What is Knowable?
A mental model for what's being done to American women — and what we do about it.
Friends,
I’m Yamicia Connor. I’m a physician — I deliver babies — and a trained engineer. When you look around right now, it can feel like a mess of spaghetti in your head: bad thing after bad thing after bad thing. So my team and I did what engineers do. We simplified.
What Is Knowable is a mental model. Before we ask what do we do, we ask a smaller, harder question first: what can we see clearly, say plainly, and prove?
It walks through the whole picture — the philosophy, the history, the politics, the law, and your health — built on five questions:
What do they want? Why do they want it? How are they doing it? Why are they wrong? How do we fight back?
Start with the frame. It’s short, and it holds everything else together.
The first foundational essay goes deep on one thread — the one I’m closest to as a practicing Catholic and a doctor:
There is a real pro-life tradition in America. It is older than the religious right, more philosophically rigorous, and almost completely unknown to the people who today call themselves pro-life. They took the conclusion and threw away the reasoning behind it. They kept “abortion is wrong.” They threw away everything that made it intelligible. This is what they threw away.
It runs from Aquinas to Dr. King to Cardinal Bernardin — and it names exactly what was lost, and what it would mean to reclaim it.
Read Essay One - No Paywall
One piece of work per week, between now and the midterms. Forward this to one woman in your life who needs the frame.
✊🏽 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
So interesting!