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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As states around it were passing bathroom bills and trans health care bans, Minnesota, under Gov. Tim Walz, went in the other direction, protecting transgender rights. -
An estimated 110,000 trans teenagers live in states that ban gender-affirming care for minors. Some travel huge distances every few months to keep getting their treatment out-of-state. -
Researchers with the Trevor Project analyzed data from 61,000 transgender and nonbinary young people. They found that after states passed anti-LGBTQ+ laws, young people in those states were more like to attempt suicide. -
For some people, 1-day topical treatments for yeast infections can cause their own irritation. And some doctors steer their patients away from the 1-day options — which contain 12 times the medicine of the 7-day treatment. -
Choosing whether and when to have children is one of the most important economic decisions a woman can make. That decision can be shaped by whether or not a woman has access to abortion. -
A major expansion of the child tax credit during the height of the COVID pandemic temporarily slashed the child poverty rate in half. That is one reason why it has become a hot topic in the presidential race. -
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. -
More family medicine and primary care doctors are doing abortions and questioning why it’s been separated from other care for decades. -
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.
