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. -
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, including Missouri. -
People will be able to go to COVIDTests.gov and get four free tests per household, starting today. The Biden administration says it is trying to prepare for the fall and winter COVID season. -
What happened to abortion numbers since Roe v. Wade fell? The Guttmacher Institute has new state-by-state numbers that show people are traveling for the procedure. -
Although Missouri was the fastest state to ban abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned, access hasn't shifted much because the state "was already in a post-Roe world." But elsewhere in the Midwest and southern U.S., abortion patients now have to travel a lot further. -
A new study shows women who call the hospitals in Oklahoma get confusing information about the state's abortion bans. One family lived through that confusion with dire consequences last month. -
In Missouri, hospital doctors told a woman whose water broke at 18 weeks that "current Missouri law supersedes our medical judgment" and so she could not receive an abortion procedure even though she was at risk of infection. That hospital is now under investigation for violating a federal law that requires doctors to treat and stabilize patients during a medical emergency. -
NPR is asking for your submissions to capture the variety of ways the new abortion laws across the country are having an impact on people's lives. -
Vaccine eligibility has been expanded to all adults. Use NPR's tool to find out how to book an appointment. Plus, helpful advice about how to navigate the system. -
We're in shutdown mode for now, but what comes next? Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is working on a plan to safely reopen the country.
