Serial Productions centers women impacted by Yale Fertility Center Fentanyl tampering case in new podcast

The New York Times and Serial Productions today announced The Retrievals, a new five-part podcast hosted by author and “This American Life” editor Susan Burton. The narrative series weaves together voices of Yale Fertility Center patients to tell a powerful and textured story about the treatment of women in medical settings and what happens when one of the most established fertility clinics in the country is held accountable for failing to protect its patients.

Listeners can subscribe to “The Retrievals” and listen to the trailer now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever podcasts are available. The first episode will be available on Thursday, June 29, with episodes released weekly after that.

“In ‘The Retrievals,’ Susan Burton takes on a question I’ve always wanted to explore: Why do we not take women’s pain more seriously?” says Julie Snyder, the executive editor of Serial Productions. “What happened to the patients in this story is horrible. But how each of them made sense of it -- both before they knew the source of their pain, and after they learned the truth -- is fascinating and so illuminating.”

“The Retrievals” tells the story of a dozen women who underwent egg retrieval procedures at the Yale Fertility Center. For months they complained of severe pain. But nobody caught on to exactly what was wrong, until one day when an anesthesiologist noticed a loose cap on a vial of fentanyl. Soon the truth was revealed: a nurse at the clinic had been stealing the pain medication and replacing it with saline. Eventually the nurse has her own story, about her own pain, that she tells to the court. And then there is the story of how this all could have happened at the Yale clinic in the first place. “The Retrievals” is a five-part series about the patients who say their pain was dismissed, a nurse who was hiding something, and the institution that failed to protect its patients.

Serial Productions is the maker of the blockbuster podcasts “Serial” and “S-Town,” with more than 743 million total downloads. In July 2020, Serial Productions became part of The New York Times Co. Together they have launched several shows, including “Nice White Parents,” a chart-topping series about the powerful forces shaping public schools; “The Improvement Association,” a captivating true story about election fraud; “The Trojan Horse Affair,” an investigative series about the mystery behind a scandal that rocked Britain; “We Were Three,” an intimate look at how Covid affected one family; and, most recently, “The Coldest Case in Laramie,” a limited series confronting conflicting stories behind a decades-old unsolved homicide case.