The research on reproductive coercion was clear. But could I find real people willing to share their stories?

It was easy to get researchers to tell me about the reproductive coercion they documented at hospitals and public health clinics across the country. It was much harder to find actual women willing to share their very private stories.

For my Center for Health Journalism Impact Fund project for TIME — “‘I Don’t Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.’ Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control” — I learned that you sometimes have to take nontraditional routes to find people willing to talk on the record about medical issues. 

Ever since a professor told me that he thought that birth control was the “cure” for poverty, I’d been interested in the idea that women were being coerced into long-term birth control. The women were often poor, Black, Latina, or young, and the people doing the pressuring were often doctors and policymakers. For a few years, I’d paid attention to the many academic studies documenting this, and to the mainstream op-eds by doctors warning against it. 

When I started reporting my story, I figured I’d have a relatively easy time finding women to talk to. After all, just about every researcher I talked to told me that coercion was going on, and that it happened in just about every hospital and medical center across the country. I reviewed nearly 40 academic studies that documented this and discussed it. I compiled them in a spreadsheet, documenting that this coercion was going on; I was glad that there was so much research to back up the main thesis of the story. 

But when I started reaching out to researchers and doctors to see if they could put me in touch with any women, the answer was always, “No.” They had obligations to keep information private; the women had agreed to participate knowing their names wouldn’t be used; doctors and patients were open to academics because they knew their responses were private. Clinics and reproductive justice organizations couldn’t help either — they were bound by HIPAA rules and a strong sense that what women needed more than anything was privacy about their reproductive choices. 

A few months into the reporting of my story, I had many interviews with academics and researchers and doctors telling me that coercion was happening, but zero women willing to talk about their experiences. The topic matter — whether women were forced into getting or keeping an IUD — was a sensitive one, and not one I could really go up to people on the street and ask about. I usually cover economics, so I hadn’t dealt with the task of getting people to share their medical histories for a while. The best way, I figured, was to go directly to the people themselves; after all, journalists are not covered entities under HIPAA and are allowed to report on an individual’s health information. 

I kept reaching out to nonprofits and doctors, hoping that someone would turn up, but as I waited and kept getting discouraging responses, I had an idea that seems obvious in retrospect. I went to Facebook and typed “IUD” into the search bar. After scrolling for a while, I found Miannica Frison, a woman in Alabama who posted on her page about her bad experience with an IUD. It couldn’t hurt to ask her about her experience, I decided, so I messaged her. She turned out to be the key to the entire story. 

Miannica’s Facebook post wasn’t about reproductive coercion, but once we started talking about her IUD, she shared with me that she had been coerced into getting it, and that she had tried to get it removed for years before a doctor finally agreed. She then put me in touch with her doula, who knew all about this and could talk about other instances of reproductive coercion women experienced. Her doula put me in touch with other women and other doulas who shared my contact information, and I finally had some good leads.

I often wonder, as a journalist, why anyone would agree to share their story with the media. But the women I talked to also wanted a voice, and wanted people to know that coercion was happening so that other women wouldn’t be put in the same position. I feel very fortunate that the women I found were willing to talk to a stranger on Facebook, because it was the key to the story, the missing link between the academic research and the lived experiences. I also feel very fortunate that through the Center for Health Journalism, I was able to fly down and meet these women in person, which in turn led to even more connections. 

The work that academics and researchers do is incredibly important; they are the people looking at the world today, wondering why it takes a particular form, and finding answers. But oftentimes their work does not get read beyond their academic circles. And because of the limits on how they conduct their research, they are most likely to report numbers and trends but not specific people’s stories, which I think is what is key in making them real to readers. 

When I started researching this story, I was surprised that academics were absolutely sure that coercion was happening but that people outside of academia seemed to have no clue. I felt strongly that it was my responsibility as a journalist to do more than bring attention to the research that documented the coercion. I’m very lucky that I was able to find a way to make this academic research real, especially on a topic that included people’s private medical histories. 

For so much reporting, the real job is finding people willing to talk to you and listening to what they have to say. I started reporting this story with the proof I needed but not the people to tell the story. I had to figure out how to find them along the way.