Reuben Anderson, Mississippi’s first African American Supreme Court justice of the modern era, had the responsibility of introducing former President Bill Clinton at the recent memorial ceremony for his longtime friends, Gov. and First Lady William and Elise Winter.
Before making that introduction, Anderson said he wanted to recognize “my congressman.” He described 2nd District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson as “the most unusual politician you will ever meet. He is not interested in getting rich. He is not interested in a higher office, and he shuns publicity.”
Reasonable people can differ on whether Anderson was being overly generous of “a fella I have known for over 50 years,” but what is not debatable is that Thompson will not be able to shun publicity this week.
Thompson, the Bolton native who has held the 2nd Congressional District post since 1993, will be at the center of attention as the special committee he chairs holds prime-time hearings beginning Thursday on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by those trying to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election. A big part of the committee’s work centers around the role of former President Donald Trump and his allies in the attack.
Thursday’s hearing begins at 7 p.m. It and a separate hearing next week will be carried live by most major networks and cable news channels — with the notable exception of Fox News.
“I want, as an African American, to be able to say to the world that I helped stabilize our government when insurrectionists tried to take over,” Thompson recently told CNN of the hearings.
Thompson — the dean of the Mississippi congressional delegation and indeed someone who has worked to avoid the limelight — has built his long political career on protecting democracy.
As a young adult in the 1960s, he worked to register African Americans to vote and to ensure votes were counted. Now leading the Jan. 6 Commission, he is effectively doing similar work: ensuring that legally cast votes are counted and that the nation’s representative democracy is protected from any future efforts to overturn the results of an election.
During a 2018 Mississippi Today interview, Thompson recalled in the 1960s as a Tougaloo College political science student working in the Mississippi Delta trying to register people to vote on behalf of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer’s congressional bid.
“I was talking to my mother, and she was saying you know we don’t vote here in Bolton,” Thompson recalled. “It was a shock to me that I was up in Sunflower County helping register Black people to vote, and even in my hometown they didn’t enjoy the same luxury.”
Thompson’s auto mechanic father, who died in 1964 — the same year of passage of the federal Voting Rights Act designed to ensure racial minorities were not denied the right to vote — never got to vote. His mother, a schoolteacher, did, and most likely her first vote cast was for her son when he ran and was elected to the board of aldermen in his hometown of Bolton in 1969.
While Thompson won that election, it took a ruling of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to ensure victory for him and for two other African Americans elected that year in Bolton.
Thursday’s Jan. 6 Commission hearings could be viewed as a continuation of Bennie Thompson’s life’s work in terms of trying to ensure fair elections.
“I’m a passionate believer that in a democracy you have to follow the rule of law,” Thompson recently told NPR. “It has nothing to do with individuals. It has nothing to do with wealth. It has nothing to do with status in the community. It’s the law. The law is colorblind.”
You know about Ole Miss and Southern Miss baseball teams winning NCAA Regionals and facing off this weekend in a Super Regional at Hattiesburg. You know about Mississippi State winning the national championship of college baseball last season. You know about the tradition of success at Delta State.
Rick Cleveland
College baseball: It gets no better than what we have here in Mississippi. And it goes a lot deeper than those aforementioned. Last week, Pearl River Community College, 30 miles south of Hattiesburg in Poplarville, won the national championship of junior college baseball.
At Enid, Okla., the Wildcats, coached by Jackson native Michael Avalon, lost to Madison (Wisc.) College 11-4 in the first game of a best-of-three championship series and then came back and smoked Madison 19-1 and 7-2 the next two games. Madison entered the championship series having lost only eight of 56 games the entire season. Pearl River beat them twice in two days by a total of 23 runs.
There’s so much to tell you about those Pearl River Wildcats, including the fact that 12 players off the team have either signed or committed to play for Division I teams in college baseball. That’s not even counting centerfielder Tate Parker of Gulfport, who should be named national junior college player of the year any day now and hasn’t committed to any four-year college yet. He may just go pro.
All those guys will follow a path so many Wildcats have taken over the past few seasons under Avalon. Slugging outfielder Reece Ewing and closer Landon Harper, former Wildcats, are two of the keys to Southern Miss’ success this season. Pitcher Cole Tolbert, who earned the most outstanding pitcher award of the national championship series (16 strikeouts in nine innings), has signed to play at Ole Miss.
The Wildcats lose a slew of players off the championship team, but Avalon believes he has “some really outstanding players waiting in the wings” to make another run next season.
“Pearl River will win as long as he’s there,” says Harper, the Southern Miss closer from Meridian. “Coach Avalon is a winner. No matter where I go or what I do, I am going to remember that man the rest of my life. He makes you not only a better player but a better person.”
The acronym “S.O.A.P.” is all over the PRCC locker room.
Avalon, who grew up in south Jackson and pitched for Forest Hill, operates the Pearl River program, basing every aspect of his coaching on a four word mantra: “Success = Organization, Attitude, Pride.” The acronym is S.O.A.P. You’ll find it anywhere you look in the Pearl River locker room, dugout and clubhouse.
Michael Avalon didn’t come up with the slogan. No, he took it from his dad, the late Billy Avalon, who was a much-beloved English literature teacher and coach in the Jackson area for decades.
Billy Avalon, a gruff-voiced ex-Marine who loved his family, words and sports (probably in that order), was the best coach Michael Avalon ever had, Michael says. And if you talk to students who had Billy as their English or literature teacher at St. Joseph or Madison Central, most will tell you he was the best teacher they ever had.
Billy Avalon used the S.O.A.P. mantra as a teacher, coach and parent. “I remember him asking me that of success, organization, attitude and pride, which was the most difficult to sustain,” Michael Avalon said. “I said success, and he said, ‘No, it’s pride, pride in everything you do, doing everything the best you can do. That’s the hardest.
“And that’s what we stress in this baseball program. I don’t want them to just be the best players they can be. I want them to be the best students, the best citizens, the best sons, the best teammates they can be.”
Says Harper, the USM closer: “S.O.A.P. was part of everything we did there. I mean, it’s stuff like, if you see a piece of trash on the side of the road, don’t pass it by. Pick it up.”
His players describe Michael Avalon as “intense” as a coach. He apparently got that from his father, too.
Michael (left) and his father Billy Avalon.
“This will tell you how intense my dad was,” Michael Avalon says. “Once, when he was coaching his girls basketball team, he broke a finger calling a timeout.”
He did what?
“Really, he broke his own finger calling a timeout,” Avalon says, chuckling. “When he made the ’T’ sign with his hands, he slammed his fingers on one hand into the other hand too hard. I’m telling you, he was intense.
“At the same time, he was a man who would do anything he could to help anybody he encountered. Not just his students or his players, but somebody he just met on the side of the road.”
Billy Avalon, friends say, was intensely proud of Michael’s coaching success. He made every game he could make. He was there for all the state and region championships his son’s teams won at Pearl River. He was in Enid, Okla., in 2019 when the Wildcats were eliminated from the national championship tournament.
Last July, Billy and Michael were having one of their typically brief daily phone conversations when Billy said, “You know what you gotta do next season?”
“What?” Michael said.
Said Billy, “You gotta go back to Enid and win the whole damned thing.”
A couple days later, Billy Avalon, 72, was killed in an automobile accident.
This season, as Pearl River won 45 games and ranked at or near the top of national polls, Michael missed his father terribly — at least partly because he knew how much Billy would have enjoyed the success.
Billy missed the Region 23 championship. He missed his son’s team ascending to No. 1 in the national polls. He missed them winning three straight games at Enid to reach the three-game national championship series. He missed the ultimate victory.
Or did he?
Pearl River was leading the championship game 7-2 going into the ninth inning. On the P.A. system, the recording of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” blared. Besides Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy and Joyce, Billy Avalon loved Springsteen. “Glory Days” was his favorite song.
Says Michael Avalon, “When Glory Days came on, I knew dad was there, knew he was watching. You couldn’t even make that up.”
Former President Donald Trump, headlining his “American Freedom Tour,” is scheduled to be in Southaven on June 18.
This visit comes ahead of Mississippi’s June 28 GOP primary runoffs, with two incumbent Republican congressmen struggling to keep their seats. With Trump remaining popular with Mississippi Republicans, his endorsement in either race could be a deciding factor for incumbents or challengers.
Incumbent Rep. Michael Guest trailed Republican challenger Michael Cassidy in unofficial results from Tuesday 46.6% to 47.8%, forcing a runoff with no candidate breaking 50%. Cassidy, a former Navy pilot, tried to run to the right of Guest, including criticizing Guest for voting with Democrats to create a commission to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by those trying to overturn Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden.
Incumbent Rep. Steven Palazzo is headed to a runoff with Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell. Palazzo led Ezell 31.6% to 25.2% in unofficial results, with the two topping a crowded field of Republican challengers to Palazzo. Palazzo drew numerous challengers in part because he has faced an ethics investigation over allegations he misspent campaign and congressional money and misused his office.
Trump’s only endorsement in Tuesday’s Mississippi midterm primaries was for incumbent 1st District Rep. Trent Kelly, who handily won his primary with 90% of the vote.
Trump carried Mississippi with 58% of the vote in 2020, and to date, candidates he has endorsed and campaigned for here — including Gov. Tate Reeves and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith twice — have won. On Tuesday, all 16 candidates he endorsed for midterm primaries held by seven states won, although most were, like Kelly, strongly favored to win.
Trump’s American Freedom Tour event is billed as being for Memphis on the group’s website, but is set to be held at the Landers Center in Southaven on June 18 from 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The event includes some free access with pre-registration required, but also includes special paid access and seating ranging from $1,295 for the “chamber” level to $3,995 for the presidential level.
The daylong event schedule includes roundtable discussions, meet-and-greet and photo ops and speeches. Speakers include Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, conservative commentators and authors Candace Owens and Dinesh D’Souza.
Two of Mississippi’s four incumbent U.S. House members on Tuesday were forced into June 28 runoffs with challengers.
Neither Michael Guest, representing the 3rd Congressional District based in central Mississippi, nor Steven Palazzo, representing south Mississippi’s 4th Congressional District, could garner a majority in the Republican Party needed to avoid the runoff.
While it was expected that Palazzo would face a tough re-election campaign in a six-candidate primary field, Guest’s troubles were more surprising.
Based on late but incomplete results, it appeared Guest will finish second in the three-candidate field. Michael Cassidy, a former Navy pilot who now lives in Meridian, was leading with 47.8% of the vote compared to 46.6% for Guest.
Guest, a former district attorney representing Rankin and Madison counties in suburban Jackson, is seeking his third two-year term.
The upstart Cassidy ran an aggressive campaign, loaning himself more than $200,000 to challenge Guest. He especially focused his campaign on the fact that Guest was the only member of Mississippi’s Republican congressional delegation to vote in favor of creating a special congressional commission to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. That attack was carried out by those trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican incumbent Donald Trump.
Cassidy’s campaign has been aided by Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign data specialist, who has been a leading voice in trying to perpetuate the myth that Trump won the election.
Cassidy held his own in Guest’s home turf in the Jackson metro area and dominated the vote count in the Meridian area and in many rural counties on the eastern side of the district.
In south Mississippi, Palazzo was leading Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell 31.6% to 25.2% in late — but also incomplete — results.
Palazzo, a former state House member who first was elected to the U.S. House in 2010, was believed to be vulnerable because of an ethics investigation over accusations he spent campaign funds on personal expenses. Palazzo has repaid some funds to his campaign and it appears that Palazzo will survive the investigation, though it is far from a given that he will succeed in his reelection effort.
Palazzo was the top vote-getter in most of the counties in the district, but not by wide enough margins to avoid the runoff.
Mississippi’s other two incumbents — Democrat Bennie Thompson of the 2nd District and Republican Trent Kelly of the 1st District — won by comfortable margins.
Thompson, the chair of the Jan. 6 Commission, won with 96% of the vote, while Kelly, a former district attorney in northeast Mississippi, garnered 90% of the vote.
All winners of this summer’s party primaries will face opposition in the November general election. The 2nd District, which includes much of the Jackson area and nearly all of the western side of the state along the Mississippi River, is viewed as a safe Democratic district while the other three are viewed as safe for Republicans.
It appears the Republican primary in the 2nd District will head to a runoff between Brian Flowers and Ronald Elder.
Diane Black was an easy winner of a two-candidate field in the 1st District Democratic primary, while Democrat Shuwaski Young ran unopposed in the 3rd. Johnny DuPree, a former Hattiesburg mayor and former candidate for governor and secretary of state, handily won a two-candidate race in the Democratic primary in the 4th District.
Primary runoff elections will be held June 28. The general election, pitting primary winners against one another, will be held on Nov. 8.
When Mississippi asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, it argued that a long tradition of state restrictions on abortion in the U.S. “defeats any claim of a deeply rooted right” to an abortion.
Yet for all but 21 of its 156 years as a state prior to Roe, Mississippi law technically permitted abortion for any reason until about 16 weeks of pregnancy.
Mississippi Today could find no published scholarship on the history of abortion law in Mississippi specifically, and national histories on the topic generally make little reference to the state.
This story is based on interviews with historians of abortion law and politics, stories published in Mississippi newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries, books and articles about abortion law in the U.S., vital records held in the state archives, and a review of Mississippi laws.
Decades after almost every state had banned the procedure at any stage of pregnancy, Mississippi’s law continued to follow the practice in place at the country’s founding: Abortion was a crime only if the fetus was “quick,” or had been felt to move, typically around four months of pregnancy. Mississippi did not update that law until 1952, though people were still prosecuted for abortions prior to that, usually in cases where the woman had died.
The role of abortion in the U.S. decades ago sits at the center of arguments about its future. In his leaked draft opinion, Justice Samuel Alito sided with the state’s reading of history when he wrote: “An unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
But if the Court’s final ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is similar to Alito’s draft, Mississippi’s legal restrictions on abortion today will become tighter than they have been at almost any point in its history. The state’s trigger law will ban abortion in all cases except those involving rape and a threat to the mother’s life. A separate law passed in 2019 banning abortions after six weeks contains no exception for rape.
The evolution of state law after Roe in 1973 mirrors the national rise of the pro-life movement as a powerful force in Republican politics. A movement that was once predominantly Catholic and Northern became largely evangelical and Southern.
A movement that was once on the defensive in Southern state legislatures, including Mississippi’s, began winning one victory after another across the South and Midwest.
Mississippi, for decades an outlier in permitting many abortions, became in 2021 the state that asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe.
“If there’s a person in Mississippi who thinks that by virtue of these laws going into force after Dobbs, that we’re returning Mississippi to the good old days … they’re wrong,” said Aaron Tang, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis who has researched the history of state abortion laws. “The substantial history of Mississippi throughout its existence as a state has been basically what Jackson Women’s Health Organization is willing to do: a procedure up to 16 weeks.”
At the time of the founding of the United States, abortion was legal in every state until the “quickening,” following the English common law tradition. Because there was no medical way to prove a pregnancy until the fetus had moved, a woman could claim she needed to “restore” or unblock her menstrual cycle, and no one else could insist she was actually pregnant.
“The popular ethic regarding abortion and common law were grounded in the female experience of their own bodies,” the historian Leslie J. Reagan wrote in her book “When Abortion Was A Crime.”
Mississippi passed its first law on abortion in 1839: “The wilful killing of an unborn quick child, by any injury to the mother of such child, which would be murder if it resulted in the death of the mother, shall be deemed manslaughter in the first degree.”
The law was part of an early wave of such legislation across the country from roughly 1820 to 1840. The historian James C. Mohr wrote that such laws were usually passed as a part of larger revisions to the state criminal codes; abortion itself was not a public issue.
Mid-19th century newspapers treated abortion as a practice that did not involve Mississippians – or, at least, white Mississippians. After the Civil War, as white Mississippians resisted Reconstruction and Black political empowerment, state newspapers sometimes presented abortion as a symbol of Northern immorality.
In 1867, the body of an infant was found near the river Under the Hill in Natchez, partially buried in the sand, wrapped in an apron and tied to two bricks.
“We sincerely hope that the abortion and child murdering mania which rages in the New England States and in New York to such a fearful extent has not reached us,” the Natchez Democrat opined.
Racism was also part of discussions of abortion in Mississippi, as it was around the country.
“Notwithstanding the North makes pretensions to all the purity of the land, and essays to look down upon the South in her barbaric practices, yet infanticide the most inexcusable and disgusting, as well as most horrible of all crimes, is of common occurrence there, while with us it is almost unknown, and when known is confined almost exclusively to the Negroes,” wrote a columnist for the Vicksburg Post in 1870.
By 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, Mississippi was one of only three states with a law against abortion that nonetheless explicitly permitted it prior to quickening. (The others were Arkansas and Minnesota.) Six states had no laws on abortion.
In the draft opinion leaked in early May, Alito claims that the remaining 28 states prohibited abortion at all stages, and thus that the Fourteenth Amendment – in which the court has located a right to privacy – cannot be understood to protect a right to an abortion.
Other historians disagree with that claim. A brief filed in Dobbs by the American Historical Association reported that pre-quickening abortions were legal in 11 states and less heavily punished in seven more by 1868. Tang claims that the true number of states that departed from the common law tradition to prohibit abortion at all stages of pregnancy by the time of the Fourteenth Amendment was actually 16.
And before the 20th century, there was no way to prove a pregnancy before the quickening, so abortion laws pertaining to a “pregnant woman” in practice were not always substantially different from laws that applied only to post-quickening abortions.
A Mississippi Supreme Court decision in 1898 rejected the idea that fetuses were people, citing the common law.
A Pontotoc woman named Emma Prude was indicted for ending her own pregnancy under a state law prohibiting giving medicine to a woman pregnant with a “quick child” to end the pregnancy. The Court not only determined that the statute didn’t apply to a woman who ended her own pregnancy, but also wrote that “An infant in the mother’s womb … is not considered a person who can be killed within the description of murder,” even if the pregnancy was quick.
However unusual Mississippi’s law was by 1868, it was much more of an outlier 50 years later.
In the late 19th century, states continued to pass stricter abortion laws, largely at the urging of doctors and the American Medical Association. The movement was led by Dr. Horatio Storer, a Boston doctor who believed fetal life began at conception, and that abortion was murder at any stage of a pregnancy.
Historians say the physician-led anti-abortion movement painted midwives, many of whom were Black women, as “abortionists” in an effort to position themselves as better trained and morally upright – and win over more patients. Storer was also concerned that white Protestant women were using abortion to limit the size of their families, while he believed recent immigrants, many of whom were Catholic, regarded abortion as immoral.
“Of the nine States that had not yet criminalized abortion at all stages (as of 1868), all but one did so by 1910,” Alito wrote. That state was Mississippi.
In 1909, state lawmakers considered a proposal to ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy, which had been backed by the Mississippi Medical Association. An abortion that ended a pregnancy would be manslaughter.
“An infant in the mother’s womb, whether viable or not, is hereby declared a human being,” the legislation said.
Yet the proposal didn’t become law, for reasons Mississippi Today couldn’t locate.
Mississippi legislators considered another total abortion ban in 1918 but would not actually pass one until 1952.
The lack of a ban didn’t mean that abortion was universally regarded as normal or morally acceptable. But it did mean, as one dismayed headline in the Jackson Daily News in 1911 put it, “Abortion Not a Crime.”
The article explained that a group of physicians had investigated an alleged abortion and contacted local law enforcement. But they found that there could be no prosecution because there was no law against an abortion before “practically four months pregnancy.”
People facing criminal charges for performing an abortion that resulted in a woman’s death could try to use this point in their defense.
Dr. F. E. Lee, for example, never denied that the abortion he performed in 1916 had led to the death of a young woman named Mary Miller. Instead, he claimed the procedure hadn’t been a crime.
At his trial in Corinth in 1920, Lee’s lawyer said that because Miller’s pregnancy was not “quick,” he had violated no law by performing her abortion and should not be held responsible for her death.
The prosecutor rejected that argument, but not that reading of the law. He acknowledged that the “original undertaking was not condemned by the law,” but said the doctor was still liable for Miller’s death.
Lee was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in the state penitentiary. But if Miller’s procedure had gone as intended, law enforcement would have had no grounds to get involved – making Mississippi an anomaly in the U.S. at the time.
Late in the evening on July 25, 1945, a former policeman named B.J. Jennings heard a car speed over the bridge above his houseboat on the Pearl River, not far from downtown Jackson. He saw someone toss something out of the car and into the water.
Later, he found a purse and pair of shoes in the river and called the police.
His call helped law enforcement piece together an explanation for what had happened to 18-year-old Betty Massey, a waitress at Abe’s Cafe who had been missing for days. Her body was found a few days later, floating in Rhodes Creek near Terry. Police arrested Dr. B.F. Johnson and said Massey had died in his clinic following an illegal abortion.
Massey’s death became a media event. Her portrait ran on the front page of the Clarion-Ledger, where stories suggested she was a tragic symbol of the dangers facing young women during the social tumult of World War II. The newspaper reported that the father of her baby, a soldier, had written her “a nasty letter … in which he relieved himself of any responsibility.”
Massey, a white woman, was a “small-town girl working in Jackson,” and a member of “a prominent Delta family.” One story described “perhaps the most tragic point” in her death: Her boarding house at 313 State Street had been located just two doors down from the state office charged with helping unmarried pregnant women.
Their case workers could have helped her “overcome some of her fears, dreads, and anxieties and face the reality of her situation so that the desire to destroy herself and others is allayed,” a representative said.
Some news stories about the doctor charged in Massey’s death mentioned that he had previously been convicted of manslaughter in the death of a Black woman named Etta Perkins following an abortion. Her life and case got little attention on its own.
He had appealed the conviction and was out on bond when he performed Massey’s abortion, the papers reported.
For Massey’s death, prosecutors chose a harsher charge — “depraved heart murder.” Johnson ultimately pled guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
By the time Perkins and Massey died, abortion in the United States – though illegal at all stages of pregnancy in most of the country – was becoming safer. Abortion was the official cause of death of about 2,700 women in 1930, accounting for a fifth of all pregnancy-related deaths that year, according to the reproductive rights nonprofit the Guttmacher Institute. In the 1940s, the development of antibiotics reduced deaths by making it easier to treat infections after abortion. In 1950, about 300 women died following an abortion.
It’s not clear how many people died following abortions in Mississippi in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vital records held at the state archives did not list abortion as a cause of death until the 1920s, and in some years after that, all pregnancy-related deaths were tallied together.
Mississippi Today reviewed records from 1927 through 1940 that showed abortion was listed as the cause of death for roughly 30 to 50 women each year. More Black women than white women died: In 1930, for example, abortion was the cause of death for 15 white women and 26 Black women.
In 1952, the Mississippi Medical Association asked the Legislature to pass a stricter abortion law. Lawmakers obliged, prohibiting the procedure at all stages of pregnancy.
The new law said someone who provided an abortion could be charged with manslaughter and sentenced to one to 10 years in prison. If the woman died, the crime was murder. The only exception was to save the life of the mother, and the law required two doctors to make that determination in writing.
Pro-life advocates often point out that women were rarely prosecuted for their own abortions prior to Roe. Historians largely agree, but that fact doesn’t account for the public shame and pressure to cooperate with law enforcement women could endure during trials of doctors and partners, Mary Ziegler, a law professor and expert on abortion history, has written.
Mississippi’s 1952 abortion ban didn’t explicitly prohibit such prosecutions. Mississippi Today found that at least one woman was arrested and charged with her own attempted abortion after she refused to cooperate with the investigation of two men involved.
In September 1962, Jackson police got a tip: An abortion was set to take place in a few days at a Travel Inn Motel on Highway 51, just outside of the city. Officers waited outside Room 152. They would later say they could smell a chemical odor, like a powerful disinfectant, wafting out of the room, and heard the clanking of metal instruments or furniture being moved.
When they opened the door, they found a woman named Mary Ann Aiken hiding in the bathroom, covered in a sheet and holding her skirt in her hand. She was arrested for participating in her own abortion and taken to a hospital for a medical examination.
Aiken, whose name was often spelled Mary Ann Eakin or Mary Ann Eakin Johnson, refused to cooperate with the authorities.
During the trial of Leo Hall, one of the men charged with the illegal abortion, Aiken denied she had attempted to get an abortion, frustrating then-District Attorney Bill Waller, who said he had a signed statement from her declaring otherwise and that she could also be charged with perjury. Aiken also said she was a prostitute and had had sex with Hall, who reportedly had ties to the Dixie Mafia, perhaps helping to explain why she would not want to testify against him.
The trial for Aiken herself was delayed because she had to give birth – the abortion had not been successful. She pled guilty to the crime of attempted abortion.
The state could also expend significant time and resources investigating suspected abortion providers.
In May 1968, a Baton Rouge woman met a doctor in a Jackson motel room. After he agreed to perform an abortion and she handed him $200 in cash, Mississippi Highway Patrol agents who had set up the sting burst into the room and arrested him.
He was eventually acquitted by jurors who were unconvinced that the woman had ever been pregnant.
By the mid-1960s, discussion of abortion nationally was intensifying. Feminists called for abortion to be legal and free. Professional organizations of doctors, attorneys and psychiatrists began arguing for more liberal abortion laws.
The 1967 Mississippi Boys’ State convention – attended primarily by well-off white high school boys who hoped to become state leaders – passed legislation making abortion legal when the pregnancy could affect the mother’s mental or physical health and when the fetus would be born with a serious deformity. Though it wasn’t actual legislation, some observers saw it as an indicator of where public opinion was heading.
“In a few years these same boys will be of voting age, and in the not too distant future some of them will hold real offices in state government,” noted an opinion columnist in the Hattiesburg American.
In 1966, Mississippi became one of the first states to add a new exception to its abortion ban, allowing women to get an abortion if they said they had been raped. Unlike Mississippi’s 2007 trigger ban, the law did not require them to report the rape to law enforcement.
Some of opponents’ points echoed pro-life claims today: that only God could make a decision to end a pregnancy, and that a woman who got an abortion could feel guilty later in life.
Supporters’ main arguments were based on racist fears around sex between Black men and white women. The Daily Herald of Biloxi reported that the measure passed the House after a speech by Rep. George Payne Cossar of Tallahatchie, who told his colleagues that pregnancy could result from “rape between the races.”
“Are you going to force this poor woman to carry this burden?” he said. “This bill is designed to prevent disgrace in a family.”
As of early 1971, abortion was legal in five states – New York, Alaska, California, Hawaii and Washington.
That year, a Hattiesburg lawmaker thought Mississippi should join the list. Rep. Robert Lennon introduced a bill that would make abortions legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
“Abortion must be considered a medical procedure and a private one between a licensed physician and his patient,” he told the Clarion-Ledger. “It should not be a part of our criminal statutes.”
The bill provoked a furious outcry. Catholic leaders in the state urged their 90,000 parishioners to lobby against it. One opponent in the Legislature called it “a possibly well-intended attempt to legalize the murder of innocent babies.”
The bill didn’t make it out of committee, and Lennon didn’t run for reelection.
Two years later, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe provoked a more muted response in Mississippi. Religious leaders were split: Catholics and some in other denominations told local newspapers they saw the ruling as a sign of moral degradation.
Rev. J.C. Harris, pastor of a United Methodist Church in Biloxi, called the ruling “wonderful.”
“I believe a woman and her doctor should do what she thinks fit.”
Man-on-the street interviews captured a range of views among ordinary Mississippians, too. Some echoed Harris’s perspective.
One Delta valedictorian used her high school graduation speech to warn that Roe would lead to “garbage cans full of aborted fetuses.”
Some states actively resisted the high court’s ruling: Rhode Island didn’t have an abortion clinic until 1975. But Mississippi and most other Deep South states did not, said historian Daniel K. Williams, who has researched the pro-life movement.
“In Mississippi at the time, the pro-life movement didn’t really have a very strong presence because in the early 1970s the pro-life movement was very Catholic and very Northern, and Mississippi had a pretty low Catholic population, considerably lower than neighboring Louisiana’s,” said Williams, a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. “So, as a result, it was somewhat unclear in the early 1970s which direction Mississippi would go on abortion.”
An editorial in the Greenwood Commonwealth published the week after the ruling sounded relieved to declare that the Court had “essentially resolved” the legal question over abortion.
“The Supreme Court has very broadly liberalized abortion law and in so doing brought years of controversy and litigation to an end,” the editorial concluded.
Nearly 50 years later, the state of Mississippi would claim before the Court that Roe was “egregiously wrong” and based on a flawed reading of U.S. history.
Left unexplained was Mississippi’s own unusual place in that story.
A resolution to the dispute between the state’s largest insurer and hospital is off to a slow start.
Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney said mediation between Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Medical Center has begun but is moving at a “snail’s pace” so far.
“Some preliminary groundwork has been set,” he said. “… I expect by Monday of next week, it’ll ramp up to full steam.”
While Chaney does not have authority to force the two parties to agree, he made a pointed statement: “I do have the authority to make them mediate. If either party tries to forestall or hinder mediation, they run the risk of damaging the University (of Mississippi) Medical Center possibly beyond repair. And they run the risk of damaging the health insurance side.”
Marc Rolph, Executive Director of Communications and Marketing at UMMC, told Mississippi Today that actual mediation will begin next week.
Blue Cross officials said they could not comment on mediation because it was confidential.
Frank Dungan poses for a portrait near Barnett Reservoir in Ridgeland, Miss., Tuesday, May 10, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Meanwhile, patients are still in the lurch. Frank Dungan of Madison is on the transplant list for a liver at UMMC. But because the hospital is out of network with his insurer, he has been marked “inactive” on the list.
Despite the insurance company directing him to go out of state and enroll in another transplant program. Dungan said he asked for his doctor to refer him to one of those transplant programs out of state, but the program never responded.
Dungan wants to stay at UMMC, where he has years-long relationships with his doctors. He wanted to know what it would cost him to stay there and get the procedure – but he was having no luck getting any numbers from either UMMC or Blue Cross.
After Chaney sent the letter, UMMC provided a cost estimate for the surgery to Dungan and Chaney, and representatives for Blue Cross provided an amount to Chaney. Both asked Dungan to keep the numbers confidential, he said, but he would have had to pay a significant amount to make up the difference in what the insurance company was willing to pay and what UMMC would charge.
There were further conversations between the two, Dungan said, but he never received anything in writing. He’s also been unable to get any cost estimates of what the immunosuppressants post-surgery would cost.
Two weeks after the communication from Blue Cross and UMMC, he’s dealing with additional medical problems.
Dungan’s knees locked up and began swelling. He couldn’t walk, which led him to the emergency room and later received injections of steroids. Now, he’s trying to figure out whether he’ll need surgery before he’s able to get a transplant.
He also discovered he again has an esophageal condition caused directly by his liver disease. The condition requires a procedure.
He’s frustrated that he’s having to see a provider outside of UMMC for his issues.
“It makes it more difficult, it makes it more complex for me to schedule and keep up with my health care appointments,” he said. “I’m sure they’re doing the best they can to communicate, but it’s two different systems.”
Chaney’s office is continuing to hear from Mississippians with questions about the dispute – including those who receive care that can only be found at UMMC – and what it means for their medical care.
Chaney said he is trying to work with individuals on a case-by-case basis, particularly those who use Children’s of Mississippi or who are on the organ transplant list.
While pandemic child tax credits meaningfully reduced financial stress for Mississippi families, federal child care supports have been less effective than in other states because of poor administration, a new report finds.
Researchers at The Center for the Study of Social Policy surveyed and interviewed Mississippi parents and child care providers to understand the impact of federal stimulus efforts, namely the increased child tax credit and stabilization grants to child care centers. The authors found that while the child tax credit payments meaningfully eased financial burdens for families, grants for child care centers experienced a delayed rollout and providers have struggled from a lack of clear spending guidelines.
The state received $319 million in federal funds for stabilization grants, which were meant to steady an industry that had experienced significant COVID-19 disruptions. Data from the 2021 Mississippi Child Care Market Rate Survey showed that 72% of providers closed at some point due to COVID-19, 80% had reduced enrollment, and 78% lost revenue.
Despite this, the Department of Human Services (DHS), the agency that administers the stabilization grants and has recently been embroiled in scandal, did not seek input from stakeholders when creating the process and has changed the rules of the program multiple times, according to providers and advocates interviewed in the report.
“When we talked to stakeholders who have worked on child care for decades in Mississippi, most really pointed to issues around the limited capacity of the state agency to administer the funding,” Elisa Minoff, one of the report authors, told Mississippi Today.
Minoff said that other states they looked at brought stakeholders into the conversation sooner to decide how to spend the stimulus funds, and created clearer guidelines and schedules for spending the money and what types of reporting were expected. She also said that for states with limited capacity like Mississippi, the federal government should be providing more support to ensure these programs run smoothly.
Democratic state lawmakers held a hearing with DHS last month after advocates complained that the agency was not adequately answering questions from providers.
Carol Burnett, director of the Low Income Child Care Initiative, spoke at the hearing addressing the issues with the short grant period of six months and the need for more technical assistance. DHS Director Bob Anderson responded to the concerns voiced at the hearing by saying that the agency cannot “take providers by the hand.”
“I felt like (Anderson’s comment) was dismissive of the genuine desire on the part of providers to be compliant, and a desire to know for sure if what they planned to do with the money was acceptable,” Burnett said. “Given the recent fiasco at DHS, you would think that they would be equally as eager to make sure that this grant program goes well.”
Despite issues with the child care stabilization grants, the report found that the expansion of the child tax credit was an effective method of decreasing financial insecurity and pointed to other research that it could cut child poverty in Mississippi in half if made permanent. The expansion of the tax credit meant that 351,000 children in Mississippi who were previously ineligible could receive benefits last year.
Approximately 86% of Mississippi children benefited from the credit in 2021, with the average monthly payment amounting to $439 per family, according to U.S. Department of Treasury data.
Parents reported spending their credit on basic necessities, with the top five uses of the expanded payments being food and groceries, clothing, internet and utility bills, rent or mortgage, and child care. The majority of parents surveyed — 61% — said the credit reduced daily financial anxiety and 25% said it reduced the financial anxiety of their children.
One parent interviewed for the report explained the usefulness of the credit, saying, “What people fail to realize is, I have a bachelor’s degree. I have a stable job. I wish I could just open up to some people like, ‘I need help.’ It might not be forever, but if I had two or three years of [government programs] to let me get higher, what’s wrong with that if our government has it. Our government spends a lot of money on a lot of stuff…That’s something that just gets on my nerves— [people say] ‘Get up and get a job.’ I got one.”
The credit was automatically available to anyone who had filed a tax return with dependents last year, but people who didn’t file taxes were still able to sign up. The authors pointed out that the ease of accessing the funds was part of what made the credit so successful, especially when compared to other government assistance.
“The saying goes, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and that’s really true,” Minoff said. “But parents have really been doing it on their own for so long without enough support from society. With the federal investments that we saw last year, it was an indication of what could happen if we move towards providing families those holistic supports they need.”
HATTIESBURG – Nothing was easy. Nothing ever is for Southern Miss, no matter the sport, no matter the venue.
But Scott Berry’s Golden Eagles achieved on a hot, muggy Monday afternoon what had seemed nearly impossible late Saturday night. They defeated the LSU Tigers 8-7, erasing a 4-1 deficit, to claim the championship of the Hattiesburg NCAA Regional. In doing so, they sent a highly partisan home crowd at Pete Taylor Park into something bordering on delirium.
Rick Cleveland
The victory – or victories – set up a monster of a Super Regional this coming weekend when Ole Miss, winner of the Coral Gables Regional, comes to town.
After the last pitch, Southern Miss players charged the infield where they piled on to one another. Then they headed for Pete Taylor Park’s Right Field Roost where they literally climbed the outfield wall to high-five with celebrating fans. Still an hour after the game, sweat-soaked fans lingered, soaking in the moment, lavishing in what their favorite team had achieved.
They had achieved so much. After LSU erased a four-run deficit and knocked the Eagles into the losers bracket Saturday night, Southern Miss had to win three straight games a matter of 30 hours. They had to beat LSU twice.
“I’m so proud, I’m just so proud,” Berry said, rubbing his bald head, his eyes misting.
If he said it once, he said it 20 times– “I’m just so proud” – during a series of post-game interviews. He said he was proud for his players, proud for his coaches, proud for the thousands of fans who were still in the stands cheering. And he said, the emotion showing clearly in his tearing eyes, he was proud of the joy he knew the victory brings to his old boss, Corky Palmer, who because medical issues due to a massive stroke listens to the USM games these days on a radio in a Collins medical facility.
“I know how much this means to him,” Berry said. “I just wish he could be here to enjoy this. Man, he would enjoy this.”
Heroes were plenty. Christopher Sargent, the MVP of the Regional, provided three more hits, scored two runs and knocked in another. Danny Lynch and Gabe Montenegro also hit safely three times. Montenegro batted in three runs, including two on his clutch single in the seventh that scored two of the Eagles’ four runs in that crucial inning. Shortstop Dustin Dickerson made play after superb defensive play.
But the biggest hero was the largest Golden Eagle, 6-foot-9-inch Tyler Stuart, who entered with the game on the line in the eighth inning. LSU had tied the score at 7 and had a runner on base with two outs and the most dangerous part of the Tigers’ batting order coming to the plate. Stuart got Jacob Berry to ground out for the last out of the eighth.
Then after USM plated the go-ahead run in the ninth, Stuart retired Cade Doughty, Tre’ Morgan and Jordan Thompson – who had combined for six hits and five RBIs. Doughty and Moran grounded out and then Thompson struck out.
Stuart went right at them, throwing 95- and 96-mph fast balls – as if to say: “Here comes the heat, let’s see what you got.”
“Nothing but fast balls,” Stuart would say later. “That’s all I threw.”
That game-winning, ninth inning run? Sargent led off the inning with a two-strike single to center field. That brought up Slade Wilkes who lined a single to right field, moving Sargent all the way to third. Lynch followed with a high fly ball to left field, easily scoring Sargent from third.
That was all that Stuart would need. What Justin Storm had done the night before, holding the dangerous Tigers in check, Stuart did Monday.
Said Lynch, who was in the same USM signing class as Stuart three years ago, “Nobody has worked harder for this moment that Stu. Even when he wasn’t getting the chance to pitch as much as he wanted, he never stopped working. Even when he had Tommy John surgery, he just kept working. I couldn’t be happier for him.”
Berry smiled and nodded, as he listened to Lynch talk about his teammate.
“You have to do a lot of things right to win a baseball game,” Berry said. “We did a lot of things right out there today, and in two games yesterday.”
Really, Southern Miss had only one bad inning in the tournament, when LSU rallied to win the game Saturday night.
“You don’t win 47 games unless you do a lot of things right,” Berry said. “You don’t win 47 games unless you have the kind of chemistry this team has.”
Southern Miss will take a 47-17 record into the Super Regional against an Ole Miss team, once ranked No. 1 in the country, which is playing its best baseball currently. The Rebels came to Hattiesburg late in the season to win a mid-week game. The two teams split their two regular season games.
The Hattiesburg Super Regional will be a matchup of mutual respect. Bianco and Berry are good friends.
“In my mind, Mike Bianco is responsible for building that Ole Miss program into one of the most respected in the country,” Berry said. “They ought to build a statue of him outside that stadium. He came to Ole Miss the same year I came to Southern Miss (as Palmer’s assistant.) I’ve watched it happen. It’s just amazing what he has achieved.”
Berry said he expects the Super Regional to be a celebration of Mississippi baseball.
“No other state loves its college baseball like the people of Mississippi,” Berry said. “You look at Mississippi State last year. You look at the attendance figures at all three schools year after year after year.
“This will be an amazing atmosphere. Heck, this was an amazing atmosphere this week. What a tournament. What a performance by our guys. Again, I couldn’t be more proud.”
After giving birth to her first child in a hospital in January 2019, Jasmine Williams knew she never wanted to go through that experience again.
The constant flow of doctors and nurses entering and leaving her room, the needles and beeping machines only added extra stress to a situation that’s intense enough on its own, she said.
The worst part for Williams was the epidural, where anesthetic is injected into the space around the spinal nerves in the lower back to block the pain from contractions. The procedure numbed Williams and made her feel like she was just a passenger for her own delivery.
“I didn’t necessarily know what the doctors and nurses were down there doing,” Williams, who lives in Jackson, said. “I couldn’t feel anything, and that scared me.”
When she got pregnant again later that year, Williams decided to look into another option: home birth. She was living in Georgia at the time and contacted Meka Hall, a local midwife, and was told she could safely deliver a baby from the comfort of her home and avoid the negative experiences she’d had with her first birth. It’s an option she wished known about the first time around.
“Everything was so new, and the only thing that I knew to do was to go to the hospital,” Wiliams said.
The relationship Williams and her husband, Jabriel, developed with Hall was much closer than any they’d had with hospital staff during her first delivery.
Williams also appreciated the ability to have a water birth, where at least part of a mother’s labor, delivery or both occur in a birthing pool filled with warm water. Williams says it helped greatly with the pain of cramping caused by contractions.
“I was a lot more present,” Williams said. “It was a lot more intimate. You actually know what’s going on.”
The home birthing experience was much smoother for Williams, and she hasn’t looked back since. After moving back to Mississippi and becoming pregnant with her third child in 2021, Williams decided to enlist the help of the Jackson-based nonprofit public health organization, Sisters in Birth, for her second home birth.
Sisters in Birth (SIB) pairs community health workers with low-income women, primarily Medicaid beneficiaries, to provide support during and after their pregnancies. SIB uses evidence-based practices with the goal of reducing birth disparities in Mississippi.
A community health worker visited Williams at home each week to make sure she was attending all her prenatal care visits, eating well and exercising regularly.
“It was a very big help and kept me on track (for a healthy home birth),” Williams said.
When she gave birth in September 2021, a Mississippi-based midwife helped her through the process while Hall, the Georgia midwife she used before, tuned in via Zoom. The actual delivery only took a few minutes, as compared to an hours-long delivery process for her hospital birth.
Now, Getty Israel, SIB’s founder and program director, wants to expand on the work done by her organization by opening Mississippi’s first birth center. The centers serve women with low-risk pregnancies and act as a compromise between hospital births and home births.
“Women deserve to have an alternative to the hospital setting,” Israel said. “I have patients who said they’re going to deliver at home with or without a midwife. And I have patients who have delivered at home without a provider being there. They did so safely, but they shouldn’t have to.”
The number of birth centers in the United States has more than doubled in the last decade. As of January 2021, there were 400 birth centers across 40 states and the District of Columbia, according to the American Association of Birth Centers. Mississippi is one of the 10 states without one.
“We’re so far behind (in Mississippi). This should have happened 40 years ago,” Yolanda Davis, a community health worker at SIB, said.
If SIB were to open a birth center, the organization would need a transfer agreement with a hospital so that patients could be moved to a hospital setting in the case of an emergency. The group currently has a memorandum of understanding with University of Mississippi Medical Center, a nonbinding agreement that states the two parties intend to form a partnership. Israel says the agreement will be made official if SIB opens the birth center.
UMMC officials declined to answer questions about the medical community’s perception of home births and birth centers.
Birth centers remain controversial due to conflicting accounts of safety. Not yet peer-reviewed research presented at The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) conference in 2021 showed that birth center deliveries are associated with a higher risk of infant death and seizures than hospital births attended by midwives.
On the other hand, a government-financed study in 2012 found that Medicaid beneficiaries who used birth centers saw lower rates of preterm birth, low birthweight and cesarean deliveries (C-sections) when compared to other Medicaid participants who gave birth.
The lack of regulation around midwifery care in Mississippi also adds risk to births outside of the hospital setting, as anyone can claim to be a midwife, even if they lack formal training and experience. Because of the lack of regulation, midwives who lost their right to practice midwifery in other states are free to work in Mississippi.
Mississippi is one of 14 states and the District of Columbia that does not regulate or license direct-entry midwives, who have become credentialed without first becoming a nurse. However, certified nurse-midwives are licensed as advanced practice registered nurses.
Melinda Thigpen, a direct-entry midwife from Bay Springs who has attended an estimated 300 to 400 births since 1999, said that the lack of regulation does present dangers, but that it also grants midwives freedom in how they practice.
“The regulation of midwives in Mississippi would mean that we were able to weed out those who just simply call themselves midwives, but do not have actual formal training … that would be beneficial,” Thigpen said. “But on the flip side, if we as midwives lose our autonomy, then our clients also lose their autonomy. The care that we’re able to give is dictated rather than individualized.”
Though the number of home births has increased in recent years, the vast majority of births still occur in the hospital setting. Of the more than 35,000 births Mississippi recorded in 2020, just 152, or 0.42%, were intended home births, according to CDC data.
Nicholas Jackson, left, and Skyler Jackson participate in a birthing exercise during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Community Health Director Yolanda Davis, center, shows Alicia Conley, left, and Skyler Jackson how to relieve back pain during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Nicholas Jackson, left, and Skyler Jackson listen as Community Health Director Yolanda Davis gives instructions on various birth-related exercises at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Alicia Conley rubs her stomach while exercising on a birthing ball during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Alicia Conley exercises during a childbirth prep class at Sister in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Nicholas Jackson, from left, Skyler Jackson, Alicia Conley and Kayla Davis listen as Community Health Director Yolanda Davis gives instructions during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. The class teaches husbands and partners to be doulas. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Skyler Jackson exercises on a birthing ball during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Community Health Director Yolanda Davis, left, shows Kayla Davis, center, Skyler Jackson how to relieve back pain during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. The class teaches husbands and partners to be doulas. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Kayla Davis takes notes during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Community Health Director Yolanda Davis talks about the differences between breastfeeding and bottle feeding during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Community Health Director Yolanda Davis shows an illustration of the pregnancy timeline during a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Getty Israel, founder and CEO of Sisters in Birth Inc., left, and Community Health Director Yolanda Davis pose for a portrait at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Friday, May 27, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Community Health Director Yolanda Davis, left, leads a childbirth prep class at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. The class teaches husbands and partners to be doulas. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Skyler Jackson, right, listens as Community Health Director Yolanda Davis gives instructions on various birth-related exercises at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. The class teaches husbands and partners to be doulas. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Kayla Davis completes a birth-related exercise at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, June 4, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Israel is currently looking at land in rural areas of Hinds County to purchase for the center, both because the land itself will be cheap and so the center can qualify as a rural health clinic. This would make it somewhat of an outlier among birth centers, as they often avoid locating in rural, low-income areas due to high out-of-pocket costs and low reimbursement rates from Medicaid and private insurers.
Israel estimates it will cost $3 million to make the center fully operational. That estimate includes $250,000 for land and $1,000,000 to build the center. The remainder will go toward hiring midwives and community health workers. She’s hoping that purchasing the land soon will help with fundraising efforts to get the center built.
“Having a plot of land with a sign that says ‘birth center coming soon’ makes it more real for people,” Israel said.
Israel began publicly fundraising for the birth center after several attempts to get state COVID-19 relief funding failed. State Sen. Albert Butler, D-Port Gibson, read a proposal for funding she submitted to the Legislature and then introduced a bill that would have given Sisters in Birth $1.5 million from the state’s Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Funds. The bill died in the appropriations committee.
Efforts to federally fund birth centers have also failed to gain steam. The BABIES Act would require the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to establish a prospective payment system (PPS) that would reimburse birth centers for prenatal, perinatal and postpartum care for mothers and infants.
The BABIES Act was introduced both in 2019 and 2021, but never advanced. U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson was the only congressman from Mississippi to co-sponsor the legislation, though Israel says she lobbied the state’s three Republican congressmen to support the bill.
Since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, there has been an increase in rhetoric among politicians at the state and national levels about the need to increase support for pregnant moms and babies. In Mississippi, the rhetoric has for the most part not been matched by policy proposals.
In March, Speaker of the House Philip Gunn killed legislation that would have extended health care coverage for new moms from 60 days to one year. About 60% of births in Mississippi are covered by Medicaid, one of the highest percentages in the nation.
“Those pro-life legislators, those hypocrites, who want to make sure women don’t have an abortion, but they won’t support something as simple as a birthing center so they can have a healthy birth – what are they talking about?” Israel said. “If we really care about saving the lives of babies, you’d want to give them access to a midwife.”
Mississippi is consistently ranked as one of the worst states to have a baby due to its poor health care system. More children born in Mississippi, per capita, do not live to see their first birthday than anywhere else in the nation. Mississippi’s infant mortality rate is the highest in the nation at 8.27 deaths per 1,000 live births.
The state also has the highest rate in the nation of children living in extreme poverty.
Mississippi mothers die in 33.2 of every 100,000 births — nearly two times higher than the U.S. average. Black moms in the state are three times more likely to die than white moms. Many experts believe Mississippi’s lack of prenatal care contributes greatly to this statistic.
Israel said that the work SIB and other organizations in Mississippi do to tackle birth disparities is undervalued and overlooked by political leaders. The work they’re doing saves taxpayer money, but they get no investment in return.
“When we prevent one premature baby, we’re saving the state a hell of a lot of money,” Israel said.
Two of the organization’s largest goals are reducing the rates of C-sections and labor induction, both of which increase the risk of further birth and recovery complications.
Israel views medically unnecessary inductions of labor as a harmful intervention of a natural process.
“It’s about the doctor’s schedule and not about nature’s schedule,” Israel said.
C-sections can save the lives of mothers and babies during dangerous deliveries caused by conditions such placenta previa, where the opening of the cervix is obstructed, or when a baby is in a breech position. However, C-sections come with greater risks than vaginal births, including a higher risk of death.
Even a relatively uncomplicated C-section comes with a longer and more difficult recovery for mothers than a vaginal birth.
C-section deliveries are thought to be overused in the United States. Since 1985, the World Health Organization has considered the ideal rate for C-section births to be between 10% to 15%. More than 31% of all deliveries in the U.S. were by C-section in 2020 and 25.6% of low-risk pregnancies resulted in a C-section, according to data from the CDC.
The prevalence of C-sections is higher in Mississippi. C-sections were used during 38.5% of births in Mississippi in 2020, giving the state the highest rate in the nation for these deliveries. According to the Mississippi maternal mortality review committee’s 2019 report, 65% of women who died after giving birth delivered by repeat C-section.
In Israel’s view, the overuse of C-section deliveries is motivated by financial incentives and expediency.
“C-sections are a cash cow for hospitals,” Israel said. “With induction and C-sections, doctors often do not have a discussion with Black women about this. They don’t engage them and allow them to help make that medical decision. They just decide for them.”
According to a report released in May 2020 by Health Care Cost Institute, average spending for a C-section birth was nearly $5,000 higher than spending for a vaginal birth for people with employer-sponsored insurance. Physicians are paid on average 15% more for a C-section than a vaginal delivery.
Studies have also shown that during the work week, non-medical factors appear to affect the time of deliveries. C-sections spike around morning, lunchtime, and the end of the day, which some see as evidence that doctor’s decisions are motivated, at least in part, by scheduling conflicts rather than purely medical considerations.
Thigpen says that popular misconceptions about what a midwife does is a factor in their work being undervalued by politicians and the general public.
“I tell people all the time, they don’t hire me just to blow up a pool, light candles or rub their back,” Thigpen said. “They hire me for the very few times where something does come up that is more concerning, and that’s when I jump in to use the skills that I’ve learned.”
Thigpen also thinks that there’s a fundamental difference between how doctors and midwives view the birthing process. She’s grateful for hospitals and doctors but believes that the medical community needs to do a better job of accepting those differences and working with midwives to help ensure better outcomes, no matter what delivery method a mother chooses.
“The medical community tends to look at birth as a medical event that may occasionally happen naturally,” Thigpen said. “And as a midwife, I look at birth as a natural event that may occasionally need medical help.”
Mississippi’s medical marijuana license portal is shy of a week old but more than 1,800 people have already registered for online accounts to apply for licenses, the state Department of Health announced Monday.
“If you can shop on Amazon you can probably work through the portal,” said Kris Jones, the director of Mississippi’s new medical marijuana program.
The program is still in its early stages and leaders don’t expect medical marijuana to be available to purchase for another six months.
“I know everyone would love for it to be up in running,” said Jim Craig, the director of the Office of Health Protection. “It looks like it will be the end of the year that we see products.”
About 85% of those who have made accounts on the new portal are patients seeking cannabis treatment. But 15 businesses and nine medical practitioners have completed their applications, Jones said during a Monday press conference. A dozen people have also submitted applications for work permits, which are required for marijuana-related jobs.
The new portal is the first step for patients to eventually receive a medical marijuana card; for doctors, optometrists and nurse practitioners to become certified providers; for facilities to receive licensing to grow, process and test marijuana; and for businesses and their workers to become certified to transport cannabis and dispose of its waste.
The portal does not handle applications for those hoping to open dispensaries. Those applications will be processed by the Mississippi Department of Revenue. The department is scheduled to begin accepting those applications on July 1.
Jones said all applications that have come through the portal are still under review and the number of applications is growing daily.
While hopeful medical marijuana patients can make accounts and begin the application process through the new portal, none of them can receive their license to buy medical cannabis until they’ve met with a certified doctor or practitioner.
No one is certified yet to offer that care but doctors’ applications will be processed within 30 days, according to the program’s rules. Jones said approved providers and dispensaries will eventually be listed on the health department website to assist patients.
Craig touted the regulation requirements deployed to manage the state’s processing labs, which are among the businesses that can now apply to be licensed. These labs will test THC levels – the chemical in marijuana that produces the feeling of being high – as well as for possible contaminants in products.
Craig called this one of the key pieces to product safety in the state. Another safety measure is limiting advertising and marketing options so medical marijuana “isn’t something very attractive to kids,” Craig said.
Medical marjinaua businesses cannot be on social media, for example. Businesses are limited to creating just a website and logo.
