Last week, an Instagram account with fewer than 3,500 followers published a video of a Florida woman named Deborah Dorbert. She described carrying a baby diagnosed with Potter syndrome, a fatal condition, to full term after being denied an abortion. Her son lived for 94 minutes, she said in the video.
The next morning, the clip debuted to hundreds of thousands of viewers on MSNBC’s popular weekday show “Morning Joe.”
Few videos have their reach jump by an order of that magnitude — fewer still on a charged topic like abortion.
But this wasn’t any Instagram account. It was a creation of Cecile Richards.
Ms. Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood — and perhaps the country’s most famous abortion rights activist — is a co-founder of a new project called Abortion in America.
It is an attempt, mostly through accounts on Instagram and TikTok, like the one that published Ms. Dorbert’s video, to bring personal stories of state bans and restrictions to broad audiences. It also represents a fight for attention in a chaotic election season, in which abortion access has moved up and down the ranks of voter concerns.
The problem Ms. Richards and her co-founders, Lauren Peterson and Kaitlyn Joshua, set out to solve is this: Journalists are writing about abortion, widely and deeply, but the work does not always resonate, or “stay alive more than a day or a week,” Ms. Richards said in an interview.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
