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Faculty at Mississippi universities will see pay raises this coming school year, after the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved increased spending on salaries at the regular board meeting Thursday. 

The raises comes as IHL is pursuing pay increases for professors over the next several years, with the goal of bringing salaries to the regional average. Ultimately, the decision of how to spend this additional money, whether through increasing existing faculty pay or hiring additional people, is up to each university.

“The Board has authorized higher salary spending,” said IHL spokesperson Caron Blanton via email. “Whether and how much of that will actually be spent is up to the universities.”

At the IHL board meeting on Thursday, John Pearce, associate commissioner for finance, said IHL appropriated about $57 million for pay raises, which he estimated could amount to an average 4.6% salary increase for faculty at the eight universities.

Last year, Pearce said faculty received an average 2.5% salary increase. 

The funding increases are part of IHL’s six-year plan to bring faculty salaries in line with neighboring states, Pearce said at the meeting. To that end, the IHL will be asking the Legislature for a 6.4% increase in the upcoming fiscal year. 

At the meeting, Alfred Rankins, the IHL commissioner, said he appreciated lawmakers for allocating enough funds to make the pay increase possible. 

“I want to take this opportunity to thank our Legislature for appropriating additional funds to help increase salaries for our faculty and staff on our campuses,” said IHL Commissioner Alfred Rankins. 

Faculty at Mississippi universities are paid far less than their peers in neighboring states. The most recent data from Southern Regional Education Board shows that in 2020, the average salary of faculty at universities with the most doctoral programs was $99,100, while in Mississippi, it was $78,600, the lowest in the region. 

When comparing with faculty salaries for similar universities in neighboring states, the average salary is at least $10,000 more in every state.

Pearce presented this data on Mississippi’s  universities with the most doctoral programs, Mississippi State University, University of Mississippi, and the University of Southern Mississippi, at the board meeting. They focused on these institutions since 80% of faculty in Mississippi teach these three schools.

After the meeting, Blanton provided additional data on comparative salaries for the other Mississippi universities. Jackson State University, where faculty make an average of $63,800, ranks second to last compared to its peers and is also about $10,000 behind most neighboring states. The remaining universities — Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Mississippi University for Women, and Mississippi Valley State University — also rank last in their category, but are closer to some neighboring states. The average faculty salary at those universities is $56,500.   

The comparatively low salaries of professors in Mississippi have made it difficult for universities in the state to recruit and retain faculty. This is an issue at every university in Mississippi, but in general, the regional universities struggle to stay competitive more than the top-tier research universities. 

The highest faculty salaries in Mississippi are offered at the University of Mississippi, where the average tenured professor made about $115,000 during the 2020-21 school year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. (The salary data from IPEDS includes the University of Mississippi Medical Center.) 

The average tenured professor at Mississippi Valley State University made about $64,000, the lowest salary at a state university. 

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The 3rd Congressional District runoff between U.S. Rep. Michael Guest and upstart candidate Michael Cassidy has devolved into a bitter affair featuring attack ads, name-calling and pointed questions about who is a true Republican.

For a few hours after it became apparent last week that upstart candidate Cassidy had garnered the most votes in the 3rd District U.S. House seat and had forced a June 28 runoff against incumbent Guest, policy — not politics — appeared the focus.

The Cassidy campaign sent out a news release the day after Election Day touting his “improved pro family policy,” a $10,000 per child federal tax deduction “for working families not currently receiving government assistance.”

But as the candidates and their supporters maneuver ahead of the June 28 runoff, focus is not on the child tax deduction nor any other policy. The two sides are slamming each other with negative attacks — including support for the child care policy.

PODCAST: Mississippi’s high-profile congressional runoffs

The Congressional Leadership Fund, an influential national super PAC dedicated to electing Republicans to Congress that has close ties to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, has rushed to Guest’s side with a TV ad attacking Cassidy for his support of costly programs, such as Medicare for all health care and a $20,000 payment for newlyweds.

“Another lying RINO,” the ad said, referring to the oft-used attack term that stands for “Republican In No Only.” The ad continues: “Michael Cassidy is hiding his socialist agenda.”

Cassidy, who says he will caucus with the ultra Conservative Freedom Caucus if elected to the U.S. House, has called Guest the “RINO.”

Cassidy, a former Navy fighter pilot, has said on his campaign website he supported what he thought would be the same health care for all Americans as what members of the military have.

“Within a week or two, I determined that this would cost too much money and that there were more conservative options, such as tort reform and allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines,” Cassidy said in response to the charge of him supporting Medicare for All. “I never raised this issue on the campaign trail or in any ads, literature or mail we sent out.”

U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi also is joining the fray in defense of Guest. According to the Federal Election Commission website, Hyde-Smith’s Mississippi Victory PAC is spending $6,800 in opposition of Cassidy.

And, of course, the candidates are attacking each other in dueling ads. Cassidy blasted Guest for joining Democratic President Joe Biden in sending funds to Ukraine to combat Russia’s attacks.

“Ukraine is not in our national interest, but fighting inflation and illegal immigration are,” the Cassidy ad said.

A Guest ad countered, “Mississippi doesn’t need a carpetbagger. It needs a conservative. A conservative like Michael Guest.”

The ad references that Cassidy is from out of state.  He moved to Meridian as part of his Navy military commitment and registered to vote in the state last year, according to the Guest ad.

Both sides are hitting each other with other charges as they campaign for the runoff on June 28. The runoff is needed because neither candidate garnered a majority in the June 7 Republican primary.

All registered voters in the 3rd District who did not vote in the June 7 Democratic primary will be eligible to cast a ballot in the runoff.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated when Cassidy’s health care proposal was removed from his website.

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Operation Shoestring has been providing after school and summer activities to children in Jackson for decades  – but this year, they’re doing things a bit differently.

The new undertaking is called “Project Rise,” and activities focused on physical and mental health are peppered throughout the summer. That includes integrating conversations about wellness into camp activities such as academic enrichment, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) activities, outdoor sports, swim classes and mentoring programs.

This year’s camp is serving about 125 third through fifth graders over a six-week period – free of charge.

Its programs during the summer and school year support kids in the Jackson Public School system and metro area. Students in Jackson are mostly from low-income families of color: 95% of students are Black, and 73.8% of students are on free or reduced lunch. 

For Laquinta Williams, the camp has been a tremendous help for her family. Williams is a single working mother of Markeem and Akirahs, students at Walton Elementary School who also attend Operation Shoestring’s summer programs. 

She believes the summer programming is especially important for her son Markeem, whose father recently passed away. 

“He likes to talk to them, and he doesn’t usually like to talk to people,” she said of the camp staffers. “He feels comfortable with them.” 

She also said the camp helps her to be able to work.

“It’s a lot of money raising children with no help,” she said. “ … We appreciate everything. This is the best service we have had hands down. They even offer us breakfast when we drop our kids off.” 

Supporting children is difficult to do alone, she said, and in past summers she’s paid for other summer camps and activities. The free activities at Operation Shoestring mean she doesn’t have that extra expense this year. 

Robert Langford, executive director of Operation Shoestring, said that the pressures that the COVID-19 pandemic had on communities of color, compounded by the immense stress caused by the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 and the ensuing social justice movement, created an urgent need within families across the country – especially in the Jackson community. 

Recent research shows that young people’s depressive and anxiety symptoms have doubled during the pandemic, with 25% of youth experiencing depressive symptoms and 20% experiencing anxiety symptoms. 

Suicide rates among Black children were increasing even before the pandemic, and Black children are now almost twice as likely to die by suicide than white children, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. And children from low-income families are two to three times more likely to develop mental health disorders than those who are from higher income families – a startling statistic for a state like Mississippi, where around 30% of its children are poor.

To respond to the need for mental health support, Operation Shoestring weaves “positive, affirming language” into its classrooms and activities, as well as focusing on physical health and wellness, Langford said. 

The organization has partnered with a dietitian from the University of Mississippi Medical Center to illustrate the importance of nutrition in overall wellness, such as conducting cooking and nutrition classes and creating healthy recipes. 

Kids at camp will also partake in a baking class at Urban Foxes, a local family-owned pie shop. 

Langford said that Operation Shoestring values being able to provide students the ability to explore outdoor spaces, which they do through partnerships with St. Andrew’s Episcopal School and the Pearl River Keepers, an organization that works to protect the biodiversity of the Pearl River through cleanups and water testing and monitoring. 

At St. Andrew’s, students are encouraged to engage in different activities, such as basketball, soccer or wellness classes. 

During a wellness class on Monday, Lauren Powell, the school’s director of wellness and upper school counselor, had the children reflect on what it means to practice wellness and to be mindful – including laughter, physical activity, dancing and positive affirmations. Students then created a drawing that incorporated five to six positive characteristics about themselves, such as brave, curious, intelligent and kind. 

Students enjoy doing the cupid shuffle and other dances to wake themselves up and get ready before any other activities, she said, and the dances set the tone for the campers to be more self-expressive. 

Powell said she enjoys working with this age group because they’re able to express their emotions without embarrassment. 

When asked how to deal with children who may come from different backgrounds, Powell explained that St. Andrew’s employs something called “asset framing,” a way of enabling children to first be defined by their assets and aspirations before their challenges or deficits. 

“These kids come from very rich cultures, and very, very rich family traditions,” she said. 

Operation Shoestring is also continuing its tradition of offering support to campers’ parents. It provided cash support to families in need during the height of the pandemic and is now hosting two separate support group sessions for parents, one in Cultivation Food Hall and the other in the Ecoshed.  

“We really are about figuring out how we can build a world that is equitable for everybody. And we have a special responsibility in Mississippi because of our past to do what we can with what we have where we are,” said Langford. “So we see ourselves as an organization, as a place to provide direct services and to broker relationships with other people for building a healthier, more just, more compassionate world.” 

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GRAMMY® -nominated country singer/songwriter and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Rivers Rutherford will visit GRAMMY Museum® Mississippi on Monday, July 11, as the featured guest for the next installment of the Museum’s Words & Music: A Songwriter Series. The event will feature an evening of music and conversation with Rutherford, who has penned hits for artists, such as Brooks & Dunn, Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, Dolly Parton, and Gretchen Wilson, among many others. 

 “We are so thrilled to welcome country music icon Rivers Rutherford to our museum for a special evening of music and performance,” said Emily Havens, Executive Director of GRAMMY Museum Mississippi. “Rivers has written hit songs for a remarkable number of artists and is a talented singer in his own right, and we’re looking forward to having him here to share his music and stories of his career.” 

Words & Music: Rivers Rutherford will take place on July 11 at 7 p.m. in the Sanders Soundstage. Tickets are $15 for GRAMMY Museum Mississippi Members and $20 for non-members. Tickets are currently on sale at grammymuseumms.org. 

Growing up in the shadow of Elvis Presley’s Graceland homestead in Memphis, soulful storyteller Rivers Rutherford came out of the gates swinging at 21 years old, landing his first cut with American legends Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson (aka The Highwaymen). What followed were a dozen No. 1 hits, multiple GRAMMYs^®, CMA and ACM nominations, and over 20 ASCAP awards, including both of the coveted awards for Country Song Of The Year and Songwriter Of The Year, all of which have firmly established Rutherford’s position within the upper echelon of Nashville’s most lauded songwriters.

You’ll see Rivers’ name on No. 1 songs by Rodney Atkins, Trace Atkins, Brooks & Dunn, Kenny Chesney, Faith Hill, Montgomery Gentry, Toby Keith, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, Dolly Parton, and Gretchen Wilson. Rivers has also enjoyed success with country giants such as Lady A, Gary Allan, George Jones, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, Hank Williams Jr., and many others.

Currently signed to Verse 2 Music, Rivers continues to write with and for the biggest names in country music and in 2019 he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

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The Mississippi State Board of Education on Thursday began the process of returning the Tunica County School District in 2024.

Tunica was placed under state control through the “District of Transformation” model in 2015, after an audit found “serious deficiencies” in special education, federal programs, instructional programs, career technical education and district governance, according to the Mississippi Department of Education. Margie Pulley was named interim superintendent when the takeover occurred.

Schools are placed in the this model when two state entities, the Commission on School Accreditation and Board of Education, both declare an extreme emergency situation exists in a district and the governor subsequently signs a declaration of a state of emergency. The districts lose their school boards and are instead overseen by the state Board of Education. The state board also replaces the acting superintendent with a new one of its choosing. 

The state has taken over school districts 21 times since 1996. Currently, the Noxubee County School District and Holmes County School District are under state control in this model, and the Yazoo City and Humphreys County school districts are under state control in the Achievement School District. The ASD is similar but places schools under state control for poor academic performance, whereas the District of Transformation model is for districts with accreditation violations.

To be released, a district must earn an accountability grade of C or higher for five consecutive years. In a presentation to the board, interim State Superintendent Mike Kent said “we are confident” the district will have achieved that after this academic year and requested the board allow MDE to begin searching for new school board members to eventually serve the district.

“We’re looking at an 18-month period of time where we seek board members and try to train them, and then hopefully at the end of 2023 we have the Tunica County School District in a position where we can hand it off with the best possible chance of success,” Kent said.

The state board approved, and now MDE will seek out board members to serve the school district in an “advisory capacity” under Pulley until the end of 2023, and become full voting members in January 2024. In November 2023, the state board will request the governor lift the state of emergency and return the district to local control in 2024. The new school board will then begin the search for the district’s new superintendent.

This would be the second time Tunica is returned to local control; it was first taken over by the state in 1997, and released in 2002.

Those interested in serving on the school board can complete an application here by July 14.

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The only woman serving on Mississippi’s death row can challenge her sentence and conviction in state court, a federal judge has ruled. 

Lisa Jo Chamberlin was convicted of two counts of capital murder in 2006 and is at housed at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl. 

But she is not the only incarcerated person on death row appealing her case. 

Of the 36 people sentenced to death, all are in various stages of having their cases reviewed by the Mississippi Supreme Court or in federal court, said Krissy Nobile, director of the Office of Capital Post-Conviction, a state agency. 

Post-conviction litigation begins after a person is convicted and sentenced and the Mississippi Supreme Court or U.S. Supreme Court denies a defendant’s direct appeal. Post-conviction cases challenge aspects of a criminal trial, conviction judgment or a sentence. 

“Post-conviction isn’t just a one stop shot and you get one chance,” said Nobile, whose office has requested to represent Chamberlin and represents all other death row incarcerated people  

Examples of post-conviction claims can include ineffective counsel, a change in law, new evidence that can excuse fault or guilt, the application of mitigation that may have convinced a jury to vote for a sentence less than death or constitutional violations. 

Relief for a death row inmate can come in the form of a new trial and resentencing for a lesser sentence, like life in prison without the possibility of parole, Nobile said. 

On June 1, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi issued a stay in Chamberlin’s case, allowing her to return to state court to litigate unexhausted claims in her case. 

He cited a 2013 Mississippi Supreme Court ruling recognizing a state right to effective-post conviction legal representation in death penalty cases, even after an initial post-conviction petition was denied. 

“Here, Chamberlin has a valid excuse for not pursuing this claim earlier: it did not exist until after her habeas case had been filed,” Reeves wrote. “The claim is not clearly meritless.” 

In 2006, Chamberlin was found guilty of murder with her then-boyfriend Roger Gillett for killing two people they lived with in Hattiesburg. 

The victims, Linda Heintzelman and her boyfriend Vernon Hulett, were put into a freezer and taken to Kansas, where Chamberlin and Gillett were arrested.

Chamberlin appealed her conviction and sentence, but in 2008 the Mississippi Supreme Court agreed with the Forrest County Circuit Court’s decision and denied her petition for post-conviction relief, according to court records. 

In 2011, Chamberlin asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi to hear her case and in 2015 Reeves ordered a new trial. Attorneys argued there was a constitutional issue in her case known as a Batson violation, which is the improper dismissal of potential members of a jury based on race, according to court records. 

A panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Reeves’ ruling, but in 2018 the full court reversed its decision, court records state. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Chamberlin’s case in 2019, putting it back in the hands of the federal district court in Mississippi. 

Earlier this year, Chamberlin’s attorney filed an intent to return the case to state court.

In state court, Chamberlin will be represented by the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel. 

Nobile and several of her colleagues sent a request to the Mississippi Supreme Court to represent Chamberlin. Once appointed, the team will begin to review Chamberlin’s case files, investigate and find evidence for claims that haven’t been raised in her case. 

The office did not represent Chamberlin in her initial post-conviction case because it represented her co-defendant Gillett. Nobile said the office does not represent co-defendants to avoid conflict of interest. 

Mississippi is one of 27 death penalty states, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit providing analysis and information about capital punishment.  

Here, capital murder can result in a death sentence. The decision to seek the death penalty is made by a district attorney and the sentence must be unanimously decided by a jury. 

A killing is considered capital murder under several instances, including a murder committed during another crime such as a rape, arson or robbery; the death of a child as a result of battery or abuse and the murder of a firefighter or “peace officer” such as a police officer, sheriff or other law enforcement officer. 

State law also lists treason and aircraft piracy as charges that carry the death penalty. 

Previously, homicide/murder was a charge that carried the death penalty. Several of the incarcerated people on death row whose crimes were committed before 1998 have this charge. 

Over the years, there have been changes to death penalty law in the state, including not executing juveniles, those found to be mentally incompetent and people who committed non-murder crimes. 

The average age of people currently on death row is 48.8, according to a review of Mississippi Department of Corrections data. Richard Jordan, who is 76, is the oldest and Terry Pitchford, 36, is the youngest on death row. 

Inmates have been on death row for an average of 20.1 years, according to MDOC data. Jordan has been there longest for 45 years and Alberto Garcia is the newest on death row and has been there for just under two years. 

About 58% of death row inmates are Black and about 36% are white, according to MDOC data. The remaining percent are Hispanic or Asian – about 3% for each racial group. 

Some have severe mental illness, Nobile said. Many of them had difficult life circumstances and were poor at the time their crimes were committed, she said. 

Because the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel is tasked by law to represent people serving on death row until their death, Nobile said she and her staff have built years-long relationships with them through visits to Parchman. 

“Justice has to be at the forefront,” Nobile said about the office’s work. “We’re looking back on how a case turned out and if there is new evidence that could be looked at in the future.” 

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Dr. Cheryl Hamlin once attended a demonstration against the Iraq War in the Boston Common, but she’s never felt like much of a radical. Then she started providing abortions in Mississippi. 

Hamlin, a 60-year-old OB-GYN at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., spends three days a month at the state’s only abortion clinic in Jackson. Her work places her at the center of a decades-long national war that has culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court case poised to overturn the constitutional right to abortion: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The job is too dangerous for local physicians, so she and other out-of-state doctors fly in on a rotation.  

Though Hamlin always thought being a doctor meant you were supposed to help people, she describes her career as “kind of ordinary.” A mix of idealism, principle and shock at the election of President Donald Trump led her to start working in Mississippi in 2017. 

And last week, during what may well have been her final shift here, she wondered how far she would be willing to go to ensure access to abortion remains.

On Monday, June 6, a little before 4 p.m., she leaned over the steering wheel of her rental car as she pulled into the parking lot, in a hurry to get to her patients. They sat in idling sedans and SUVs, cranking up the air conditioning against a hot and sunny afternoon. 

Standing on the sidewalk just beyond the metal fence that surrounds the pink stucco clinic – known around Jackson as the Pink House – Pam Miller watched the doctor drive up. Miller, a 67-year-old grandmother of seven, is a regular presence outside the Pink House, wearing her blue 40 Days For Life baseball cap and clutching a stack of pro-life pamphlets. 

“That’s Cheryl Hamlin,” she said to Zach Boyd, another frequent protester. “She’s just now getting here.”

Hamlin didn’t notice them. And she wasn’t thinking about the seemingly imminent fall of Roe and the end to a constitutional right to abortion in the United States – at least not directly. 

She was thinking about her patients. She felt the extra pressure of knowing that clinics across the Southeast are packed with people seeking abortions, that some of them had driven hours for their appointments, and that soon it could be too late. 

A clinic staffer came out of the building to tell patients they could come inside.

Boyd held out a tan rubber fetus, smaller than his fist. 

“God’s going to judge you,” he called to the clinic employee.

“Why are you worrying about what I’m doing?” she shouted back. “Worry about yourself.”

If the final ruling in Dobbs hews to the draft opinion that leaked in early May, the Pink House will close. The clinic and some of the staff will move to New Mexico. Hamlin will join them there once a month, just as she has done in Mississippi for the last five years.

“I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on that fact,” Hamlin said of the possibility that this shift could be her last in Jackson. “But I guess I’ve been reading too much – it’s starting to affect my mind.”

While Hamlin began work inside the clinic, a young couple waited in their car down the block. As college students, they said, they’re not financially stable. They’re not ready to have a baby. The young woman had called Planned Parenthood in her home state, but they had referred her to Jackson. 

The pregnancy was already causing health complications, and they were thinking about their future. There was nothing any protester or pamphlet could say to change their minds. 

“I feel like everyone thinks that it’s an easy decision,” the woman said. “It’s really not.”

On Wednesday morning, six women sat in high-backed chairs arranged in a semicircle inside a narrow room in the back of the clinic. A purple sign taped to a door said “Everyone loves someone who had an abortion.” 

The patients gripped medical forms or held their hands together on their laps; one rocked back and forth in her seat, and another crossed her legs and jiggled her foot. 

“Hi ladies, how are you doing?” said Hamlin, taking her seat at the front of the room. The doctor has short hair and an air of friendly professionalism. 

“So, I’m Cheryl Hamlin, the doctor for the week, and I’ll be doing your counseling.”

She described the risks of the procedure: infection, blood transfusion, uterine perforation.

“To put it all in perspective, if you were giving birth, I would tell you you have all the same risks, but many more,” she said. 

She delivered the line required by Mississippi law, that abortion increases risk of breast cancer. 

“Nobody thinks it’s true. I’m pretty sure Governor Reeves doesn’t think it’s true, but it’s a state law that I say those words,” she told them. She recited another required line: If the only reason for the procedure is financial, “there may be organizations that will assist you as well as the father of the pregnancy should be providing child support.”

Then she turned to what she called “the elephant in the room:” the Supreme Court’s impending decision in the case that started with this clinic. In the best case scenario, she said, the Court will uphold Mississippi’s law and allow it to forbid abortions after 15 weeks. 

Since the Pink House currently provides the procedure through 16 weeks, that outcome wouldn’t make a major difference for the clinic. 

“The more likely and worst-case scenario is they overturn Roe,” she continued. “This clinic, and every clinic through most of the South and Midwest, is going to close.”

She urged her patients to vote. Then she moved on to explain the process for surgical abortions and for medication abortions. 

Next came individual counseling. Each person had a number to indicate her turn in line. Hamlin told them to keep an eye on her office door. Lately, as abortion clinics across the country have cut back services, the Pink House has been busy, and the process is designed for efficiency.

“When she comes out, you go right on in,” she said. “You guys pay attention, don’t wait for me to call you, and we’ll get you right on out of here.”

The individual counseling room is a small office shared between the doctors when they come to the clinic for their shifts. Hamlin sat behind a broad, dark wooden desk. The patients sat in a chair across from her. 

None of the generic furnishings reflected anything of Hamlin; this was the clinic’s office, not hers. 

The fifth patient to talk to Hamlin was a young woman in running shorts.

“Come on in, how are you doing?” Hamlin said.

“Good,” the woman replied as she sat down. 

Hamlin looked at her medical records spread on the desk. 

“You’re 15 weeks, so you have to come…” She paused, glancing up at the monthly calendar taped next to her seat. It was June 8. 

The calendar showed Hamlin’s shift, which would end just before 1 p.m. the next day, and another doctor’s shift on June 10 and 11. But that doctor only performs abortions through 13 weeks.

“So it’ll be the next available…” Hamlin looked at the calendar again. “…is the 16th or 17th. Gosh. You’re 15 – we’re not going to get you in.”

The woman’s face betrayed no emotion. She explained that the nurse who performed her ultrasound had said the doctor might be able to do the procedure on Friday. 

“Aaah,” Hamlin said in a high-pitched tone. “Let me just make sure what I’m saying is true.”

She ran the math in her head: The woman was already 15 weeks pregnant. The next time a doctor at the clinic could perform the procedure, she would be more than 16 weeks pregnant – past the clinic’s cut-off date.

Hamlin left the room. The woman looked at her phone on her lap. 

Two minutes later, Hamlin came back. The patient wouldn’t be able to get an abortion in Jackson.

“But we can help refer you, we have a relationship with Huntsville, Alabama, that can do beyond (16 weeks),” she said.

“OK,” the woman replied. Hamlin guided her out of the room to talk to a staffer about the referral.

These were the limits of choice, even with Roe still technically the law of the land. 

The patient might have waited weeks to get her first appointment at the Pink House because Texans were streaming into every clinic in the South following that state’s recent ban on abortions after six weeks. Then she ran into Mississippi’s mandatory 24-hour waiting period. 

And the threats and harassment directed against local abortion providers meant that when Hamlin flew home to Boston, there would be no one in the state who could or would perform the procedure for days – critical days. 

The Alabama Women’s Center in Huntsville, which performs abortions up to 21 weeks and six days, is more than five hours from Jackson by car. The clinic sees about five patients who have been referred from the Pink House every week, according to its office manager Makeda Harris. 

That state has a 48-hour waiting period, meaning Hamlin’s patient would likely have to spend two nights in an unfamiliar city or make a long round-trip drive twice. 

Hamlin felt terrible realizing that her patient would just barely miss out on being able to get an abortion in Mississippi. 

Cases like this one raised the question of how much she was willing to sacrifice. 

“I could do it today, but it’s a law that I can’t,” she said. “How many hoops do you jump through? … Should I stay a little bit later? I’ve done stuff like that, but you can also make yourself completely insane. If I miss my plane, I’ll be a really unhappy person … You can’t make yourself completely crazy.”

The constraints on the Pink House limit patient options in another way: Because there are so few slots available for surgical appointments, those whose pregnancies are under 11 weeks are urged to opt for a medication abortion. 

That process is safe, but it involves hours of cramping and heavy bleeding, and often lighter bleeding for weeks afterward. 

During Hamlin’s consultations on Wednesday morning, two patients whose pregnancies were early said they were scared of the pills and wanted a surgical abortion. Hamlin said she doesn’t hear that very often, and since the doctor coming in on Friday and Saturday could do the surgeries, she didn’t try to push them to take the pills.

“You want to give people all the choices,” she said. “If just one person does that, no big deal. But if people start coming in for their eight-week, seven-week surgical procedure, pretty soon we’re not going to fit all the 15-weekers in. So it’s always that balance of, how can you help the most people?”

The war outside the Pink House started years before Hamlin first arrived in Mississippi. 

In the 1980s, Mississippi had more than a dozen abortion clinics. Around the country, the number of providers began to fall as abortion opponents bombed clinics and harassed doctors. States also began imposing strict rules around clinic operations; in 1992, Mississippi passed the country’s first mandatory 24-hour waiting period. 

By the following year, there were only three clinics. And in 2004, the Pink House became the last clinic standing. 

Barbara Beavers, who has protested outside Mississippi’s abortion clinics for decades, remembers those days. She and her husband founded an anti-abortion pregnancy center in 1988. 

At one point, she was a frequent presence outside a building that housed an abortion clinic on the second floor. 

“Maybe a few times I did chase them up the stairs, and say, ‘Come home with us! Come home with us!’” she said, sitting in a camp chair outside the Pink House on Tuesday afternoon. “My husband liberated me to do that, and we’ve had girls in our home.”

“Here, we have to stand here,” she said, reminiscing about the days of easier access to patients. “We have to shout at them for them to hear us.” 

Since Derenda Hancock established the Pink House Defenders in 2013, the volunteers have served as a buffer between patients and the people aiming to dissuade them from entering the clinic. While escorts at other clinics may ignore protesters, the Defenders believe confrontation fights abortion stigma and can help change “the cultural narrative” around abortion.

Since the leaked opinion draft came out in early May, there have been relatively few protesters outside the clinic. Some of them are preaching and passing out supplies in Ukraine. Others, the street preachers, are using the early summer to do yard work. With June being LGBTQ Pride Month, some regulars are busy protesting those events. 

For the escorts, this is a bitter time. Hancock and Kim Gibson, who joined the organization in 2017, have felt for years that this day would come. Now, the world is watching, and it’s too late. 

They’re also exhausted, as the clinic’s operating days have increased from three days a week to five or sometimes six. They guide patients into the parking lot for up to 10 hours at a time while the temperature climbs into the 90s and the shade disappears. 

“We’re just sitting here waiting for the ax,” Hancock said. “It just needs to go ahead.”

When Hamlin started working in Mississippi in 2017, she was motivated by the desire to help people outside of her “pretty nice bubble” in Boston. 

She wanted to practice in a state where access to abortion is limited – so limited that advocates say many people already believe it is illegal here. 

On the morning of Hamlin’s first full day at the clinic, an anti-abortion demonstrator known to the escorts as “Stepper” took up her usual spot down the street from the parking lot entrance. She declined to share her name with Mississippi Today; the nickname comes from her tendency to pace up and down the block as she waits. 

“It’s a lot quieter than I thought it would be,” she said of the period since the leak. “I thought the community would have been all over this. That case is going to put Mississippi on the map.”

Around 9 a.m., a woman wearing a crucifix necklace got out of a car and headed toward the clinic. Stepper called out after her as the driver of the car idled outside the clinic. 

“Do know that God loves you and you can make a different choice,” she said. The woman didn’t look at her. 

“What is this?” asked the woman’s driver, a middle-aged woman who said she works for Uber, while gesturing at the Pink House. The passenger had told her she was going to work. 

“This is an abortion clinic,” Stepper replied.

“I thought they outlawed that,” the driver said.

Brooke Jones, a 28-year-old Jackson native and a sonogram and lab tech at the clinic, spent her afternoon break sitting on the patio with a bag of chips she decided she didn’t want to eat. 

Jones said it feels like everyone at the Pink House is thinking about the upcoming Supreme Court ruling, but not talking about it much. What would she do if Roe were overturned and the clinic closed?

“Cry,” she said. “And not just because this is my job. Because it’s the only clinic in Mississippi.”

Jones has always been pro-choice. She joined the Pink House staff two years ago, thanks to an acquaintance who worked at the clinic and curiosity about what took place there. 

Before that, she worked at group homes for kids. 

“I know the kids they want you to keep and tell you the state is going to help – they treat them like shit,” she said. 

If clinic director Shannon Brewer approves, Jones wants to move to New Mexico to work at the new facility Brewer and Pink House owner Diane Derzis are opening there. She’s made a list of pros and cons, and doesn’t see many cons. It’s a chance to keep doing the work she knows how to do and experience life in a new state. 

In the meantime, she keeps coming to work. Every morning and every afternoon, she walks past the protesters. She’s memorized their lines. 

“‘You can find something else, we can help you, let’s get you something else, you do not need the blood of innocent lives on your hands!’” she recited. “I’m like, ‘shut the hell up.’”

They don’t bother her, but patients sometimes say they were already scared and the protesters made it worse, she said.

Jones gestured toward Beavers, who was sitting in her camp chair by the fence. 

“She’s going to sit there until everybody clocks out and walks to their car,” she said. 

Then Jones went back to work to prepare for the afternoon’s surgical procedures. 

Beavers, a leader of the pregnancy center movement in Mississippi, was hoping to get women to turn toward the Cline Center, a crisis pregnancy center across the street from the clinic, where they could get a free ultrasound. Around the country, these centers aim to dissuade women from seeking abortions and often offer supplies and parenting classes. 

Now, they are the centerpiece of what Gov. Tate Reeves calls a “new pro-life agenda.” 

The state’s nearly 40 centers can receive up to $3.5 million in tax credits thanks to a bill passed in the most recent legislative session. They are not regulated by the state department of health, and there are no rules or reporting requirements on how they spend the money. 

Beavers said that after Roe falls, she wants to see the pro-life movement focus on helping women who have had abortions deal with “this hurt and this pain.” She has been praying for “revival.”

While Beavers has her priorities, Hamlin and those who work with her see a bigger problem to address: the lack of health care access in Mississippi, the state ranked at the bottom of most health indicators and one of only 12 that has not expanded Medicaid.

When Hamlin started working in Mississippi, she was shocked to meet so many patients who didn’t have health insurance, which meant they couldn’t afford to see a regular OB-GYN and often weren’t sure how to get or pay for birth control. 

But Beavers doesn’t see much value in paying for people to get health care. 

“We’re giving money to have babies without husbands, in my opinion,” she said. 

“You can get health care in Mississippi,” she continued. “… They’re getting all their money from the government anyhow.”

Around 5 p.m., Beavers packed up and left for her weekly “post-abortion healing meeting” with women who have had abortions. They are told that accepting that they killed their child “is the first step in grieving,” according to a lesson plan Beavers shared.

Not long after Beavers left, a 24-year-old woman walked out of the clinic holding a bag of pills and started down the block toward her car. She had just taken the first pill involved in a medication abortion, and within the next 48 hours she would take the second set. 

“I’m young, and I already have children. I’m a single mother,” she said. “And it’s already basically hard for me. I’ve barely got my head above water, with the high gas prices and basically we’re in a recession, they just don’t want to admit it … I think it would be selfish to bring another child into this world, and I’m knowing that I’m not able, physically or emotionally or mentally.”

Even making $15 an hour, she was just scraping by, she said. 

Growing up in Jackson, she saw the anti-abortion protesters around town from time to time. They once posted up outside her high school with big posters of fetuses, which felt to her like harassment. 

She had mostly managed to ignore them walking into her appointments at the clinic. When she heard them offer help, she didn’t believe it. Would they help her pay for housing and child care? Would they do that for the dozens of people who visited the clinic every week? 

“Y’all don’t know us by a cat or a dog walking down the street,” she said. “When they go home, they’re living comfortably, without a care in the world, besides what’s going on with our bodies.”

If Roe falls, advocates expect the nearest abortion clinic will be in southern Illinois, a seven-hour drive from Jackson. Would she make trip? 

“I would go,” she said. 

Just before 8:45 a.m. on what might end up being her final day working at the clinic, Hamlin turned off State Street and angled into the clinic parking lot. As the escorts waved her to her parking spot, 78-year-old David Lane left his place across the street and walked toward the driveway. 

“Cheryl, you need to quit killing the babies!” he called. “You’ll answer for every child you’ve ever killed. Won’t you repent and quit killing the babies?”

As Hamlin got out of her car, escorts stood nearby, eyeing Lane. Because the protesters aren’t allowed to cross onto clinic property, Lane kept shouting at Hamlin from yards away. 

“We know you make a lot of money, but it won’t do you any good when you’re in a casket and your soul burns in hell for dying as a murderer. Won’t you quit?”

Lane had no megaphone—the protesters who’d left for Ukraine typically brought that. Hamlin couldn’t even hear him, but that didn’t matter to Lane: He shouted at her as a matter of duty and custom. 

Hamlin disappeared into the clinic, and Lane shuffled back to his chair. He understands why the clinic’s doctors must travel from out of state. He helped make it that way. 

“Nobody will do abortions from Mississippi here because they’d get recognized. They don’t like people coming to their house,” he said. “We go to the neighborhoods and tell everybody in the neighborhood what they do. They don’t like that. But if it’ll get rid of them, and it’s legal, we’ll do it.”

The likely closure of the Pink House will change Lane’s life, and that of his brother, Doug, who also protests regularly. Before Doug left for Ukraine two weeks earlier, the brothers were driving down the road together. Doug put his arm around David’s shoulder, and David could tell he was about to cry.

“He said, ‘David, I’m sorry that we didn’t get to do what we planned,’” Lane recalled. “And our daddy raised us hunting and fishing. And what we wanted to do was retire one day, and go hunting and fishing. But now we come here.”

He paused to envision the world after the Court rules in Dobbs. 

“So I’ll, maybe I’ll get to do a little hunting, and maybe I’ll get to do a little fishing.”

Hamlin walked out of the clinic just before 1 p.m. on Thursday. The parking lot was nearly empty. The escorts had left for the day. There were no protesters damning her to hell. 

As she started the 20-minute drive to the airport, she thought about her work in Mississippi and what might come next. 

In what she considered an otherwise standard career, performing abortions in Mississippi had, from the very beginning, felt bold. When she applied for her license to practice here, she almost hoped it wouldn’t arrive. Then it came in the mail.

“I’m like, ‘OK, here we go,’” she said.  

Now, she was questioning how bold she was willing to be.

“I do feel like this is bigger than just abortion rights, and it really scares me,” she said. “And I’m feeling like … for the first time, questioning … How far am I going to take this? Would I do something illegal? I mean, I don’t know. Right now I don’t think I want to. I’m going to try to do everything through legal means. But…”

She paused.

“I guess at some point, if it’s really people’s lives at stake, I might.”

At the rental car drop-off, she got her duffel bag and backpack out of the Honda and retrieved a stray Earl Gray tea bag from the passenger seat. She walked across the parking lot into the airport, up the escalator and past the bust of Medgar Evers to security, a route she’s taken dozens of times before. She finished a can of seltzer, dropped it in a trash can, and headed for home. 

She wasn’t sure when she would be back in Jackson. If Roe falls, the Pink House will close, and she’ll go to New Mexico for her next rotation. 

But during her shift, she asked Brewer if she ought to buy tickets for July, just in case the Court doesn’t overturn Roe. Brewer said yes. So Hamlin left her spare t-shirts, running shoes, shampoo and toothbrush in the doctors’ shared apartment and booked her next trip to Jackson. 

Correction 6/16/22: This story has been updated to reflect that Brooke Jones’ correct title is sonogram and lab tech. An earlier version of the story identified her as a nurse.

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