Selena Simmons-Duffin
Selena Simmons-Duffin reports on health policy for NPR.
She has worked at NPR for ten years as a show editor and producer, with one stopover at WAMU in 2017 as part of a staff exchange. For four months, she reported local Washington, DC, health stories, including a secretive maternity ward closure and a gesundheit machine.
Before coming to All Things Considered in 2016, Simmons-Duffin spent six years on Morning Edition working shifts at all hours and directing the show. She also drove the full length of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014 for the "Borderland" series.
She won a Gracie Award in 2015 for creating a video called "Talking While Female," and a 2014 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for producing a series on why you should love your microbes.
Simmons-Duffin attended Stanford University, where she majored in English. She took time off from college to do HIV/AIDS-related work in East Africa. She started out in radio at Stanford's radio station, KZSU, and went on to study documentary radio at the Salt Institute, before coming to NPR as an intern in 2009.
She lives in Washington, DC, with her spouse and kids.
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The Supreme Court will hear a case on gender-affirming care in the next term after a flurry of legislation. Lower courts have come to conflicting conclusions when these bans were challenged.
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The decision on abortion that the Supreme Court handed down Thursday was narrow. But confusion for doctors in abortion ban states about how to deal with pregnancy emergencies remains widespread.
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More family medicine and primary care doctors are doing abortions and questioning why it’s been separated from other care for decades.
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The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling upholds access to mifepristone, a drug used in more than 60% of abortions. The decision shocked some doctors and abortion rights advocates.
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The two major presidential candidates have very different approaches to health policy. What are they, and how might they shape health care access over the next four years?
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The Texas Medical Board has drafted guidelines for doctors to decide when an abortion is necessary and legal under the state's strict ban. The rules were widely panned at a recent public hearing.
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State laws on abortion keep changing – with new bans taking effect in some places while new protections are enacted in others. And abortion will be on the ballot in at least four states.
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The maternal mortality rate in the U.S. in 2022 – while still high – went back to where it was before deaths surged during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the latest CDC report.
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The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled in favor of transgender patients on Monday. The case was brought by Medicaid recipients in West Virginia and state employees in North Carolina.
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The Supreme Court will consider the question: Should doctors treating pregnancy complications follow state or federal law if the laws conflict? Here's how the case could affect women and doctors.