything” can be its own kind of harm. Not because the baby is not worth it. Not because the family is wrong to hope. But because at the edge of viability, aggressive intervention can create suffering without creating meaningful survival. And even when survival is achieved, the quality of that survival can range from remarkably intact to profoundly impaired. There are children who surprise us. There are children who do not. In this window, we cannot guarantee which story a family will get.

This is where the counseling I did that night settled into my bones in a new way. Because I wasn’t only thinking about survival curves or NICU statistics. I was thinking about what comes after the hospital—if there is an after.

The part the public often misses is that periviability doesn’t just create a clinical outcome. It creates a life. A long one, sometimes. A life that may be shaped by chronic lung disease, feeding tubes, repeated hospitalizations, severe neurodevelopmental impairment, dependence on machines and caregivers, pain we can’t fully eliminate, needs that do not fade with time. That’s not every case, but it is a real possibility, and the earlier the gestational age, the more that possibility becomes central. Some people hear that and still choose maximal intervention. That is their right. Many people, once they truly understand what it can mean, choose something else. What matters is that the choice is made with honesty, not with slogans.

And then there’s the logistical reality that becomes its own moral problem: where you are.

In a smaller hospital—capable, staffed, doing our best—there are moments when you cannot ethically pretend you are the right setting for what may come next. In those moments, your job becomes two simultaneous things: care for the patient in front of you and move the system fast enough to get her to a place that can hold the complexity if the worst happens.

So you pick up the phone. You call bigger hospitals. You initiate transfer. You try to make sure nothing catastrophic happens between leaving your doors and arriving at theirs, because the last thing anyone wants is a delivery in an ambulance. You do the peculiar dance of modern medicine where urgency is filtered through bureaucracy: long holds, vague answers, incomplete conversations, the sense that the person on the other end of the phone is emotionally absent from the reality you are trying to communicate.

📱 That night, I felt the surreal whiplash that I think every clinician knows but never gets used to.

On one line, I’m discussing thresholds for resuscitation—what we can do, when it matters, when it doesn’t, and why some interventions carry their own risks when used too early. On the other line, the world is texting about Christmas gifts. “What should we get him?” As if time is normal. As if the calendar protects us.

And in the middle of it all is a young woman who needs adults around her—people who know her, love her, can help her think—because decisions like these are difficult for anyone, and even more brutal when you are young, scared, and newly introduced to the fact that pregnancy can become a crisis without warning. I remember saying, in my own way, what I always try to say in those moments: take a few minutes. Call someone you trust. Let another brain hold this with you. Not because you need permission, but because you deserve support.

Here is where my household flu week—small compared to what my patients face—became a strange kind of teacher.

Because being sick while caring for my children reminded me how quickly caregiving drains reserves even in a home with partnership and stability. It reminded me how fragile “coping” is when sleep disappears. How thin the margin is between functioning and falling apart. It made me feel, in my body, what I already know intellectually: sustained caregiving pressure reorganizes a life. And if a temporary, ordinary childhood illness can shake a household to its foundations, then the long-term care needs that can follow periviable birth are not just “hard.” They are life-altering.

💔 This is the part that makes my chest tighten when people talk about pregnancy and newborn life like the moral obligation ends at delivery.

We live in a culture that loves to demand outcomes it refuses to support. We argue fiercely about what pregnant women should do, what doctors must do, what babies deserve, as if obligation is simply a matter of insisting on intervention. But periviability exposes the deeper moral question: are we willing to build a world that can hold the consequences of that intervention?

Because if a child survives with profound needs, the burden doesn’t land on legislators or commentators. It lands on a family. It lands on a mother. It lands on siblings whose lives get reorganized around crisis. It lands on the people least protected by our current systems—people who may not have stable housing, stable childcare, stable transportation, stable insurance, stable work leave, or stable support.

So when I counsel families in this window, I am not only thinking about the next hour. I am thinking about ten years. Twenty years. I am thinking about what it costs to keep a fragile life alive in a society that routinely withdraws support from the disabled, the poor, and the caregiving labor that holds everyone up. I am thinking about the fact that “miracles” are often sustained by invisible work—work done mostly by women, quietly, without applause, without rest, without the infrastructure that would make that work humane.

🙏 And this is where gratitude shows up differently than it usually does on Christmas.

I am grateful my children’s illnesses, while miserable, were temporary. I am grateful my week of caretaking did not become my decade. I am grateful for the clarity that arrives when you are exhausted and your mind stops pretending love is simple. I am grateful for the colleagues who stand in these rooms and keep their humanity intact, who do not hide behind vagueness when patients deserve truth. I am grateful for the best version of medicine—the version that is honest, compassionate, unflinching about tradeoffs, and unwilling to outsource moral weight to a patient who is already drowning.

And I am grateful—strangely, stubbornly—for the fact that I still care enough to be upset by how unfair this is. Because it would be easier, emotionally, to numb out. To call this “just part of the job.” But there are moments in obstetrics that should disturb you. There are thresholds that should make you pause. There are situations where the system’s failures are so loud that you can hear them in the spaces between phone calls.

Christmas, in my house, will be late this year. The kids will still get their magic; it just won’t arrive on schedule. That feels appropriate. Parenthood is mostly a repeated exercise in accepting that love and control rarely travel together.

But the thought I keep returning to is this: if we want to call ourselves a moral society, we have to stop treating people’s most difficult moments as private tragedies they should manage quietly. Periviability doesn’t just test medical skill. It tests what kind of community we actually are—what we are willing to fund, support, and carry together, instead of insisting on outcomes and disappearing afterward.

So today, I’m holding the messy kind of gratitude. The kind that doesn’t perform cheer. The kind that sharpens responsibility. The kind that makes you see what you’ve been spared, and what other people are being asked to endure.

Merry Christmas. 🎄

—Yamicia D. Connor

This has been a season of extraordinary growth for Diosa Ara and the Labora Collective. We have been building, testing, learning, and listening, often all at once. Now, as many of us step into a slower rhythm for the holidays, we’re choosing to do the same—intentionally and with care.

A Gentler Publishing Pace

Over the Christmas season and through January, you’ll notice a gentler publishing pace across our platforms. We will continue to share work on each channel, but with more space to breathe. This is a time for reflection, clarity, and alignment, both for our team and for our community.

You’ll continue to hear from us, just not at a volume that competes with rest, family, or restoration.

A Holiday Gift: Free Access & Luminary Upgrades

As a holiday gift to our entire community, we’re making a meaningful shift during this period. All of our journals will be fully free for the next one to two months. Everything currently published will be open and accessible, so that anyone who arrives here—whether for the first time or as a longtime reader—can explore the ecosystem without barriers.

At the same time, every paid subscriber will be upgraded to Luminary status. This is our way of saying thank you for believing in this work early and helping make it possible.

Restructuring Our Private & Public Channels

During this transition, all premium and paid content will move into a private space. The public-facing journals will remain welcoming, generous, and substantive, while the private channel will house deeper dives, early pilots, and more intensive offerings for those who want to engage at that level. Our goal is simple: to make the free experience genuinely valuable and the paid experience clearly distinct, intentional, and worth opting into.

A More Thoughtful Publishing Rhythm

You’ll also start to see a more thoughtful publishing rhythm designed to respect your time and your inbox. Going forward, if you’re subscribed to a specific channel, you’ll receive one update from that channel each week. In addition, twice a week, we’ll send Labora Collective–wide digests that bring together links and highlights from across the ecosystem. This allows you to stay connected to the breadth of our work without feeling overwhelmed by constant notifications.

Starting this Friday, and continuing weekly, I’ll also be sharing founder updates directly with you. These will be candid, grounding check-ins—celebrating wins, naming progress, and keeping you close to the thinking and momentum behind the scenes. Think of them as a standing Friday conversation between us.

What to Expect in February & Beyond

When we return in fuller stride in February, you can expect a more unified, coherent publication experience. We’re integrating our substacks into a tighter editorial ecosystem so that the throughline of our work—medicine, justice, lived experience, and systems thinking—is easier to follow and more powerful in practice.

You’ll see more guest writers, including physicians, midwives, doulas, and other birth workers, alongside collaborators from aligned organizations who are building in this space with integrity and urgency.

Piloting Our Clinical Care Model

We’re also entering an exciting phase of experimentation. In the coming months, we’ll begin piloting elements of our clinical care model within the collective, offering members the first opportunity to participate. Some of these early pilots, including potential e-consults, will be offered at very low cost or even free, because feedback and learning matter more to us at this stage than scale. This community will help shape what comes next.

Growing Our Team & Building Partnerships

Behind the scenes, our team is growing. We’re actively recruiting an editor to champion the work and strengthen our editorial rigor, and I’m expanding our executive leadership to support the scale and seriousness of what we’re building. We’re also developing collaborations with partner organizations that we’re genuinely excited to share more about in the new year.

With Gratitude

Most of all, I want to wish you a peaceful, grounding holiday season. Thank you for being here—for reading, for engaging, for trusting us as we build something different and necessary. We’re looking forward to stepping into the new year with clarity, generosity, and renewed momentum, and I’m grateful to be doing that alongside you.

With warmth and appreciation,

Yamicia.

It was designed for the people who stay in the room long after the headlines disappear.

If you’ve ever held a Doppler on a quiet unit at 3 AM.

If you’ve ever had to argue a patient’s pain into legitimacy.

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You deserve healthcare that treats you as a whole person—not just a collection of symptoms to manage or a uterus to monitor.

Women’s Health provides medical expertise grounded in the reality of your life. We don’t discuss PCOS without examining why healthy food costs three times more in certain neighborhoods. We don’t analyze maternal mortality without addressing housing quality, workplace protections, and economic security. We don’t prescribe antidepressants for postpartum depression without acknowledging the absence of paid family leave that forces you back to work while your body is still healing.

The clinical expertise remains central—this is medicine written by a practicing OB/GYN who delivers babies and sees patients daily. But it’s no longer artificially isolated from the systems that actually determine whether you thrive or just survive.

What You’ll Find Here

Women’s Health covers the full spectrum of reproductive and sexual health across your entire life:

• Medical explanations in plain language, not jargon

• Evidence-based guidance for making informed decisions about your care

• Clinical expertise contextualized within social realities

• Practical tools for navigating a healthcare system that wasn’t built for you

• Honest conversations about what your doctor might not tell you

Our Six Focus Areas

Each subjournal addresses a specific aspect of women’s health and reproductive justice:

• The EmpowerHER Journal - Your comprehensive guide to reproductive healthcare navigation

• Her Health Matters - Medical education in plain English, no jargon required

• Yemaya’s Circle of Care - Pregnancy and postpartum support rooted in power and trust

• Pleasure & Power - Sexual health that centers autonomy, healing, and joy

• Roots & Wings - Parenting while healing, mothering while breaking cycles

• Second Act - Menopause and midlife transitions on your terms

Who This Is For

Women’s Health serves women navigating reproductive healthcare in an era of restrictions, barriers, and systemic failures. We center Black and Brown women—who face the worst outcomes—because building solutions for those most harmed by broken systems creates healthcare that protects everyone.

You belong here if you:

• Want medical information you can actually understand and use

• Are tired of being dismissed or gaslit by healthcare providers

• Need to advocate for yourself or someone you love

• Want to understand how policy and economics affect your health

• Believe your health outcomes shouldn’t be determined by your ZIP code

From Dr. Yamicia Connor
Founder, Diosa Ara & Editor-in-Chief, Women’s Health

“I deliver that healthy baby to a woman apologizing for ‘failing’ to attend prenatal care—while working two jobs, raising six kids, with no transportation. The system created impossible barriers, then convinced her that her inability to overcome them was a personal moral failing.

That’s the fundamental lie of American healthcare: we’ve convinced women that their health outcomes are primarily determined by individual choices, when research shows only 10% comes from medical care. The other 90%? Your housing, your work, your ZIP code, the policies governing your life.

Women’s Health tells you the truth about how health actually works—and gives you the knowledge to navigate systems that weren’t designed with your survival in mind.”

Start Here

New to Women’s Health? Begin with:

• Her Health Matters for foundational medical education

• The EmpowerHER Journal for reproductive justice context

• Your specific life stage: Yemaya’s Circle (pregnancy), Roots & Wings (parenting), Second Act (menopause)

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here.

You’re trying to give your children what you didn’t receive. You’re working to parent differently than you were raised. You’re healing your own childhood wounds while raising kids who depend on you to be the stable one.

This is hard work. Generational trauma is real. And you’re not alone.

Roots & Wings acknowledges that parenting is challenging under the best circumstances—and nearly impossible when you’re simultaneously processing your own trauma, navigating economic insecurity, managing mental health, and trying to break cycles of dysfunction.

What We Cover

Healing While Parenting

• Managing your own trauma while raising children

• Breaking cycles of dysfunction and abuse

• Addressing your mental health without guilt

• Finding therapy and support that actually works

Parenting Intentionally

• Conscious parenting when your blueprint is broken

• Age-appropriate conversations about hard topics

• Building chosen family and support systems

• Creating new traditions and family culture

The Realities of Motherhood

• The rage and resentment nobody talks about

• Maternal mental health beyond “baby blues”

• Managing when you’re touched out and overwhelmed

• The gap between how you want to parent and how you actually do

Family Systems & Relationships

• Navigating toxic family members and boundaries

• Co-parenting with difficult ex-partners

• Addressing children’s questions about family dysfunction

• Protecting your children without isolation

Special Features

Love Letters to Motherhood
Personal narratives from mothers navigating the beautiful, terrible, overwhelming reality of raising humans while figuring out how to be human yourself.

Welcome to Motherhood
Support for new mothers transitioning into parenthood—the stuff nobody tells you about the identity shift, the isolation, and the loss of self that comes with becoming “mom.”

Partners in Parenting (Column for male partners)
Guidance for fathers and male partners on showing up, sharing load, and supporting their partner’s healing while raising children together.

Our Approach

We don’t do toxic positivity. We don’t pretend motherhood is all joy and fulfillment. We don’t shame you for struggling, for needing breaks, for sometimes resenting your children or your life.

We also don’t wallow in misery. We acknowledge the hard parts while celebrating the victories—even the tiny ones. We’re honest about what’s broken while building toward what’s possible.

Every piece balances:

• Validation (you’re not failing, the system is broken)

• Practical strategies (things you can try today)

• Long-term healing (this is a journey, not a destination)

• Community connection (you’re not alone in this)

Who This Is For

You’re parenting with:

• Childhood trauma you’re still processing

• Mental health challenges you’re managing

• Economic stress that never lets up

• Little to no support from family or systems

• The weight of breaking cycles for your children

You love your kids fiercely AND sometimes fantasize about running away. You’re doing your best AND know your best sometimes isn’t enough. You’re exhausted AND keep showing up anyway.

Roots & Wings is for mothers doing the hardest work there is—raising children while healing yourself—with honesty, compassion, and zero judgment.

Recent Topics

• “When You Parent Like Your Mother Despite Swearing You Never Would”

• “The Rage Nobody Talks About: Maternal Anger and What to Do With It”

• “Explaining Family Dysfunction to Your Kids: Age-Appropriate Scripts”

• “Finding Therapy That Actually Helps (When You Can Barely Afford It)”

You’re giving your children roots in healing and wings toward freedom. That’s enough.

Named for the Yoruba goddess of the ocean and motherhood, Yemaya’s Circle of Care centers Black women and women of color in pregnancy and postpartum support.

Because the statistics are devastating. Black women are 3.5 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. More than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. And the wealthiest Black woman in California faces higher maternal mortality risk than the poorest white woman.

This isn’t about different biology. This is about a healthcare system shaped by centuries of medical racism, where providers are less likely to identify pain in Black patients’ faces and less likely to believe when you say something’s wrong.

Yemaya’s Circle of Care addresses the unique challenges, celebrates the strength, and provides culturally grounded support that mainstream healthcare fails to offer.

What We Cover

Pregnancy Navigation

• Preconception planning and health optimization

• Choosing providers who will actually listen

• High-risk pregnancy management and advocacy

• Recognizing and addressing discrimination

Birth Planning & Preparation

• Creating birth plans in systems that don’t trust Black women

• Building your support team (doulas, midwives, advocates)

• Understanding interventions and when to question them

• Hospital policies and how to challenge them

Postpartum Support

• Fourth trimester recovery and healing

• Breastfeeding challenges and solutions

• Postpartum depression vs. postpartum anxiety

• Returning to work and life transitions

Your Birth Care Guide
A special series within Yemaya’s Circle
Comprehensive pregnancy and birth guidance specifically addressing what Black mothers and mothers of color need to know.

Our Approach

We tell the truth about risks without creating fear. We acknowledge systemic racism without leaving you helpless. We provide practical tools for navigating a broken system while fighting to fix it.

Every piece includes:

• Medical information contextualized for your reality

• Self-advocacy strategies for getting the care you deserve

• Warning signs that require escalation

• Community resources for additional support

Cultural Grounding

Pregnancy and birth are sacred. You deserve care that:

• Respects your cultural traditions and practices

• Honors your intuition and embodied knowledge

• Acknowledges the strength and wisdom you carry

• Celebrates your family and community connections

Yemaya’s Circle holds space for the joy, fear, power, and vulnerability of bringing life into a world that hasn’t always protected Black lives.

Recent Topics

• “Creating Your Birth Plan When Hospitals Don’t Trust Black Women”

• “The Preeclampsia Red Flags Your Doctor Might Dismiss”

• “Building Your Birth Team: Doulas, Midwives, and Advocates”

• “Postpartum Depression in Black Women: Why It’s Different and What to Do”

Community Wisdom

This isn’t just medical expertise from the outside. Yemaya’s Circle centers the knowledge and experiences of Black mothers and birthing people. Your stories, your wisdom, your survival strategies matter here.

You are not alone. We circle you with protection, power, and trust.

Reproductive justice isn’t abstract theory. It’s whether you can get the IUD you need. Whether your insurance covers the abortion you’ve decided on. Whether your employer fires you for missing work due to hyperemesis gravidarum. Whether the hospital believes you when you say something’s wrong.

The EmpowerHER Journal connects medical expertise with practical action. We examine how laws, policies, and systems shape your ability to make real choices about your reproductive health—and what you can do about it.

What We Cover

Reproductive Rights in Practice

• State-by-state abortion access and legal updates

• Contraception access and insurance coverage

• Fertility treatment barriers and solutions

• Emergency contraception myths and realities

Navigating Healthcare Systems

• Advocating for yourself in medical settings

• Getting second opinions and specialist referrals

• Understanding insurance denials and appeals

• Finding culturally competent providers

Real-World Reproductive Decisions

• Pregnancy planning in restrictive states

• Abortion decision-making and access

• Fertility preservation and family planning

• Pregnancy termination for medical reasons

Your Rights & Resources

• What to do when care is denied

• Legal protections and limitations

• Financial assistance programs

• Support networks and community resources

Our Approach

We don’t sugarcoat reality. Reproductive healthcare in America is fractured, hostile, and often dangerous—especially for Black and Brown women. But we also don’t leave you hopeless.

Every piece provides:

• Clear explanation of what’s happening and why

• Practical guidance on navigating current reality

• Action steps you can take right now

• Resources for additional support

Who This Is For

You’re navigating reproductive decisions in a landscape where:

• Your state may criminalize the healthcare you need

• Your employer might not cover essential services

• Your doctor may be legally afraid to provide standard care

• Your insurance company denies coverage for political reasons

The EmpowerHER Journal gives you the information and tools to make the best decisions possible within impossible constraints.

Recent Topics

• “Planning Pregnancy After Dobbs: A State-by-State Decision Guide”

• “When Your Doctor Says No: Getting the IUD You Need”

• “Understanding Abortion Pills: Access, Legality, and Safety”

• “The Second Opinion Strategy: How and When to Get One”

Knowledge is power. Let’s build yours.

Sexual health isn’t just about disease prevention and risk reduction. It’s about pleasure, autonomy, and healing from trauma. It’s about desire, consent, and power dynamics. It’s about reclaiming your body after it’s been violated, controlled, or dismissed.

Pleasure & Power addresses everything your sex ed class didn’t cover and your doctor probably won’t discuss—always centering your right to make informed choices about your own body.

What We Cover

Sexual Anatomy & Function

• How pleasure actually works (beyond basic anatomy)

• Understanding desire, arousal, and response

• Common concerns and variations

• Pleasure across the lifespan

Sexual Health & Wellness

• STI prevention, testing, and stigma-free treatment

• Contraception options and informed decision-making

• Sexual pain and dysfunction

• Pelvic floor health and recovery

Consent & Relationships

• Understanding consent beyond “yes” and “no”

• Navigating relationship power dynamics

• Communication strategies for sexual needs

• Recognizing coercion and manipulation

Healing & Recovery

• Reclaiming sexuality after trauma

• Recovery from sexual violence

• Healing from sexual shame and stigma

• Body autonomy after medical procedures

Our Philosophy

You have the right to:

• Sexual pleasure without shame

• Comprehensive information about your body

• Healthcare that addresses your actual needs

• Autonomy over every sexual decision

• Healing and recovery on your timeline

Pleasure & Power provides information mainstream medicine ignores and popular culture distorts. We talk about sex like it matters—because it does—while respecting that everyone’s relationship with sexuality is different.

What Makes Us Different

We’re sex-positive, not sex-prescriptive
Whether you’re having sex with multiple partners, one partner, or yourself—whether you’re having lots of sex or none at all—you belong here.

We center consent and autonomy
No one owes anyone sex, intimacy, or their body. Ever. Under any circumstances.

We address trauma without requiring disclosure
Healing resources don’t require you to share your story or relive your trauma.

We talk about pleasure explicitly
No euphemisms, no coyness, no shame. If we’re going to discuss sexual health, we’re going to be honest about how bodies work and what feels good.

Recent Topics

• “The Anatomy of Pleasure: What Sex Ed Never Taught You”

• “Understanding Desire: Why ‘Low Libido’ Might Not Be the Problem”

• “STI Testing Without Shame: What You Need to Know”

• “Reclaiming Your Sexuality After Sexual Violence”

• “The Consent Conversation: Beyond Yes and No”

Content Notes

Some content includes explicit sexual information and discussions of sexual violence. We provide content warnings when appropriate and always include resources for support.

Your body. Your pleasure. Your power.