The first time I listened to the podcast, The Retrievals, I knew I was going to teach it in Psychology of Women & Gender. The five-part series chronicles the story of dozens of women who sought fertility treatment at the Yale Fertility Center starting in 2019.
The women featured in the story underwent IVF treatment. This treatment is expensive and involves a multi-step process where doctors first stimulate a woman’s ovulatory process through use of hormones and then remove her eggs by inserting a transvaginal ultrasound and needle into her follicles. The eggs and surrounding fluid are then placed in a dish that will later be combined with sperm. Once eggs are fertilized, they are then transferred by catheter into the woman’s uterus with the hope of a successful pregnancy.
Although this procedure is quite invasive, it should not be painful. Yet, when the women featured in The Retrievals underwent the process of egg retrieval, they experienced unexpected and excruciating pain. Their accounts are gripping as each tries to put into words the intense, burning, and terrifying pain they experienced. None of the nurses or doctors at the clinic could explain why so many women were experiencing pain. In the absence of evidence, everyone – the patients, doctors, nurses, and administrators – started to come up with explanations. Much of their reasoning dismissed or blamed the women for the pain. The women themselves started to doubt their own experiences.
Later, it was discovered that a nurse at the clinic was stealing the pain management drug fentanyl and replacing it with saline. In other words, the women were undergoing an invasive treatment without any pain management.
The Retrievals is brilliantly narrated by Susan Burton, a contributor for This American Life. She explains the events that occurred in accessible and compelling detail. I knew my students would be drawn in immediately. It was also a nice break from the reading intensive schedule we had the few weeks prior.
Since the podcast is organized in 5 episodes, I decided to utilize a jigsaw strategy. This is a cooperative learning method in which students take ownership and become “an expert” on one particular aspect of information and then shares it with their classmates. Although I designed this for an in-person experience, I think this could also work in online learning.
In order to facilitate it, I asked all students to listen to Episode 1, which provided an overview of the events. This episode is a little under an hour, and I told students they could listen while they did other tasks. Then, I assigned each student to listen to an additional episode, so that episodes 2-5 where split among the students.
Here is a brief summary of each episode:
- Episode 1: An overview of the events that occurred at the Yale Fertility Clinic as patients were experiencing unexpected and unexplained pain while undergoing the process of egg retrieval.
- Episode 2: Features the story of the nurse who stole the fentanyl and explores her motivations for doing so.
- Episode 3: Explores the court case and the nurse’s sentencing hearing.
- Episode 4: Highlights what happened at the clinic and how people who worked there experienced the events.
- Episode 5: Features the outcomes for the patients who were involved in the events.
On the day of the class when we discussed The Retrievals, I first asked the students to sit with their designated episode group. I ask them to discuss their experience listening to the podcast and to identify 3 key themes and/or statements that stood out to them. After 15 minutes of discussion, I then place the students into new groups, so that each new group has one member of an episode per group. I then ask each student to share their themes/statements from their original group. Following a 30-40-minute discussion, I ask the students to come together to answer the question, “How do we as a society understand, explain, dismiss, and interpret women’s pain, particularly as it relates to reproductive health?”
If I facilitated this online, I would likely divide the episodes into different discussion threads and have students post to their assigned episode first and then respond to the posts of other episodes.
As I expected, the students were quite engaged in this discussion. Since we had just covered Chapter 9 (Reproduction & Parenting), they made connections between themes in the podcast and our reading. I noticed that the students were much more likely to show compassion and empathy than in our typical class discussions of textbook material since it was impossible to disconnect the content discussed from the women’s stories.