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.
Local news media has been weakened, feminist digital media has all but disappeared and the news cycle has accelerated to a hectic, almost indigestible degree.
“The only thing people respond to and remember are stories,” Ms. Richards said, citing advice from her mother, Ann Richards, a former Texas governor. But those stories have to be easy to access — namely, short and free and in your face.
“We have to figure out: How do you catch the attention of people that, even if they could find the article, don’t have 20 minutes to read it?” she said.
Activists of all stripes have long relied on the power of visual storytelling to sway audiences, particularly on social media and during elections. But while stories about abortion “are breaking through to many — and appear to be affecting opinion,” according to a June report from the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem, they are not reaching Republicans or anti-abortion voters at the same level as people who already support legal abortion.
The Abortion in America solution: recording, producing and releasing content on social media. Over the last three days, a video posted to TikTok featuring a Texas man detailing his wife’s harrowing miscarriage has been viewed more than one million times. The video was filmed at a launch event for Abortion in America, co-hosted by Glamour magazine at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan.
The group is a nonprofit project of the Hopewell Fund, which sponsors Democratic causes and organizations. The founders said they had raised about $1 million from about half a dozen donors, including Phoebe Gates, a daughter of the billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
With the videos and website, the founders are blurring the lines between their advocacy work and traditional news media. Their site places its own footage alongside articles from national and local publications, some republished in full with the outlets’ permission.
Ms. Peterson referred to this blend as a “complimentary relationship.”
The small group would never be able to achieve the kind of journalism produced by major publications, Ms. Peterson said. But “there are also people who we’re able to speak with who wouldn’t trust a journalist,” she added. The activists did not require women to use their full names or provide medical records to verify their stories, as many journalists would.
Still, Ms. Richards said her motivation was to document history in real time, not unlike the goal of a journalist. She pointed to how stories about enslaved people and those emancipated from slavery had not been told until decades later.
“I didn’t want to come back 30 years later,” she said. “Nor could I.”
Ms. Richards, 67, was diagnosed in 2023 with a glioblastoma, a type of brain tumor. She revealed the diagnosis in a January New York magazine article that described the median survival rate for the condition as 15 months.
“I was doing really pretty well for the last year,” said Ms. Richards, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August. Then the cancer began affecting her balance. She now uses a walker, and her speech is slightly slower.
Ms. Richards is continuing to try new medications and treatments. “And who knows?” she said during an interview at her apartment on Central Park. She works on the storytelling project as much as her treatment schedule allows.
But often a story has to be told multiple times in multiple ways to resonate.
To Jessica Valenti, a longtime abortion activist and a writer who is not affiliated with Abortion in America, repetition is essential.
“You have to assume every day that someone hasn’t seen it and just continually repeat it,” she said. “There is this sense of overwhelm with readers, where these stories are horrible to read. They’re really, really difficult, and I think that there’s a tendency to tune out at a certain point.”
These stories can also be difficult to tell. Ms. Dorbert, the Florida woman who was unable to have an abortion, is often brought to tears while recounting her pregnancy. And yet she has done so many times, including to The Washington Post in February 2023, to CNN and The Post again in May 2023, to the television host Katie Phang on MSNBC in May, to “Good Morning America” in June and to Rolling Stone magazine (and in a Florida political ad) in October.
Still, the 60-second Instagram video posted by Abortion in America was the first time some viewers had heard her name.
On Oct. 28, four days after airing that clip, “Morning Joe” brought Ms. Dorbert to the program in person. She was part of a pretaped panel, alongside Ms. Richards, Ms. Joshua and other supporters of reproductive rights. While introducing her guests, one of the show’s hosts, Mika Brzezinski, already had tears in her eyes.
“When I first aired this video on ‘Morning Joe,’ I was sitting at a table of five men,” Ms. Brzezinski said in an email after taping the segment. “They all cringed, and two of them cried.”
The panel aired one week before the election. Ms. Richards says she is concerned about what might happen when the election is over — when abortion is no longer a ballot measure or a candidate’s core issue — “and all the money and press and attention to these stories will abate.”
“Not because people have fatigue, because every day there’s another story,” she said. “But because it’s just hard to keep track of.”
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