Fine Feminist Hour with Dr. Yamicia Connor turned into one of the most urgent conversations we’ve had yet about reproductive healthcare, feminism, birth worker shortages, and the increasingly dangerous reality facing women in America.
Dr. Connor — an OBGYN, engineer, founder, mother of three, and one of those people who makes you immediately wonder how she manages to fit more than 48 hours into a day — laid out the looming maternal healthcare crisis in terrifyingly concrete terms.
Thousands of OBGYNs are expected to leave the profession in the next few years. Rural hospitals are losing labor and delivery units. Emergency rooms are performing emergency C-sections without OB coverage.
Entire states are approaching catastrophic shortages of reproductive healthcare providers.
We knew it was bleak. I’m not sure I realized it was this bleak.
We also talked about Dr. Oz’s “under-babied” comments and why so many women reacted viscerally to them. Because the contradiction is impossible to ignore: politicians are simultaneously pressuring women to have more children while dismantling healthcare, Medicaid, childcare support, reproductive freedom, and the basic infrastructure required to safely raise families.
One of the most striking parts of the conversation was Dr. Connor’s framing that what we’re witnessing is not random policy chaos, but a coherent ideological project around power, dependency, race, gender, and control. She described modern attacks on reproductive rights as part of a larger “Manufactured Healthcare Crisis” to make women economically and physically dependent again — and called misogyny “impotence at scale,” which may be one of the sharpest phrases I’ve heard all year.
We also talked about feminism, motherhood, pumping breast milk between surgeries, raising daughters in a world increasingly hostile to female autonomy, and the emotional exhaustion of trying to protect young women while watching hard-won rights begin to erode in real time.
A furious, brilliant, deeply clarifying conversation.
Thank you Courtney, Jai C. Porter🇨🇦, Lisa | We Are The Third Estate, Ms.Yuse, Lynn, and many others for tuning in, and to Karen Marie Shelton and Yanni Hamburger for moderating.
Thanks for listening!
We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.
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