OurTupelo

LAUREL — What Truitt Bush wanted more than anything in the world was to play on the indoor playground at Chick-fil-A again.

The 4-year-old had spent the majority of his time since March of 2020 inside his Laurel home with his mother. Truitt hadn’t known much of the pre-pandemic world, but he knew he wanted to go back to it. He missed his friends and his gymnastics lessons. 

Truitt’s parents, Anna and Matt, wanted that for him too, but were concerned about his health and safety. Though the two had been vaccinated against COVID-19 soon after they became eligible, children in Truitt’s age group were still ineligible.

Then they heard that Moderna’s pediatric vaccine trial would be coming to Hattiesburg Clinic.

The clinic, which was eligible to participate because of its previous work in clinical trials, was the only health care provider in Mississippi to participate in the pediatric Moderna trials, which involved around 6,700 children across the U.S. and Canada.

Anna said the decision to enroll Truitt in the trial was an easy one after talking it through with friends who are doctors and their children’s pediatrician, Dr. Anita Henderson. Henderson is also the president of the Mississippi Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“If she (Henderson) says it’s okay, I’m going to follow what she says,” Anna said. “I know that she has his best interest and the best interest of the children of Mississippi at heart.”

Henderson said she saw a lot of interest from parents in the community whose children were clinic patients or had heard about the trial via word of mouth.

“A lot of families wanted to have that chance of getting their child vaccinated and protected and also just wanted to participate in getting COVID vaccine research out there for the general public to help get the pandemic behind us,” Henderson said. 

Anna and her husband, Matt, didn’t make the decision unilaterally, though. They let Truitt be a part of that process, and he had few reservations about getting what his parents called a “super shot” that would give him the protection he needed for their family to return to some sense of normalcy.

With everyone in agreement, Anna and Matt enrolled Truitt in the Moderna vaccine trial. Truitt was selected to participate. This phase of the trial was open label so they knew Truitt would be getting the actual vaccine and not a placebo.

He received his first dose in early June of 2021. 

The trial, which was slated to last for 14 months, involved a combination of in-office visits, phone calls and e-check-ups using an app. 

The worst part of the experience for Truitt was having blood drawn at each of the five in-person visits, his parents said. He would distract himself by explaining to the nurses and techs what the virus looks like and how the mRNA vaccines work, all things he’d learned by watching educational videos on YouTube. 

“I don’t think you’re going to find a 4-year-old that’s going to tell you getting nasal swabs and blood drawn and a shot is their favorite thing to do on a Tuesday,” Anna said. 

Truitt didn’t experience many symptoms following either of the two shots, only a slight headache and sore leg. Matt jokes that he took it better than either of his parents did, who both had to take a sick day from work after receiving their second dose. 

Now, Truitt has one in-person visit left for the trial, which may be extended to include occasional remote check-ins. 

Truitt’s two-year-old baby brother, Gilliam, is set to receive his vaccine next month. Truitt, now 5 years old, is proud that he played a part in his brother and friends becoming eligible for vaccination. He’s also enjoying a much less restrictive childhood and has even returned to the Chick-fil-A playground. He described it as “the best day ever.”

Henderson, who had multiple patients participate in the vaccine trial, said those who participated played a key role in helping prevent further COVID-19 infections and transmission in Mississippi. 

 “I think we as a community owe them a debt of gratitude,” Henderson said. 

Anna and Matt say they’ve heard some people say, ‘What kind of parents would put their child in a clinical trial?’”

“Nobody says that about clinical trials for other illnesses we’re searching for cures for,” Anna said. “We’re just regular folks in Laurel, and we just want the best for our family and our community. I just hope this helps ease the fears people might have.” 

The post This 4-year-old Mississippian participated in the Moderna COVID vaccine trial. Here’s how it went. appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A committee Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann created to study the needs of women, children and families in the wake of Roe v. Wade abortion rights being overturned has scheduled four hearings and wants written input from the public.

Hosemann said on Thursday the bipartisan, nine-member Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families will hold hearings at the Capitol on September 27 and 28, and on October 25 and 26. The hearings will be webcast, archived and open to the public.

The public is invited to email written testimony to WCFStudyGroup@senate.ms.gov. The comments will be presented to the full committee.

House Speaker Philip Gunn last month also announced he was creating a similar committee — the Speaker’s Commission on the Sanctity of Life — to address post-Roe needs for services in Mississippi. On Thursday a spokeswoman in a statement said Gunn and his staff “have been diligently working” on creating the commission and “curating a list of candidates” that will include “Mississippi’s top experts and professionals in all areas of concern.”

Republicans Hosemann, Gunn and Gov. Tate Reeves have praised the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on a Mississippi case that overturned the decades-old Roe v. Wade decision providing women abortion rights. But the three said the decision also requires Mississippi leaders to provide more resources to help mothers, children and families.

Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation, suffers from lack of prenatal, postnatal and all other forms of health care. It also has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation and one of the highest maternal death rates. It has for years faced federal court decrees to address its substandard foster care and children’s services system.

The Senate committee will be chaired by Sen. Nicole Boyd, a Republican from Oxford.

“Many people have personal stories about these topics and written testimony provides an opportunity to share them with study group members and the Senate,” Boyd said in a statement. “We are also encouraging legislators to reach out to their constituents and hold public hearings in their districts before the study group hearing dates in the fall.”

Hosemann said: “Testimony primarily from state agency heads and experts, and research following these hearings, will aid Sen. Boyd and the study group members in forming policy proposals going into the 2023 legislative session.”

Gunn has steadfastly opposed Medicaid expansion to cover the working poor, and earlier this year he torpedoed a Senate proposal backed by Hosemann to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage for Mississippi mothers.

Hosemann is the only one of the state’s top three leaders who’s said he’s open to discussion about expanding Medicaid, which would provide the state about $1 billion a year in federal funds to provide health coverage for the working poor. But Gunn said recently when asked about Medicaid and postpartum expansion said, “All of those things you’re mentioning are things that will be on the table” with his new commission.

Topics set for the Senate hearings are:

Sept. 27: Statistical overview and maternal/child healthcare

Sept. 28: Adoption, foster care and child support

Oct. 25: Childcare availability

Oct. 26: Early intervention

Hosemann said additional hearing dates or topics may be added as necessary.

The post Senate committee asks public to comment about needs of Mississippi women and children appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Needy families need to be put first. Not last like they are now.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Families Last appeared first on Mississippi Today.

After years of struggling with home wells running dry, Amanda Barkley and her neighbors near the Falkner community on the Benton-Tippah county line hope soon to have ample, clean water as Mississippi prepares to spend over $1 billion in federal money on water and sewerage statewide.

“We got a letter from (Public Service Commissioner) Brandon Presley,” Barkley said. “Three Forks Water Association is applying for the grant to hook us up … It sounds like the money is there, the water association is going to do it. We’re just very hopeful.”

The Mississippi Legislature earlier this year decided to spend up to $750 million of the $1.8 billion it received in American Rescue Plan Act federal pandemic relief money on two of the state’s major problems: In many urban areas, most notably Jackson, antiquated water and sewerage systems are collapsing. In rural areas, such as where Barkley lives, 13% of the state’s population does not have public water service.

The issue is a hindrance to the state’s growth and economic development, and it’s a major health concern. Drinking water contamination in rural wells and from crumbling urban systems is widespread, as is pollution from leaking sewer mains and rural septic tanks.

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Full coverage of how Mississippi is spending billions in federal pandemic relief tax dollars

The Legislature earmarked $450 million to provide matching grants to cities and counties for water, sewerage and stormwater drainage projects. Cities and counties received about $900 million directly from ARPA that they can use for the matching grant program. For approved projects, the state will match counties’ and most cities’ ARPA money 1-to-1, but will provide a 2-to-1 match on projects for towns that received less than $1 million from ARPA.

The Legislature also set aside $300 million for grants of up to $2.5 million each for rural water associations, from which most Mississippians receive their water. This is for projects such as the one Barkley and her neighbors hope will provide them water.

The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and Mississippi Department of Health are running the city/county and rural water grant programs, respectively. They have in recent weeks promulgated rules and scoring and are taking applications, and plan to start awarding grants by the fall.

‘We invented the wheel on this’

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann led the push in the Legislature and lobbied local governments to focus ARPA spending on infrastructure projects that would be “transformational and generational.” Last year, he traveled the state urging local governments to hold onto the ARPA funds they had already received until the Legislature could work out a plan to match their money.

“I’ve been very pleased with the cities that have held their money for the matching grants,” Hosemann said. “… It appears most of them did, and I’m hopeful they saved at least between $300 million and $400 million that can be fully matched to give us a big infusion on water and sewer statewide.”

The money won’t be a cure-all for Mississippi’s water and sewer infrastructure. Needs in many areas, such as Jackson, are far beyond the money available. But it’s well beyond what Mississippi’s cities, counties and hamlets could do on their own, and is being called a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by many leaders.

“We just appreciate this lift, this push,” said Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons, who said his city hopes to have the state program match his city’s $6.2 million in direct ARPA funds to cover $12.4 million in water and wastewater system improvements. “… Our children and their children will see the positive benefits of infrastructure work.”

READ MORE: Should safe drinking water be a priority for Mississippi’s federal stimulus spending?

Greenwood Mayor Carolyn McAdams, president of the Mississippi Municipal League, said cities are reading the new regulations and signing up for webinars with MDEQ and that MML and the secretary of state’s office are helping cities navigate the grant programs. She said Greenwood has $3.2 million it hopes to get matched to “re-line a lot of sewer pipes that are 70 to 75 years old,” and other work.

“We’re sitting on go — or at least on one or two of ‘one-two-three, ready go,’” McAdams said. “… We’re really appreciative of the additional funding from the state level. I really totally agreed with Lt. Gov. Hosemann. A lot of people could have taken that money and done other things that, while needed, might not be the best decision. When you narrow it down to water and wastewater, you’re doing things that are going to last many years.”

Robert Lee, interim city engineer for Jackson, said the city is finalizing plans for projects. The city plans to use $25 million of the $42 million it received from ARPA for the state water and sewer match program — the largest amount of any city in the state.

Lee said the city plans to focus these projects on sewerage, not because the city doesn’t have plenty of drinking water system needs, but because many of the water projects have much larger price tags and will have to be staged over years.

“On the sewer side, we have a (court) consent decree (to fix problems),” Lee said. “Right now, I’m looking at sewer overflowing and spilling as we talk.”

Derrick Surrette, director of the Mississippi Association of Supervisors, said most counties in Mississippi do not have water or sewerage operations, but some plan to apply for matching grants from the state for stormwater projects. He said these are mostly larger, more developed counties with major drainage issues. He said many other counties will be using their ARPA funds on road and bridge work and other issues, without getting a match from the state.

Surrette said some counties are looking to partner with rural water associations, and use county ARPA funds to help them leverage a state match and upgrade water systems and service. But he said there is still some confusion and concern about counties giving money to non-county entities.

“The rural water issue gets more complicated,” Surrette said. “Once the money goes off the county books to a private association, that’s where all sorts of red flags go up for counties. It’s not that we don’t want to do it, it’s just being very cautious. You can’t just give that money to a rural water association and hope they get it done.

“But this was a first for everybody, and the legislators had to invent the wheel on this, and we appreciate the work they’ve done,” Surrette said. “We invented the wheel on this, so there will probably need to be some more tweaking.”

Kirby Mayfield, CEO of the Mississippi Rural Water Association, said he believes many water associations will take advantage of the state’s $300 million grant program, although the money is not enough to cover all the needs of more than 900 associations. Most of the systems were created in the 1960s and ’70s when affordable USDA grants and loans were available and they have not been able to afford needed upgrades and replacements.

“I think we will never see a chance like this again,” Mayfield said. “This is really huge for our water industry.”

Mayfield said the grants will allow for repairs and expansion, and probably help some very small associations merge and consolidate.

Deadlines loom, inflation eats into projects

Mississippi is behind most other states in standing up programs and spending federal ARPA money. States have a deadline of December 2024 to allocate the money, and December 2026 to finish spending it. While those deadlines appear generous, Mississippi will see a flood of projects statewide, with a finite number of water, sewerage and drainage contractors available. Some local governments may be sweating deadlines on the larger projects.

Also, as the clock has ticked, inflation has risen to record levels and construction is particularly hit hard.

“We’re looking at construction costs up 40% from our original estimates from before the (legislative) session,” said George Flaggs, mayor of Vicksburg. “Asphalt has gone up 52% since the pandemic, and anything with iron in it has gone up more than that. We’ve had to re-bid two city projects. Plus, an issue now is the workforce — all the contractors are in need of workers. I think we can still make all the deadlines, but may have to cut back on some of the projects we do.”

READ MORE: Mississippi procrastinates as other states plan for, spend billions in pandemic stimulus

McAdams and Simmons said they’ve seen the same skyrocketing inflation in construction costs.

“Pre-COVID, for 8-inch concrete pavement, it cost $72.22 per square yard,” Simmons said. “In May, it was running $119 for that same square yard.”

McAdams said Greenwood got estimates on projects when ARPA payments first went out, but those estimates are no longer near reality. She said with local governments across Mississippi — and neighboring states, too — doing projects at the same time, contractors and labor are liable to be in short supply.

Hosemann said inflation is one reason the Legislature held back on spending about $400 million in state ARPA funds early this year.

“First of all, we believed there was going to be high inflation and possibly a recession,” Hosemann said. “Second of all, we weren’t sure Mississippi would have the contractors to consume over $2 billion all at once — and then you also feed inflation itself when you do that … We’re looking longer out how these funds can help infuse the economy, not just in one year.”

Lee said that for water, sewerage and drainage projects there are also huge design, engineering and other professional service costs that come into play. He noted the state’s matching grant program caps what it will cover for those costs at 4% of a project’s total cost. But for water and sewerage and drainage projects, those costs can easily run 8% to 10%.

While the state matching program will cover only 4%, the federal ARPA regulations for money that went directly to local governments doesn’t have that cap. Lee said this could likely mean that for some projects, local governments will have to hold back some of their federal dollars that otherwise could have gotten a 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 match from the state.

“That just means we may not be able to get the full match,” Lee said. “Is it a deal killer? No, of course we can work with that, but I would think for smaller towns that could be an issue.”

Surrette said some county leaders have raised this issue, noting that for large projects, just hiring a consultant to make sure ARPA regs are being followed could run more than 4%. But he said in many cases, local governments have already done engineering and other work in drafting projects. And, he said, a 1-to-1 match on the projects makes such costs a small price to pay.

“A 100-percent grant is almost unheard of,” Surrette said. “We’re more used to 80-percent grants … There’s times to argue and fuss and complain, but maybe not when you’re doubling your money. Plus, (federal) Treasury gave them a lot of flexibility (on direct dollars). I think it’s going to be doable.”

First, ‘catch a rabbit‘

Surrette said perhaps a larger concern — especially for smaller local governments that don’t have large clerical staffs or consultants they regularly use — is making sure all T’s are crossed and I’s dotted on federal spending and project regulations.

Not doing so with federal money, Surrette said, could result in “clawbacks” — the feds wanting the money repaid.

Surrette said that for now, state lawmakers left that work up to the local governments, but he hopes the state might reconsider and perhaps hire staff or consultants that could help local governments. He said some cities and counties might be willing to pay a fee for such help.

Hosemann said such issues could still be addressed by lawmakers, and tweaks made if needed.

“Certainly if that’s an issue they want to bring to the Legislature, we will look at it,” Hosemann said. “Our goal for this money is for it to go into the ground, have an economic impact. We want it done correctly, but we wanted to get moving. The first thing you have to have for a recipe for rabbit stew is to catch a rabbit.”

Simmons said Greenville, like many other cities, has struggled to maintain and upgrade infrastructure and will continue after the ARPA money is used. But he said the program “is a good start for cities and towns to become more competitive,” and he thanked Congress and state’s legislative leaders. All Republican members of Congress voted against the $1.9 trillion ARPA measure.

“We want to thank Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Speaker Philip Gunn for keeping their word to towns and cities,” Simmons said. “… When you strengthen Mississippi’s cities and communities, you strengthen Mississippi. That’s how we grow and thrive as a state.”

The post Cities and counties will soon spend $1 billion in water, sewer upgrades as inflation rises appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The struggles of Black farm workers in the Mississippi Delta losing jobs and being paid lower wages than white guest workers were brought in front of a U.S. congressional committee on Wednesday.

Mississippi attorney Ty Pinkins traveled to the nation’s capital to testify in front of the House Education and Labor Committee, which is examining the H-2A and H-2B farm workers visa programs. The H-2A program was the focus of a recent Mississippi Today investigation that found several farmers misusing it to underpay and push out Black workers from their jobs in favor of workers from South Africa. 

“Despite all the laws and regulations designed to protect American workers against unfair competition, local farm workers in the Delta have been displaced as area farmers each year import more and more foreign workers,” Pinkins testified.

Pinkins, a retired Army officer and son of a Delta farm worker, has worked closely with Black workers fighting discrimination in Delta. He has helped file two discrimination lawsuits against Mississippi farms with more in the pipeline. 

“Absent major changes in the way the H-2A program is administered and its rules enforced, there won’t be another American generation of local Black farm workers in the Delta,” Pinkins told representatives.

Pinkins also referenced Mississippi Today’s extensive reporting during his five-minute testimony. 

READ MORE: Exploited: White Delta farm owners are underpaying and pushing out Black workers

Near the hearing’s end, the focus came back to Mississippi after speakers covered the conditions from Georgia to the Carlonias and California. 

Rep. Mark Takano, a Democrat from California, seemed stunned at the testimony. He had heard of foreign workers being brought in and paid less money than local workers, he said, but not the opposite.

“You’re telling me that these H-2A employers are paying, specifically white South African workers, more than the local Black workforce? Help me understand because it’s obviously not economic reasons,” he said to Pinkins. 

“This doesn’t make sense from a business perspective,” Pinkins said in his response.
“So, the only common denominator here is race.”

Pinkins said following the 90-minute hearing, he was glad he was able to make that point at the end.

In addition to Pinkins, three other experts testified: Daniel Costa, an immigration attorney and researcher with the Economic Policy Institute; Teresa Romero the president of the United Farm Workers; and Leon Sequeira, an attorney who works closely with farm owners and served as an assistant secretary of labor under George W. Bush. 

Wednesday’s hearing had a back-and-forth partisan rhythm, with a clear divide in perspectives on the programs’ issues and the issues facing the farming workforce at large. Republican representatives repeatedly emphasized their concerns over the number of undocumented workers entering the country. 

“President Biden’s border crisis hangs over this hearing,” said Rep. Fred Keller, a Republican from Pennsylvania. “It’s a self-made disaster that is endangering millions and creating a humanitarian crisis. We cannot meaningfully discuss reforming the H-2 programs while our border is wide open and being overrun.” 

The H-2A program is designed to fill gaps in the workforce when farmers cannot find enough U.S. workers to fill seasonal jobs. 

Democrats on Wednesday were concerned about the findings in “Operation Blooming Onion,” which a Georgia U.S. district attorney called “modern-day slavery.” Investigators say a smuggling ring misused the H-2A program to traffic and abuse more than 200 workers from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to work on onion farms.

The problems facing local Delta workers may be different, but are stemming from the same visa program. Mississippi Today’s investigation farms often made no effort to bring back Black workers who had worked previous seasons, preferring the white H-2A workers from South Africa.

READ MORE: U.S. Labor Secretary assures Black Delta workers his office will combat racist hiring practices used by white farmers

In the instances in the Delta, it was the local workers — who are typically Black — being affected negatively through misuse of the program. 

More than 90% of H-2A workers come from Mexico. South Africans make up about 3% of the program, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. 

“These programs do not reflect their intended purpose,” said Rep. Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina, who chairs the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. “Instead, these programs are a relic of slavery. Together we must reform the H-2 visa programs to ensure that all workers are treated with dignity and respect.” 

Sequeira, who handled policy on Bush’s team, spoke to the majority of farms following the program’s rules. He said many of his clients have gotten wrapped up in audits for minor offenses that over burden them. 

Pinkins told Mississippi Today following the hearing that he felt Republican representatives weren’t taking the happenings in the Delta seriously. 

Pinkins pointed to Sequeira’s written testimony, which stated that H-2A employees do not harm U.S. workers. 

“They are basically just blind with regards to detrimental effects the H-2A program is having on Black farm workers in the Delta,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. “They were basically saying, ‘Because a small percentage are misusing the H-2A program, it’s OK. A place like the Mississippi Delta? We don’t care about that small group of farmers.’” 

He said much of the hearing felt like it was diverting away from the central issues. Still, he’s eager to see what the committee determines. 

Rep. Adams ended the hearing by saying she looked forward to working with committee members on future legislation to address worker discrimination and strengthening labor standards.

READ MORE: Here’s how we reported the story of Black farmers losing out on jobs

The post Congress hears about plight of Black Delta farmers featured in Mississippi Today investigation appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The news that Mississippi was revamping its foster care system had reached countless officials, churches and charities across the state before Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Dawn Beam realized: The plan was never going to take root.

It was September of 2018, just weeks after Beam and then-First Lady Deborah Bryant launched the Family First Initiative with a splash. They named the project after federal legislation that could have provided the state an unprecedented boost of funding to help poor families — a law the state had just chosen not to implement.

The federal Family First Prevention Services Act, bipartisan reforms passed by Congress that year, was meant to encourage states to use a proactive approach to dealing with child neglect, which is the cause of more than 3-in-5 family separations and is often the product of poverty. 

The federal government would pump new foster care dollars, or title IV-E funding, into states to use on stabilizing services for biological families, as opposed to on traditional orphanages or group homes.

By mid-2018, when the initiative launched, Mississippi had already begun rapidly reducing the number of children in its custody, which was bloated due to the drug epidemic, by enforcing new standards for separation at the courts. The Family First Initiative, heavily promoted by two now-embattled welfare officials John Davis and Nancy New, would go beyond that, promising more than a change in philosophy.

“We’re going to have the greatest support we’ve ever seen from Washington, D.C., to the Capitol in Jackson,” then-Gov. Phil Bryant said at the July 2018 Family First Summit announcing the state’s new direction in foster care. “We’re going to have the rest of the nation looking at Mississippi and saying, ‘If they can do it there, you can do it anywhere, and they’re doing it better than anyone else.’”

The claim was widely repeated. “State to Be National Model for Keeping Families Together,” reads one Mississippi Public Broadcasting headline at the time.

But the state never submitted such a plan to the federal government, Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services confirmed to Mississippi Today. At the same time, millions of other federal funds the state could have used to serve this mission instead went to the pet projects of politicians or celebrity athletes and enriched their friends and family.

To this day, Mississippi has not participated or pulled down the Family First federal funding. 

Instead, the state continues to use funding from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program — known as “welfare” and the subject of a massive ongoing state and federal investigation — to plug holes at the state’s notoriously underfunded foster care agency.

There’s no data to show how the state met the needs of poor families in order to prevent family separations under this initiative or how the state carries out this mission today. 

When Beam learned that Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, a department under the governor’s office, chose to delay the Family First plan, she sent Bryant a letter.

“You and I both represented to the public at the Family First Summit on July 30, 2018 that Mississippi is going to be a model for putting families first and embracing the Act. Certainly, the Executive Branch of government makes the decisions regarding implementation and timing; however, I have put the credibility of the Court on the line by repeating that Mississippi is embracing the Act all over our State,” she wrote on Sept. 17, 2018. “…this ‘delay in implementation’ is not embracing a new day in Mississippi.”

Beam is an outspoken child welfare advocate who had cleaned up a caseworker backlog in her home county before Bryant appointed her to the Supreme Court in late 2015. She described the governor’s reaction to her letter in one word: “Furious!”

Bryant held a meeting with his judicial appointee.

“He yelled at me in a meeting with Chief Justice Waller and Judge John Hudson present,” Beam told Mississippi Today by text, speaking in an individual capacity and not as a representative of the Supreme Court. “He said, ‘Don’t you know that all letters to my office are subject to a document request.’ I tell the truth and was protecting my own integrity and that of the court so I made no apology.”

That was the moment Beam said she realized the governor’s office was not going to follow through with its commitment. In an April 2022 interview with Mississippi Today, Bryant did not seem to know much about Family First or why his administration rejected the act even though he publicly supported it.

“I cannot imagine they would not have worked diligently to try to get those funds,” Bryant said. “… I don’t know if there were something within that act that we later found out was offensive.”

Bryant’s appointed CPS commissioner at the time, former Justice Jess Dickinson, argued in a 2018 letter against immediately implementing the act, which would have provided the state unlimited dollar-for-dollar matching funds to help families in poverty. Since the agency was already choosing to use federal welfare funds from the Mississippi Department of Human Services to supplement its paltry legislative appropriation, Dickinson said the agency wouldn’t have seen a net financial benefit from the Family First Act. He also had concerns over how pulling down that funding for preventative services would jeopardize the state’s existing federal funding for group homes — most of which wouldn’t qualify under new requirements in the act.

The act forced states to shift financial focus away from group homes and to preventative services, since the point of the federal program was to keep kids with their families and reduce the number of children in orphanages. Dickinson, who argued the state was already achieving this goal, recommended delaying Mississippi’s start date from October 2019 to October 2021, the latest date states were given to comply with the act.

Without structural buy-in, Beam and Deborah Bryant’s initiative did more than fall flat for families in need. 

It also helped provide a guise for the misspending of tens of millions of federal grant funds from the Mississippi Department of Human Services, a distinct yet closely related agency to CPS.

The Family First Initiative, which fell under the Mississippi Commission on Children’s Justice created by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2006, emphasized how it coordinated its efforts despite “virtually no funding.”

But the similarly named Families First for Mississippi, the now disgraced government program run by two private nonprofits, was supposed to serve as the resource arm of the initiative and had as much as $40 million a year in flexible welfare funds from DHS at its disposal. 

A video promoting the Family First Initiative, the unfunded judicial project, highlights the story of a mother named Sherniqua Thedford, who was able to transform her life because of help she received from the state — not from the new initiative but from a DHS case worker within the traditional TANF program.

Then the video cuts to Nancy New, founder of one of the nonprofits running Families First, Mississippi Community Education Center, to which the state was increasingly outsourcing the TANF program.

“It is a true compassionate service that we are offering,” New said, “and we want them to walk into an environment now that they’re not intimidated and I think that’s what they’re seeing through Families First. And it’s already happening. We’re seeing the connecting the dots. That’s what we’re doing so the people of Mississippi can become stronger.”

The overall idea was that poverty is a community problem that can be solved by providing resources — training, child care and tangible items like beds and refrigerators — to parents, instead of pulling children from their homes.

Instead, New’s nonprofit was spending millions on vague contracts for motivational speaking or outreach from famous athletes and their friends, expensive vehicles, investments in a pharmaceutical startup and construction of a volleyball stadium, to name a few. New and her son Zach New pleaded guilty in April to several charges including bribery, fraud and racketeering related to the welfare grants. In a separate civil lawsuit, Nancy New says former Gov. Phil Bryant was just as responsible for the misspending and even directed some of the questionable purchases. Bryant denied this assertion.

Forensic auditors determined at least $77 million was improperly spent during the last four years of Bryant’s administration.

Thedford said Family First organizers told her she was being tapped as a spokesperson for the initiative, but after the luncheon at the Westin Hotel during the 2018 summit, “it was absolutely nothing.”

“They were supposed to get back with me and then all of a sudden I heard the money disappeared,” Thedford said. “I was hearing through the grapevine, ‘We don’t have the funding for it.’ That’s how I heard it at first. But then I heard somebody stole the funds.”

Through the TANF program years ago, Thedford received cash assistance that she said “helped me stay afloat” while her case worker helped her find a job. Thedford said without that assistance, she’d likely still be living in public housing where she started. Today, she’s a branch manager at a bank, solidifying her place in the middle class.

Currently, this program serves about 222 adults in Mississippi.

“For people to just take that away from so many people like me, that’s disturbing. That actually makes you sick to your stomach,” Thedford said. “… The one person that helped me that could have created thousands of people to help thousands of me, for that to be taken away, that is sickening.”

Beam shared a similar sentiment.

“I can’t understand anybody in the state who has a moral bone, when they know that we’re the poorest state in the union, that we have families that are suffering, why they wouldn’t just get up and want to work,” Beam said of social service providers in Mississippi.

The justice spotted trouble early on. 

On Sept. 10, 2018, Beam emailed Nancy New after attending a steering meeting in one of the counties selected to pilot the Family First Initiative. One of the only visible functions of the initiative were the community meetings they held across the state where family court officials, charities, churches and other stakeholders could discuss the needs in their area.

“I was extremely embarrassed tonight at the meeting by the lack of presence in Pearl River County of Families First Services,” Beam wrote. “Although you had two people there the young lady from Harrison County kept talking about all of these services that Families First provides and coalition in that area but no one in Pearl River County Leadership including judges that work every day in it has seen anyone.”

“I was ready to go under the table!!!!!!!!!” Beam added.

Both Nancy New and Mississippi Department of Human Services Director John Davis responded to Beam, explaining that they were still working to expand Families First to all areas of the state. In his response, Davis appealed to Beam’s religious bent. Beam is the daughter of former Mississippi Baptist Convention president and preacher Gene Henderson and sister to Pinelake Baptist Church pastor Chip Henderson.

“My book tells me that the author of confusion is not someone we serve…better still we serve the problem solver,” Davis wrote to Beam.

Davis shared his reply with Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr., a retired WWE wrestler who appeared to be an executive employee of MDHS and sat on Family First Initiative’s advisory council – though he was being paid by New’s nonprofit. He received over $3 million. DiBiase starred in one of the dramatic video advertisements that marketing firm Cirlot Agency was paid hundreds of thousands of welfare dollars to produce.

“Praaaaaiiiiissssee Jesus Wow…” DiBiase responded to Davis’ email, “never in my life have I ever heard so much said without saying much at all. Well put sir.”

The success of both the judicial initiative and the welfare program, multiple sources told Mississippi Today, relied on a sophisticated resource referral and tracking computer system, which would connect families to the services that met their needs and allow the state to follow up with clients and measure outcomes. 

Two days after Beam and Bryant’s heated meeting, Davis told Gov. Bryant in a letter that the welfare department and Families First for Mississippi would have to budget $5 million in TANF funds to develop this system on behalf of the court.

The system could have revolutionized the state’s public safety net, sources say. But the investment – which was the same amount New paid to build a volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi for Brett Favre – never came.

“That (referral tracking system) did not materialize and that’s the most heartbreaking thing,” Beam told Mississippi Today.

The prospective budget Davis sent Bryant also included $600,000 to the Cirlot Agency for marketing and branding, $200,000 annually for each new Families First center in the pilot counties and $20,000 per year for salaries assigned to Justice Beam.

In the public record, Mississippi Today found no written response to this letter.

Beam told Mississippi Today she had never seen this budget breakdown. And while the justice employed two people under the court to run the Family First Initiative, Beam said she never received funding from MDHS to pay her staffers’ salaries.

Davis also wrote that Families First for Mississippi was providing other services to aid the initiative and that each service “has associated costs.”

“We very much appreciate the courts (sic) involvement and need it to be successful in reaching all the families and children who need these services,” Davis wrote. “Currently the policy is being directed by the Executive Branch. However, if the Supreme Courts initiative remains on the course it has chosen, there could be decisions which cross the Judicial and Executive Branch lines.”

One reason it appears the state chose to use TANF funding instead of pulling down new foster care funding, is that Family First Act funding requires a new state match, whereas using TANF did not.

“On the one hand, there isn’t a financial incentive to opt into this paradigm because of the need to invest more state dollars;” a child welfare policy expert said in a 2018 email to a Bryant staffer, “on the other, accessing the federal funds for the front-end work would allow TANF to be repurposed for something else.”

The expert also noted that the TANF funds necessary to build the computer system hadn’t been allocated and asked for an explanation. There was no response to this email within the archived file containing Family First records.

Mississippi used $20.1 million of its TANF dollars on child welfare in 2018, $27.1 million in 2019 and $21.8 million in 2020, according to the state’s reporting to the federal government. A spokesperson for Child Protection Services told Mississippi Today that the agency had received $35 million in TANF to “fill ‘budget holes’” in 2021 and that it currently receives up to $30 million in TANF annually, representing 20% of its budget. TANF spending on grants to nonprofits has significantly declined since the scandal, resulting in an unused balance of nearly $50 million in federal funds, according to the most recent available reports.

Beyond the tension over how the initiative would be financially supported, there was another problem: people were confusing the Family First Initiative and Families First for Mississippi, not just because of their similar names and overlapping leaders, but because the company hired to market both groups, Cirlot Agency, used the same logo for each project. 

From the beginning, Beam expressed concern over how Cirlot, which was recording meetings and producing dazzling videos for the initiative, was being compensated. 

Davis responded that the state agency had an “ongoing work relationship” with Cirlot and that his deputy would check to ensure “everything is properly procured and in-line with all funding stream requirements.”

But it wasn’t, auditors found.

A state audit released almost two years later revealed that New’s nonprofit improperly paid Cirlot Agency a whopping $1.7 million for various branding and planning work, including $300,000 for materials it developed for Beam’s judicial initiative. Federal regulations prohibit states from using welfare money on many of these services, the audit states. Cirlot continues to partner with the state in its programs for children.

“We don’t think we did a thing wrong and did everything according to how we were contracted to do it,” Cirlot CEO Liza Cirlot Looser told Mississippi Today.

Looser said her company was not aware of the source of the funds. Officials have not accused Cirlot of any wrongdoing or instructed Cirlot to return the funds.

On Dec. 16, 2018, Cirlot Agency President Rick Looser met with Beam to recommend she change the name of her initiative to something else, in part because of the similarity to the program run by Nancy New. Beam, bothered by what had occurred, described her demeanor in the meeting as quiet and reserved.

Rick Looser told Mississippi Today that Beam never followed up with Cirlot to move forward with the rebranding and that it was their last meeting. The company did no more work for the initiative after that, Looser said.

For the rest of the initiative’s first year, little took place, Beam said.

The justice said that as she became uncomfortable with the insincerity of the mission, she began to back away from the initiative. 

In July of 2019, Cindy Cheeks, the court’s coordinator for the initiative, sent an email with a link to the Family First annual report to dozens of stakeholders, such as Phil Bryant’s then-chief of staff Joey Songy, state agency and nonprofit employees, church officials and judges.

The initiative had struggled to demonstrate a consistent objective or measure its impact.

A court press release announcing the launch of the initiative had explained plainly: “If children are sleeping on the floor, someone out there has beds to donate. If the house is dirty, would a group of church volunteers be willing to help clean it?”

But the annual report does not provide any examples in which the initiative facilitated a person in poverty receiving a bed or having their home cleaned.

In the report, the initiative does take credit for the pilot counties that expanded free legal services or provided child care assistance to parents receiving a GED, for example, but it did not provide specifics about how the pilots propped up or paid for the programs, how the services differed from what they would have already provided independent of the initiative, or what the outcomes were.

The annual report contains no data about how many people the initiative assisted and offers only one anecdote about an actual person it helped: members of the initiative coordinated to repair the home of a disabled veteran after a storm.

Beam had a hard time offering her own specific examples of families the initiative assisted: “I’m not on the ground floor,” she said.

“The work that we have done is just because of good Mississippians stepping up,” Beam later added. “Because great stuff is going on, but if we had the resources that Mississippi was entitled to, there’s no telling what we could do.”

When Mississippi Today recently asked Cheeks, the initiative’s full-time coordinator, what the Family First Initiative accomplished, she answered, “What we did, which you know that was very centered around the courts, and then when COVID hit, it shut down a little bit of our operations, but something that we learned through that initiative is that it’s so important to have local resources identified for your different children intercepts — courts, schools. And so, we had eight pilot counties that built coalitions and we learned the effectiveness of coalitions in preventing the removal of children unnecessarily due to neglect.”

The initiative’s 2019 annual report said that 2020 would be the year of full implementation and in 2021, they would evaluate effectiveness of the services.

“We are excited about this great foundational first year and looking forward to year 2 to come,” Cheeks wrote in her 2019 email.

But there wouldn’t be a second year. By then, the auditor’s office had begun an investigation into Davis and his management of the welfare program, which would lead to what officials call the largest public embezzlement case in state history. 

The Family First Initiative quietly dissolved.

Like the now-defunct Families First for Mississippi program – which handed out glossy brochures advertising services that, in some cases, it didn’t even offer – the Family First Initiative ended up being more of a marketing campaign than a true disruption of the cycle of poverty.

“For too long we talk about problems but we don’t really address them, and today we are saying that we are going to put our families first,” Beam told SuperTalk talk show host Paul Gallo during a broadcast of the 2018 summit. 

“Please pay attention,” Gallo told his listeners, “because number one, this will change lives. It’s a new initiative that Justice Beam has been working on, and other folks, First Lady, the governor.”

In an interview on the same day with New and Davis, Gallo quipped, “Sometimes it just takes people like Nancy New and John Davis … to say we’re not going to do this anymore. We’re going to take the lead on this.”

Since then, state prosecutors have nabbed both New and Davis on charges including bribery and fraud — New reached a plea deal while Davis is still pleading not guilty — and they each face potential prison time.

By the end of 2020, the number of children in state custody had dropped by about a third, from 5,872 in December of 2017 to 3,738 in December of 2020. With a caseload of 3,888 in June of 2022, the size of the foster care population has been relatively unchanged since 2020 and experts say will only grow following the state’s new ban on almost all abortions.

Today, the child welfare agency is benefitting from a cash infusion made possible by pandemic relief funds. But neither state agency leaders nor lawmakers have indicated any plans to stop using TANF dollars to shore up Child Protection Services’ budget in the long term.

Meanwhile, the welfare program continues to dwindle. Since the scandal broke, the number of needy families receiving cash assistance, the first tenet of the TANF program, remains on the decline, while Mississippi Department of Human Services has also provided far fewer grants to service providers, building up a unused balance of federal TANF funds in the tens of millions, according to the latest available federal data.

The Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, now overseen by Commissioner Andrea Sanders, is also still failing to meet settlement requirements within a long running lawsuit over the state’s foster care system, in which plaintiffs say the state failed to protect kids in its custody. 

The agency says it is working on submitting a Family First Act plan that will meet the criteria for pulling down new federal funding, an agency spokesperson told Mississippi Today.

“Beginning her tenure a little over a year ago, Commissioner Sanders discovered that (Family First) plan submission is beneficial to Mississippi families and children and has tasked her team with drafting a comprehensive plan,” an agency statement reads. “Our agency is intentionally developing a plan that focuses on more proactive prevention of child abuse while prioritizing child safety.”

The post Inside Mississippi’s false promise of putting the Family First appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office and a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Oxford are now providing “additional resources and assistance where needed” in the search for Jimmie “Jay” Lee, a 20-year-old University of Mississippi Student who has been missing for 12 days.

That’s according to an update Tuesday afternoon from the Oxford Police Department, which is putting out statements on behalf of all the agencies involved in the investigation. 

The department’s update does not say when, specifically, the FBI and the AG’s office became involved in the search for Lee. Police officials did not respond to Mississippi Today’s inquiry by press time, and a spokesperson for the AG said the office doesn’t comment on open investigations.

In the statement, Oxford police also said that officers have conducted more “physical area searches,” obtained and reviewed “additional video footage” and are reviewing data that has been returned from digital warrants. 

It’s not unusual for local police to call on state and federal authorities to provide more resources in missing persons cases, but experts and law enforcement standards emphasize the importance of swiftness. This is for several reasons, including to preserve evidence and protect the missing person from imminent danger.

Lee, a Black student who is well-known in Oxford’s LGBTQ community, was last seen sitting in his car at Campus Walk Apartments, where he lived, on Friday, July 8, at 5:58 a.m. He was wearing a silver robe or housecoat, a gold cap, and gray slippers. 

He was reported missing later that day at 8:28 p.m. to the University of Mississippi Police Department. An officer conducted a welfare check at Campus Walk Apartments, where Lee lived, but there was “negative contact,” according to UMPD’s incident report obtained by Mississippi Today.

Oxford police started working on the case two days later, according to the department’s incident report. The first page of OPD’s report, which was created on July 10 at 11:59 p.m., contains little information about the investigation and says only that “Detective MIke (sic) Burks, was assigned to investigate a missing person case handed over from the University Police Department.” 

Mississippi’s public records law gives police departments broad discretion to redact or withhold any information “that would impede the public body’s enforcement, investigative or detection efforts.” 

Shelby Hernandez, the records custodian for the Oxford Police department, said the first page of the incident report is the only part that is publicly available “considering everything that’s going on.” 

The day after Oxford police started working on Lee’s case, officers found his car in the impound lot of a local towing company called Bandit Towing that services Molly Barr Trails, a student housing complex. Bandit Towing had taken Lee’s car from Molly Barr Trails in the afternoon of July 8. 

At Molly Barr Trails, multiple residents told Mississippi Today that police visited the beige complex in northeast Oxford several times in the week after Lee went missing. Residents say officers have knocked on their doors or stopped them in the parking lot to ask if they’d seen Lee. 

On Wednesday, July 13, Desoto County sheriff’s deputies walked K-9 dogs through the complex, multiple residents said. Officers also used what appeared to be a black light to search a unit. 

Some residents told Mississippi Today they feel unsafe at Molly Barr Trails. Some residents told Mississippi Today they feel unsafe at Molly Barr Trails and that the investigation seems to be moving slowly. One resident said he feels “like more could be done.” 

“Oxford is so small – everybody know everybody around here,” said a resident named Chuck Scott.

Crimestoppers, a nonprofit that supports law enforcement, has pledged a $1,000 reward for finding Lee. Lee’s family is offering a $5,000 reward. 

Lee was spending the summer in Oxford finishing his bachelor’s degree in social work. He is already accepted into UM’s masters program in social work and is scheduled to start this fall. 

The day he went missing, Lee was supposed to go to a donation drive for baby formula that he organized as part of a summer internship with the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services in Lafayette County. 

A rally is planned for Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Circle on University of Mississippi’s campus. There will be “group prayer, speeches, bubbles and lighting tea candles to illuminate Jay’s way home,” according to a flyer. 

The post FBI, Attorney General now assisting in search for missing Ole Miss student Jay Lee appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Editor’s note: On July 30, the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame inducts its Class of 2022. What follows is Part II of a series detailing the achievements of the eight inductees, today featuring Mississippi State and NFL standout Eric Moulds.

Jackie Sherrill recruited and coached many, many splendidly gifted athletes in his stints at Pittsburgh, Texas A&M and Mississippi State.

Lucedale’s Eric Moulds, soon to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame, Sherrill says, was the best of all.

“Size, speed, maturity and football knowledge, Eric Moulds had it all,” Sherrill said. “I was fortunate to have some great ones who had many years in the NFL, but Eric was the best overall. He won so many games for his teams, first at State and then at Buffalo in the NFL.”

As a player, Moulds stood 6 feet, 2 inches and packed 225 pounds of muscle. He ran with the speed of a world class sprinter. Playing on predominantly running teams at State from 1993 until 1995, he caught 117 passes for 2,022 yards (just over 17 yards per catch).

He also excelled as a kick returner, leading the nation in kickoff returns in 1994 with 33 yards per return. We can only imagine what it was like to speed down the field, covering kickoffs, and see a muscular 225-pounder coming at you, carrying the football, at world class speed.

That speed/size quotient, along with sure hands, made him a first round draft choice of the Buffalo Bills, for whom he played 10 of his 12 NFL seasons. For his pro football career, he caught 764 passes for 9,995 yards and 49 touchdowns. He was a much-feared deep threat, once averaging more than 20 yards per catch for an entire season. Another remarkable statistic: 475 of his 764 NFL catches resulted in a first down.

He made the All-Rookie team in 1996 and played in three Pro Bowls later in his career. Twice, he was named All-Pro. None of those awards, Moulds says, compares to his being voted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.

“When you look at all the great athletes who are from Mississippi, it just makes you so proud, man,” Moulds said. “There are about 300 people in the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and now I am going to be part of that.”

Moulds said he is well aware that Mississippi leads the nation per capita in producing both NFL players and Pro Football Hall of Famers. “And it’s not just the guys who were born in Mississippi either,” Moulds said. “I’ve run into so many guys around the league whose roots are in Mississippi, guys like Charles Woodson and Larry Fitzgerald. Woodson’s people were from Picayune, Fitzgerald’s from Natchez. It’s amazing. I’m proud to be part of that.”

These days, the 49-year-old Moulds lives in Charlotte where he has a training facility and works with athletes from high school to the NFL. Among the players he trains now is another Lucedale native, Ty Tryfogle, who played his college football at Indiana and who Moulds believes is about to make a splash for the Dallas Cowboys as an undrafted free agent.

Moulds says he enjoys working with younger players because it keeps him close to the game he loves.

“There’s a lot about football I don’t miss, but I miss the camaraderie of the locker room and the relationships you have with your teammates,” Moulds says. “My business still connects me to that. I enjoy it.”

Moulds says he and many of his former Mississippi State teammates stay in touch, and he remains close to Sherrill. “Coach Sherrill was a players’ coach,” Moulds says. “He had a couple of simple rules – be on time and never wear a cap or hat inside – and other than that, he expected you to take care of your business.”

Clearly, Moulds took care of his.

•••

The 2022 Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Induction Class includes Moulds, world swimming champion Maggie Bowen-Hanna, basketball coach Kermit Davis, Sr., baseball standouts Barry Lyons and David Dellucci, golf champion Jim Gallagher Jr., football star Eric Moulds, and football coaches Bob Tyler and Willis Wright.

Part I: Maggie Bowen-Hanna.

For MSHOF Induction Weekend event and ticket information, click here. 

The post Jackie Sherrill coached many greats, but says Eric Moulds was his best appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Dr. Nina Ragunanthan wonders exactly how long she’s supposed to watch a miscarrying woman bleed before Mississippi law permits her to perform an abortion. 

The OB/GYN in the Delta worries that the state’s new laws — banning abortion “except in the case where necessary for the preservation of the mother’s life or where the pregnancy was caused by rape” — could force doctors to wait for patients to deteriorate before providing life-saving care. She wonders: Who decides when the patient’s life is in danger, and how imminent does the danger have to be? 

“Does it have to be that she’s going to die in 30 minutes if we don’t do this?” said Ragunanthan, who spoke to Mississippi Today in an individual capacity and not representing her employer. “That she’s at risk of dying within 24 hours? How much are we going to let her bleed? Do we have to wait until she needs a blood transfusion, start transfusing the blood, then do an abortion? … Am I going to be at legal risk for saving someone’s life if a court decides the risk to life wasn’t imminent enough to justify (an abortion)?”

These questions — and many others — haven’t been answered by state officials, law enforcement officers, hospital leadership or judges. And some OB/GYNs worry the lack of clarity will have a chilling effect on physicians who will either delay or refuse to perform abortions for fear of legal repercussions. If a doctor’s decision is challenged and they wind up on trial for performing an allegedly illegal abortion, they face up to 10 years in prison. 

Two of the health care workers interviewed by Mississippi Today spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear backlash or even legal scrutiny for discussing a highly sensitive topic. 

Marc Rolph, a spokesman for the University of Mississippi Medical Center, said the hospital won’t comment on any questions related to the state’s new abortion laws and how its doctors will implement them. UMMC is home to the state’s largest group of maternal-fetal medicine subspecialists, and OB/GYNs around the state, like Ragunanthan, frequently refer patients with high-risk pregnancies there. Some UMMC doctors reached by Mississippi Today said they had been instructed not to speak to media about anything related to abortion.

None of the medical professionals interviewed by Mississippi Today said they had received any guidance from their employers as to how to interpret the new laws. 

“Have I read a sheet of paper that tells me what to do in the middle of the night when I’m on call?” one Jackson-area OB/GYN said. “No, there’s not that. You’re probably going to need approval if you’re facing a difficult decision, particularly with the exceptions in the law.” 

Mississippi Department of Health spokeswoman Liz Sharlot said the agency could not answer any questions dealing with the impact of the state’s abortion laws in the wake of the Dobbs ruling. She referred questions to the Attorney General’s office, though on Tuesday all pending litigation ended when the state’s last abortion clinic dropped its lawsuit that sought to prevent the ban from taking effect.

Questions sent to the office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who argued on the state’s behalf that the U.S. Supreme Court overturn Roe, were not answered.

The Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure executive director Dr. Kenneth Cleveland said the board does not currently have plans to issue any statements about abortion issues in Mississippi. The board has the authority to investigate physicians and revoke their licenses for performing illegal abortions. 

Anti-abortion advocates, lawmakers and some doctors say that the exception gives physicians the discretion to determine when an abortion is necessary. They point out that most of the roughly 2,500 abortions performed annually in Mississippi prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were elective. They say that doctors already regularly make weighty choices in high-pressure situations.

“I don’t see that these decisions have changed with this law,” said Dr. Geri Weiland, president of the Mississippi State Medical Association and a Vicksburg pediatrician. “I really don’t. I think the decisions have always been difficult.”

Dr. Terry McMillin, an OB/GYN in Greenwood, describes himself as pro-life. He doesn’t foresee the new abortion restrictions changing his practice at all. This week, he removed an ectopic pregnancy just as he always has, with no extra calls to attorneys or administrators. 

He generally refers patients with high-risk pregnancies to UMMC early on. In other complex situations, like labor beginning before viability, he counsels patients about what to expect and monitors them carefully for signs of danger. Those situations, and others where an abortion could be necessary to save the pregnant person’s life, are rare, he said.

“A lot of times I’m gonna put it in the hands of the creator, because I believe there is a God, and I believe in the providence of God, that everything happens for a reason and that he’s in control of it all, so I think we should give life a chance, if we can,” he said. 

Richard Roberson, vice president of state policy at the Mississippi Hospital Association, said the organization had been fielding questions from members about compliance with the new laws, but that decisions will largely be made by medical staff on a case-by-case basis. Clarification from lawmakers or through the courts would be helpful, he said. 

“It’s hard to issue specific guidance on a very non-specific law,” he said, referring to what hospital administrators might be able to provide their staff at this point. 

Even so, he doesn’t expect doctors or patients to be at risk of legal or medical consequences: Physicians have always sought to protect maternal and fetal health in complicated situations, and he doesn’t see that changing. 

But some doctors aren’t reassured. 

The Jackson-area OB/GYN said that life-threatening conditions during pregnancy often occur on a spectrum and can develop over time; they’re not always an obvious catastrophe like an ectopic pregnancy that could rupture and cause internal bleeding. For example, a patient with serious pre-existing heart problems will likely be stable early in a pregnancy but have a high risk of developing life-threatening symptoms as the pregnancy progresses. 

Before, the doctor routinely presented the option of early termination. Now, the OB/GYN said, “that discussion has been taken out of our hands as clinicians.”

“There’s a huge gray zone which leaves people at risk and providers possibly confused,” she said.

Doctors also expect that even though the law permits abortions in cases of rape, no one in the state will be willing to do the procedure under those circumstances, fearing potential prison time or costly lawsuits. 

“I don’t think people in Mississippi can have comfort around, ‘Oh, if I’m raped, I will have access,’” the Jackson-area OB/GYN said. “You probably won’t. You’ll have to find someone to do it that includes a hospital with the whole team there supporting that, and that’s much more difficult.”

The people who wrote the laws that now dictate decisions in every hospital around the state don’t seem to understand pregnancy, doctors told Mississippi Today.

“The situation is far too complex for a statute,” said one women’s health care provider. “It needs to be between the doctor and the patient.”

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization was for years the only facility in the state that provided elective abortions. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, Mississippi doctors generally sent patients there or to clinics in other states for non-emergency procedures. 

In emergencies, however, doctors at hospitals around the state have terminated pregnancies to protect their patients. Though the law still technically permits that, the language “in the case where necessary for the preservation of the mother’s life” isn’t a clear medical standard. 

Mississippi OB/GYNs interviewed by Mississippi Today listed a range of scenarios in which a patient’s life is clearly at risk, but maybe not enough risk to pass muster under the law.

Up to about 30% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, and some people experience heavy bleeding. One potential treatment is a dilation & curettage (D&C) to remove the tissue from the uterus. Ragunanthan said that if the fetus still has cardiac activity, the procedure is an abortion, though there’s no chance of a live birth. Facing legal uncertainty, Ragunanthan worries doctors may stand by as the patient bleeds and potentially requires a blood transfusion. 

In other states, miscarrying people have already reported being denied care and sent home to wait.

“I work in a rural hospital where – it’s not like a major trauma center, we don’t have a huge blood bank, and so things like that scare me,” Ragunanthan said. 

She described another scenario: If a woman’s water breaks before viability, which occurs around 24 weeks of pregnancy, the fetus has a very low chance of survival because its lungs cannot develop without amniotic fluid. The woman then has a high risk of infection, but the fetus may still have cardiac activity. 

As part of the ongoing legal battle over Louisiana’s trigger ban, a New Orleans doctor filed an affidavit describing how after a patient’s water broke at 16 weeks, the doctor planned to perform a dilation and evacuation (D&E) to end the nonviable pregnancy. Then her hospital’s lawyers told her that wasn’t legal. 

Louisiana’s ban – which had briefly gone into effect before a judge issued a temporary restraining order while the court challenge plays out – includes an exemption for “medically futile” pregnancies that could apply in such cases (though the state health department has not issued a list explaining what situations that includes). Mississippi’s law has no such exemption.

“What are you supposed to do?” Ragunanthan said. “Are you supposed to wait until she becomes infected? … Do you have to wait until it gets into the bloodstream?”

For people with pulmonary hypertension, becoming pregnant carries a roughly 30 to 56% risk of death. The women’s health care provider who spoke to Mississippi Today said she wasn’t sure what the law would permit in such a case.

“It feels like to me, the laws are written for – ‘Well, there’s that chance that everything will be OK,’” she said. “A lot of times it’s just not.”

The Jackson-area OB/GYN said she thinks the onus to explain how to apply the new laws at the bedside falls on lawmakers, regulators and law enforcement. 

“I need their help on what they will choose to prosecute and what they won’t,” she said

So far, none of them have offered any guidance, though two Mississippi DAs have said they won’t prosecute people for abortions.

Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, principal author of the trigger ban, said he thinks doctors will do what they need to do to save a patient’s life. If a doctor’s decision is called into question and criminally investigated, he said he expects they would have documentation to show they had acted in accordance with the law. 

“I mean, I didn’t go to med school, so I’m not going to sit here and armchair quarterback what a bunch of OB/GYNs will be deciding, whether this specific case is sufficient to qualify,” he said. “That’s why we meet every session. We can certainly revisit that law and add more flesh to the bone.”

Weiland, the head of the state medical association, said she doesn’t expect to see doctors being investigated and prosecuted for making good-faith decisions. 

“Mississippians are very fair people,” she said. “I don’t see the state supporting doctors being prosecuted for doing what we’ve been doing, taking care of moms and complications of pregnancies forever. That’s what we do … Maybe I’m being too optimistic about it. But I personally don’t see that being something that’s supported by this law.”

Mississippi Today community health editor Kate Royals contributed to this story.

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