The novel reportedly explores the ways institutional power — medical, governmental, social — was wielded against women's bodily autonomy during an era we tend to romanticize as one of liberation and free love. It's a reminder that for many women, especially those who were poor, non-white, or otherwise marginalized, the Summer of Love wasn't all flowers and freedom.

Here's where it gets interesting from a liberty perspective: reproductive injustice in the 1960s wasn't some rogue operation. It was systemic. It was government-adjacent institutions — public hospitals, state-funded programs, bureaucratic gatekeepers — deciding who got to make the most intimate decisions about their own bodies. If that doesn't make your libertarian alarm bells ring, nothing will.

Whatever your politics on reproductive issues (and we know they're complicated), there should be broad agreement on one thing: the state has no business making coercive decisions about people's bodies. Full stop. The history Schatz is fictionalizing isn't ancient — it's within living memory, and the institutional mindset that enabled it hasn't fully disappeared.

San Francisco has spent decades building a mythology around its own progressivism. Fiction rooted in the city's actual, uncomfortable history is a useful corrective. The question isn't whether these things happened — they did. The question is whether we've built enough guardrails against government overreach to ensure they don't happen again.

Spoiler alert: we probably haven't.