But first… 

One sad thing about tending to a news website is watching a carefully crafted feature story sink beneath a rising tide of breaking news. We've had a lot of breaking news lately, so you might have missed Claire Stremple's terrific Hard Labor series. It's about the challenges women in rural and remote Alaska face when giving birth and getting prenatal care.

Claire wrote about how women in Haines must move to another city with a hospital a month before their due date, how it didn't used to be that way, and why that change is mostly about money. She wrote about the problems of traveling 800 miles from Unalaska to Anchorage — and how things can go when an expecting mother doesn't get off the island soon enough. Finally, she wrote about a St. Paul Island woman's hard choice between spending months of her pregnancy in Anchorage or risking exposing her community to COVID-19.

The stories reach back to explain how childbirth and neonatal care have changed in Alaska, and they look at how the pandemic is making everything harder. It's the kind of in-depth work we would all like to do more of.

Claire has also posted the stories to a Facebook page. If you have a story about health care and pregnancy in rural Alaska, she wants to hear it.

-- Ian Dickson, KTOO Web Editor