Articles & essays
The Bottle Station
Twins, day one postpartum. Severe preeclampsia, the magnesium about to come down. And a conversation about a bottle-washing station that, in the absence of any system at all, is the system she is going home to.
The Recovery Period Itself
The six-week visit is the one that catches the postpartum hypertension, the postpartum depression, the diabetes screen she cannot afford to miss. A line in a federal budget becomes a closed daycare becomes the visit that never happens.
Infrastructure We Call a Luxury
America treats childcare as a private luxury. The workforce underneath it — the one that depends on women returning to work — is built on exactly the opposite assumption.
Insurance on Paper
When the enhanced Premium Tax Credits expired on December 31, 2025, the marketplace plan became a card she still carries — and a set of appointments she will no longer keep.
The Day I Bought Her
Day two postpartum. Blood pressures still creeping, no safe place to go home to — and a discharge I held back by one day, against the unit's own clock.
Housing Crisis — The Cortisol Pipeline
When the address is unstable, the placenta does what placentas do under chronic cortisol load. The path runs from eviction filing to preterm birth, and the discharge sheet has no row for it.
Housing Crisis
Housing is healthcare. A stable, secure place to live is a prerequisite for a healthy pregnancy — and this patient's most dangerous exposure never made it onto the monitor.
The Card That Just Kicked In
Four clinics in six weeks. A beta-hCG that should have triggered a methotrexate order a month earlier. And a Medicaid card that finally activated the week she arrived in the ED.
The Fever I Almost Sat With
A Black physician — in a city, with private doctors and good insurance — sitting on her own postpartum fever of one hundred and three degrees, telling herself she was just engorged. And what that hour taught her about the patient she discharges today.
She Did Everything Right
The ACA made maternity and newborn care an essential benefit every marketplace plan had to cover, and barred insurers from turning women away. This is the patient who did everything right — and the morning the subsidies expired.
Kicking Away the Ladder
Economic mobility was supposed to be the shield against bad health outcomes. This is what happens to maternal death when the ladder is deliberately kicked away — and why the death rate is the canary.
The Bargain That No Longer Holds
For two generations the public-health bargain was that income and education would buy a Black woman a safer pregnancy. In 2026 that bargain is being unwound, and the obstetric chart is the first place it shows.
About Where's My Money
Where's My Money follows the funding — and the defunding — of women's health. Title X allocations, Medicaid cuts, hospital closures, insurance denials, pharmaceutical pricing, and the economics of keeping women sick, pregnant, or silent. Every dollar tells a story. We track where it goes and who loses when it disappears.
Part of the In Her Name journal at Labora Collective.
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