The Long War

I did not train as a historian. The opposite, in fact: I trained as an engineer, then as a scientist, then as a physician. I came to this work counting things — measuring, modeling, looking for the mechanism beneath the symptom. But the longer I have done it, the more I have come to believe that history is one of the most precise instruments we have. It is another lens, sitting alongside the legal, the medical, the cultural, and the societal lenses we already use — and it brings into focus something the others cannot.

It shows you that the present is not an accident, and not a surprise. It is a pattern.

And a pattern, once you can see it, can be named — and what can be named can be fought with more precision.

So before this series walks you through a hundred and fifty years of American reproductive control, I owe you an answer to a fair question:

Why is a medical-intelligence project reaching back into history at all?

Because the attack on women is not new. None of it is new. It is so deeply rooted in the American story that you cannot understand what is happening in an emergency room in 2026 without going all the way back to the structures that made it possible. We say it constantly — none of this is new — and The Long War is the name for exactly that continuity. What looks like a sudden emergency is only the latest turn of a very old machine.

History is also useful here for a sharper reason: the conservative legal movement weaponizes it. Roe, and then Dobbs, were argued on “history and tradition” — and on the question of a woman’s authority over her own body, that history-and-tradition story is, to put it plainly, bullshit. Justice Alito reached into a selective, deeded version of the past and called it the whole record.

But what they forgot is that we can read too.

We understand history as well as they do — better, in the places they would rather we not look. They do not own it, and they do not get to decide where the record begins and ends.

Women’s reproductive health used to be the domain of women. It was midwives; it was mothers; it was a body of knowledge held, practiced, protected, and passed between women. And when men found a way to make money from it, they did two things, in this order: they pushed women out of the profession, and they criminalized and punished the behavior they did not like. That is the actual tradition — not the sanitized version now being sold back to us.

Ask the counterfactual: if OB/GYN were a more male-dominated profession, would it be under this kind of attack?

It would not.

Read Horatio Storer, the nineteenth-century physician who led the medical campaign to criminalize abortion, and his demographic anxieties ring with an unmistakable echo of the panic being voiced right now. The target is different. The argument is the same exact cycle: rinse, wash, and repeat.

I’ll say it plainly, because the profession will not: physicians are responsible for where we are. The AMA holds a tremendous amount of it. The AMA owes women an apology. We would not be here without those framings, without the deliberate destruction of midwifery, without these political forces being given professional cover. People may be allies now — but we cannot forget where this profession was born, because it still carries the markers of the history that produced today’s crisis. And its leadership is not stepping up.

The job, right now, is to be in front of Congress. The response has been more practice bulletins. It is genuinely tragic that a self-funded team of about ten people is making more noise than organizations with far more money, access, and authority.

Why do conservatives leave statutes like Comstock on the books for a century and a half without repealing them? These dormant laws are not oversights. They are traps — a standing check on society, ready to be reactivated. When they say “rights,” they implicitly mean citizens — and they do not regard women, or people of color, as full citizens. In their minds there is no contradiction, because we were never part of the discussion in the first place.

These laws were always draconian. In the age of AI, they become outright dystopian — because AI makes complete surveillance possible. The thing that used to keep constant surveillance impractical was cost: watching everyone meant paying people to physically read everyone’s mail. AI removes that limit. And we already know the government wants the capability — the fight between Anthropic and the Department of Defense was about exactly this. What keeps us free is not that we don’t break laws; it’s that most laws are never prosecuted. Full-enforcement capability hands the state a precise coercion lever. That is game over for our freedoms — and it’s why every American, on every side, has a stake in limiting it.

We end the way we should end every essay: with what you can do. Where they wrote Project 2025, we are writing Project 28 — a concrete, stackable, ready-to-govern agenda for the work that has to start now. Voting rights have to be in it. Reproductive rights have to be shored up in every manner available under the law — we have to stack the law, so that if and when we come back into power, these things are ready to go. And we have to strengthen the medical profession’s own infrastructure, so it can respond to the crises it helped create instead of pretending they’re someone else’s job.

That is the work. This is the doorway.

Let’s go all the way back — because once you see how old this machine is, you stop being surprised by it, and you start being ready to dismantle it.

It starts in 1873, with a dry-goods salesman who walked into Congress with a bill in his coat pocket and walked out with the authority to read America’s mail.

The law he wrote was never repealed.

In 2026 it’s being loaded again.

Read Essay 1 — Comstock, 1873

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

Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective