Why We’re Here
A Letter from Dr. Yamicia Connor
🕯️ To our community,
Before I tell you what’s changing — and things are changing — I want to tell you why we’re here in the first place. Because if you understand the why, the what will make perfect sense.
First: thank you.
To our founding members, to our paid subscribers, to everyone who has been with us from the beginning and everyone who found us along the way — thank you.
Every dollar you have invested in this organization goes directly to keeping this work alive. It pays my staff. It funds the research. It keeps the lights on while we build something that, frankly, nobody else is building.
This is not a passion project.
I want to be careful with that word because it implies something optional.
What we are doing is not optional.
Not anymore.
Who We Are
Diosa Ara is a clinical company. I am an OB/GYN — a physician who delivers babies, who manages high-risk pregnancies, who has held women’s hands during the worst moments of their lives and helped them through to the other side. That is my day job. That is where all of this comes from.
Our thesis is simple and urgent: we are targeting maternal mortality by focusing on obstetrical emergencies.
The United States has the worst maternal health outcomes in the developed world. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.
These are not statistics I read about. These are patients I take care of.
The Labora Collective is our medical community. That’s what it has always been. Not a newsletter. Not a content platform. A medical community — built to serve the people who are most affected by the crisis and the providers who are trying to do something about it.
What the Labora Collective Actually Does
I need to be honest with you about what we’re building, because what you’ve seen on Substack is the tip of the iceberg.
We are an intelligence organization.
We conduct rigorous, cross-cutting clinical and research intelligence across 31 domains of women’s health. This is not content. This is surveillance-grade analysis with citations, double-checked methodology, and an equity framing that I have not seen replicated anywhere else.
Why does this matter right now? Because our government has abandoned it.
The CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health has been gutted. Community-based maternal health grants have been halted. The White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis has been erased. Federal offices that tracked racial disparities in maternal outcomes have been closed. Pregnancy surveillance in the most dangerous Western country to have children has been effectively shut down.
It does not take a rocket scientist — and I say this as someone married to one — to figure out what happens next. You take the country with the worst outcomes, and you stop watching.
More women are going to die. We are just not going to know about it.
Unless someone is watching.
We are watching.
Why Your Investment Matters
I have invested close to $400,000 of my own money in this company. Not because investors offered and I turned them down — because they never showed up.
Black founders receive approximately 1.4% of all venture capital funding. That number barely moved post-COVID; now it sits around 4.4%. The companies that have managed to attract investment in maternal health have often been pressured to change their models in ways that serve profit over patients. The actual intervention stops looking like what the founder intended.
We chose a different path. Deliberately. Painfully.
When you subscribe to the Labora Collective — when you invest in us — you are not paying for essays. You are funding an independent research intelligence operation that is actively working to fill the gap left by a government that has decided women’s health is not worth tracking.
That is what your money does. And I want you to know that.
Dr. Yamicia Connor, MD, PhD, MPH
Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
The Labora Collective publishes at the intersection of clinical care, policy, and innovation — because only 10% of your health outcomes come from the exam room. The other 90% is what we cover.
Explore the Labora Collective → Member Home: Start Here
Become a Member → Subscribe to The Labora Collective by Diosa Ara: Member Edition
Message from our founder → Read Viva Voce: Come Inside the Build