Susan Baer

News Written by Susan Baer | Published on October 25, 2019 What’s it like to be such a recognizable figure in Washington? “For the longest time, the only people who really recognized me were cab drivers. A lot of them were from someplace that I had actually helped— from Ethiopia, or Afghanistan. Or sometimes people would sit and stare at me—they would know that they knew me from somewhere.

For nearly half her pregnancy, Kelly Hartge, a NICU nurse at Children’s National, knew that her daughter wouldn’t survive. “At our 20-week ultrasound, our baby, a girl, was diagnosed with anencephaly. I knew what that was because of my work. Not all of the baby’s skull had formed, which meant the brain would not develop fully. I knew our baby wouldn’t survive long-term—they couldn’t tell us if it would be days or hours or minutes—and might not even make it to delivery.

News Written by Susan Baer | Published on October 22, 2019 Egyptian scholar Nancy Okail fled her homeland for the US, leaving behind her family, when she was prosecuted for her pro-democracy work after the 2011 revolution. “I found out over Twitter that I’d been indicted by the government. As director of the Egypt office for the US-based human-rights group Freedom House, I was harassed, threatened, and, once the trial began, held in a cage in the courtroom.