Sarah McCammon
Sarah McCammon is a National Correspondent covering the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast for NPR. Her work focuses on political, social and cultural divides in America, including abortion and reproductive rights, and the intersections of politics and religion. She's also a frequent guest host for NPR news magazines, podcasts and special coverage.
During the 2016 election cycle, she was NPR's lead political reporter assigned to the Donald Trump campaign. In that capacity, she was a regular on the NPR Politics Podcast and reported on the GOP primary, the rise of the Trump movement, divisions within the Republican Party over the future of the GOP and the role of religion in those debates.
Prior to joining NPR in 2015, McCammon reported for NPR Member stations in Georgia, Iowa and Nebraska, where she often hosted news magazines and talk shows. She's covered debates over oil pipelines in the Southeast and Midwest, agriculture in Nebraska, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in Iowa and coastal environmental issues in Georgia.
McCammon began her journalism career as a newspaper reporter. She traces her interest in news back to childhood, when she would watch Sunday-morning political shows – recorded on the VCR during church – with her father on Sunday afternoons. In 1998, she spent a semester serving as a U.S. Senate Page.
She's been honored with numerous regional and national journalism awards, including the Atlanta Press Club's "Excellence in Broadcast Radio Reporting" award in 2015. She was part of a team of NPR journalists that received a first-place National Press Club award in 2019 for their coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue attack.
McCammon is a native of Kansas City, Mo. She spent a semester studying at Oxford University in the U.K. while completing her undergraduate degree at Trinity College near Chicago.
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An Ohio bill would ban abortions after a Down syndrome diagnosis. It has become a divisive issue in the community, much like it is everywhere else. -
Medicaid pays for nearly half the births in the U.S., and centers that counsel women against abortion often help pregnant women enroll in Medicaid so they don't have to worry about health care costs. -
A goal for many Republicans is to cut federal funding for health services at Planned Parenthood and divert those funds to public health centers. How ready are those centers to pick up that work? -
Failure rates for the most common forms of contraception are down, but it's not entirely clear whether it's due to education, availability, or other reasons. -
A report by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that backs legalized abortion, puts the 2014 rate at 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age — the lowest recorded rate since 1973.
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Part of each hospital's income now hinges on keeping patients with chronic conditions healthier outside the hospital. One medical center has hired nurses and social workers to act as health coaches.
