Overview: After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, OBGYNs and family medicine practitioners in states with bans or severe restrictions on abortion realized within days that their ability to provide the nationwide “standard of care” for women of reproductive age took a sudden turn for the worse. In addition to abortion, this ruling has affected multiple aspects of women’s reproductive care that the Supreme Court and lower courts did not intend. This Story+ Project asks undergraduates to create short social media and podcast pieces using interview excerpts from the Post-Roe Women's Reproductive Health Archive (WRHA) created by undergraduates interviewing Duke OBGYNs and family practitioners in Wesley Hogan’s Spring 2023 course, Documenting US Women’s Health Post-Roe v. Wade. Story+ participants will be expected to use their creativity, ethical compass, and humanities, media, and arts backgrounds to delve into the Post-Roe Women's Reproductive Health Archive and create clear, accessible, research-informed stories about the post-Roe medical landscape, and its ethical, social and economic consequences. What was the pre-Roe standard of care possible prior to the June 2022 Dobbs decision, and specifically how has it changed since that time? These stories aim to impact the future of legal decision-making, policy decision-making, and an informed citizenry.

Six-week plan:

• Create accessible, clear, engaging stories on social media and in short audio + video excerpts that clarify the standard of care possible prior to June 2022, and how that standard of care has changed since the June 2022 Dobbs decision:
  • A total of four creative nonfiction stories (podcast or video pieces of 2-4 min) and social media posts that illustrate the practical impact of the Dobbs decision on the healthcare available to girls, women and people with uteruses;
  • Building a team (and our extended networks) is also a “product” of the Story+ experience. We think it is essential for undergraduates on the team to build and/or develop networks of information sharing in this era of rapid changes to women’s reproductive health. Large groups of people are not able to access accurate information about what is happening in women’s reproductive healthcare, how these legal changes are impacting health care standards for women and people with uteruses. Making accurate information more accessible to more people is a major challenge this Story+ team aims to improve.
• Lay out some initial possibilities to test the reach of the different platforms (examining how well people respond to podcast, short videos, social media posts on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms) for distinct targeted audiences. This will form be a preliminary communication plan that will be developed further by members of the Fall 2023/Spring 2024 Bass Connections team building the Post-Roe Women's Reproductive Health Archive.

Key words: women’s health, reproductive justice, medical humanities, women’s reproductive health, abortion

Preferred skills/interests for undergraduates:

• Global health and pre-health majors interested in women's reproductive health
• Film, Visual Studies, Art, and/or journalism students interested in women's reproductive justice
• Computer science majors interested in building influencer networks and apps to foster awareness of reproductive justice
• Medical humanities students interested in women's reproductive health from anthropology, African American and African Studies, Asian American Studies, Latin@ Studies, history, GSF, sociology, documentary studies, English, literature, film studies, AAHVS, journalism

Preferred skills/interests for the graduate student mentor:

• Familiarity with audio/video production and building social media campaigns is a plus
• Someone with interest in the topic ready to use their analytical and creative skills to build a small, nimble team of undergraduates working in real-time to create social media pieces and short audio and video pieces (2-4 min. each) explaining an unfolding domestic health crisis with long-term ethical, medical, economic, and societal ramifications
• Someone able to work with undergraduates to help them assess and respond to the complex media and policy landscape so that they can create new narratives from the Women’s Reproductive Health Archive to impact public health, legal, and policy decisions at the state and national level
• Someone interested in building/developing influencer networks for this material that will help them disseminate their own scholarship going forward, as well as guiding undergraduates to do the same