About me
Sarah Varney has served as a special health care correspondent for the PBS NewsHour since 2014, contributing health reporter for NPR for two decades, and a senior correspondent for KFF Health News. Her feature and magazine stories have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Politico Magazine, and The Caravan.
A ’24 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Sarah studied the journalistic framing and ethics of abortion coverage in the United States, focusing on the intersection of religion, sociology, politics, medicine, and gender. Her research projects include a linguistics analysis of abortion discourse in modern American journalism, data mapping of abortion ban impacts, and an analysis of state-funded grants to crisis pregnancy centers.
Since the end of federal abortion rights, she has reported from Idaho, Texas, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington and elsewhere chronicling the seismic fallout on medical care and documenting what lies ahead for women’s rights. She has reported on physicians’ unprecedented obstetric dilemmas, on pregnancy through the eyes of young teens, whose bodies often aren’t built for childbirth, and emergency contraception as a furtive undertaking. In her essay writing, Sarah has delved into the legal implications of giving state legislatures the authority to determine when life begins and tracing similar efforts to revisit universal medical definitions of death.
Her series on India’s booming opioid market won SABEW’s international reporting award, and her story on the Affordable Care Act’s benefits for victims of gun violence, published in The New York Times, won the top newspaper award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She has reported on medical devices threatened by the dissolution of NAFTA in Mexico for The New York Times, on the first year of the Affordable Care Act in the nation’s poorest and sickest state for Politico Magazine, on France’s treasured maternal and child health clinics for NPR and on Hurricane Maria’s toll on Puerto Rico’s elderly for PBS NewsHour and NPR.
Previously, Sarah established the health beat for San Francisco-based NPR station KQED and its statewide news program The California Report, shaping the desk’s expansive view of coverage to include the connections between economic and social conditions and disease, and in-depth reporting on racial and ethnic health disparities. That work won dozens of awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists.