Jason Ukman
Managing editor
STAT
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Profiles of post-Roe America |
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Ask a clinician who provides abortions whether patients might want to speak to a journalist, and the answer is no. Physicians are worried about privacy. Patients themselves are worried about stigma. Go to the r/abortion page on Reddit, where patients share their abortion questions, and a journalist can get kicked out of the group for asking if people would like to be interviewed. This poses a real challenge: Reproductive health experts see patient stories as the single most important tool to deepen Americans’ understanding of the Dobbs decision and its aftermath — but they are unwilling or unable to help bring such stories to light. STAT reporter Eric Boodman overcame that challenge by slowly, carefully building trust with patient community leaders: people who’d had abortions themselves, and had since become peer supporters. Eric knew that the most powerful stories zero in on one person’s experience. But he also knew that fully understanding one person’s experience would require dozens of interviews. It took an emotional toll, hearing story after story of wanted pregnancies interrupted by terrible diagnoses. But the more interviews he did, the more questions emerged. What do abortion restrictions feel like for a Chinese American family shaped by the one-child policy? How could someone be told they were 20 weeks pregnant in one clinic and 21 weeks in another? What does it feel like to terminate a pregnancy when you’ve assigned personhood to the fetus, chosen a name, decoded every kick as an expression of personality? These were questions no other journalist was asking. Only by listening — with his characteristic curiosity, empathy, and open-mindedness — could Eric have hit on these stories. Take his feature about gestational age. In almost every news story about abortion, gestational age is treated as a given, a throwaway fact: “She was X weeks pregnant” or “Abortion is banned until Y weeks.” Eric, having spoken to someone who’d been given two different gestational ages by two different clinics, wanted to unpack what lawmakers and other reporters took for granted. |
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