The Mississippi State Department of Health has now identified six cases of monkeypox across the state.
The monkeypox virus has spread to dozens of countries and infected thousands worldwide since the outbreak began in May. Since Mississippi reported its first case on July 25, the number of nationwide cases has more than doubled. As of Aug. 5, there were 7,510 monkeypox cases in the U.S., according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.
The monkeypox virus, which is part of the same family of viruses as smallpox, has not caused any deaths but does produce painful symptoms. Nearly all infections outside Africa have occurred among men who have sex with men.
Transmission often occurs through close skin-to-skin contact with an infected person. Airborne transmission also occurs during prolonged close contact with an infected person.
“Regardless of your gender, regardless of your sexual orientation, anybody can get monkeypox,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Byers said.
Mississippi’s initial allotment of the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine included enough doses to inoculate 300 people. Due to the limited supply, the vaccine is only available to direct contacts of infected people. Byers said that the department is looking at making vaccines available to people who have had multiple sexual partners.
However, health department officials are unsure how many more doses the state will receive through the rest of 2022.
“We have so few doses right now that it’s very hard for us to expand our vaccination efforts beyond trying to make sure that we vaccinate those known contacts,” Byers said.
The Biden administration declared the monkeypox outbreak a national health emergency on Aug. 4. In addition to increasing public awareness of the virus, the declaration frees up federal funding for the further creation and vetting of medical treatments.
The World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global public health emergency on July 23, the first time it has taken this step since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. monkeypox, COVID-19 and polio are the only diseases that have this designation.
Symptoms of monkeypox can include: fever, headache, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. Infected persons often experience a rash that looks like pimples or blisters that appear on many parts of the body. The illness typically lasts for two to four weeks.
Lindsey Trinh, a senior journalism student at the University of Mississippi, said she won’t be going back to school in person this fall after the killing of Jimmie “Jay” Lee. Credit: Courtesy Lindsey Trinh
Lindsey Trinh wiped her tearful eyes with the collar of her navy blue Ole Miss T-shirt as she described the fear and anxiety she has experienced in the month since police announced a student had been charged with the murder of Jimmie “Jay” Lee.
Trinh had only known Lee from class, but the 27-year-old journalism student, who is gay and Vietnamese, knew what it was like to live with an identity held by few others in Mississippi – and to be recognizable for it.
At home in Biloxi, she thought about going back to Oxford for her last semester. She had been looking forward to finally graduating; to dancing at Code Pink, a local drag show; and to walking around the Square holding her girlfriend’s hand. Now she started to wonder, what would happen if she went missing?
“Oxford felt like such a welcoming community, that when this happened, and this news came out, it felt like the whole world, the whole city, is against you now,” Trinh said.
The day after Sheldon Timothy Herrington’s initial appearance, Trinh made a decision. She opened her laptop and started writing an email informing the university provost and her journalism school advisers that she wouldn’t be returning to Oxford for the fall semester.
“I have had an immense amount of frustration, stress and anxiety from the lack of information, Jay’s unfound body disposed in the area and the injustice for his family, friends and all of Oxford’s hurting LGBTQ+ community,” she began, “including myself.”
“At the time and because of the unknown of why this has happened to Jay and the whereabouts of his body, I have decided that I cannot physically come back to Oxford for my last semester this Fall,” Trinh added. “I fear for my safety and well-being as an outspoken and proud gay person of color.”
Trinh is not the only LGBTQ student considering not returning to UM this fall in the wake of Lee’s disappearance and death. As court proceedings for Herrington have begun, the community is grieving and trying to understand how someone like Lee could go missing.
“It doesn’t feel real, especially since they haven’t found his body,” said Braylyn Johnson, a UM student who was roommates with Lee during the pandemic.
Eleven LGBTQ students, faculty and alumni told Mississippi Today they now fear for the community’s safety in Oxford, a town known for being more inclusive than most in Mississippi. Many also worry that Lee’s killing will lead community members, seeking safety from violence and harassment, to conceal their sexuality or gender identity.
“You never know, especially within our community, who becomes a target when you are free,” Blake Summers, a co-founder of Code Pink, told Mississippi Today at a rally for Lee on July 21.
Trinh said that Lee’s killing makes her worried “the generation after me,” including her 10-year-old brother, who loves Lil Nas X.
“He knows that Lil Nas is gay,” Trinh said. “He told me that being gay is normal. When I heard about Jay’s killing, I thought about my little brother and his friends and how some of them will probably never be comfortable with being themselves because of the society we live in.”
Since the Oxford Police Department arrested Herrington for Lee’s murder two weeks ago, local law enforcement has not released any new information about the case, compounding anxiety in the community.
Jaime Harker – the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at UM and the owner of Violet Valley, a feminist bookstore near Oxford – said she knows of at least one community member who is afraid to leave their house due to rumors about the nature and reason for Lee’s killing.
Harker said that she understands prosecutors need to act in a way that will ensure a conviction, but she wishes authorities would take steps to tamp down on the fear and help the LBGTQ community make informed decisions about their safety.
“I think people are filling the void with what their biggest fears are,” she said.
At the Lafayette County Courthouse on July 27, protesters hoped that Herrington’s initial appearance would provide some answers, but he was sent back to jail pending a bond hearing this week.Herrington has not yet entered a plea, but attorney Carlos Moore, his uncle who is retained in the case, has said he believes the 22-year-old is innocent.
Jose Reyes,one of Lee’s friends at UM, was standing in the shade of a tree near the courthouse after law enforcement escorted Herrington back to jail. Reyes said he views justice for Lee as Herrington going to prison for “as long as possible,” but that he’s anxious about the route the court case might take.
“I don’t want this happening to anyone else,” Reyes said, “and if we let him get away with it, it just shows how easy someone can go missing and be murdered, and no one’s going to do anything about it.”
Reyes and many members of the community, even those who did not know Lee personally, are determined not to let his killing pass by like that of so many other cases of missing and murdered Black trans and non-binary people.
“Justice for Jay Lee!,” an Instagram page started the weekend that Herrington was arrested, now has more than 2,000 followers. The page has called on the Oxford community to protest outside court proceedings and is organizing a fundraiser with Code Pink for Lee’s family – the “Jayoncé Benefit Night” – for Aug. 11 at Proud Larry’s, a local bar.
“We send our condolences to the family and friends of the victim,” read the caption of the page’s first post. “The entire world is watching Oxford, Mississippi to make sure that Jay Lee’s family gets the justice that they deserve.”
The community’s fears are magnified by the backdrop of a national backlash that Harker said she hasn’t seen since the 1980s, when she was a teenager.
Trinh, who transferred to UM from community college in 2020, initially worried she would get into “arguments with people all the time.” But she decided it would make her tougher. A first-generation student, Trinh sometimes felt like she was expected to entertain or educate her peers in class, even though she was at UM to get an education herself.
She recalled taking a political science class with Lee and reading his outspoken discussion posts. He was “opinionated,” she said, “but in a way that he was proud of what he thought.”
Sometimes, Trinh would reply to Lee’s posts: “I love that you mentioned this, because being here at Ole Miss, a lot of people don’t think the way that most of us in the LGBTQ community think or people of color think.”
The day after Trinh sent her email to the university, she was in the car on the way to Destin, Fla., for a family vacation with her girlfriend when she received a reply from Julie Glasco, the assistant to the provost. She read the email’s opening lines with a pit in her stomach.
“Thank you for reaching out to our office, expressing your concerns, and sharing your challenges as a student,” it began. “This has been an extremely upsetting time for our campus community.”
“Please know that you have resources available. Chancellor Boyce shared a message with the community last week offering a list of services and resources available. I’m providing the list below for you to access quickly,” Glasco continued, adding that she had cc’d the university’s vice chancellors for diversity and community engagement and student affairs and the dean of the journalism school.
Her first thought, Trinh said, was that the provost’s office hadn’t listened to what she was saying. She said the reply had “no sentiment.” In an Instagram story, she called the list that Glasco appended just a “quick copy + paste.”
“I was like, oh my god, they literally don’t care. They don’t care,” she said. “I can’t go back, because I feel like, if they don’t care about Jay’s case, then what does that say for the rest of us?”
Trinh is now waiting for the university to give her a new fall schedule that will allow her to take online classes and graduate on time. She’ll have to go back to Oxford one last time to empty her apartment. Then she’s moving to California – her job, a company that sells Tesla accessories is there, and so is a community she perceives to be less dangerous than Mississippi.
Without more information, she said that’s the only way she’ll feel safe.
“None of us knows what happened to Jay – we don’t know if it’s racially motivated or if it was homophobic,” she said, “They can’t sugarcoat that, because we’ve got to know. At the end of the day, we have to protect ourselves.”
Federally contracted call center workers are striking in Hattiesburg for the third time this year — this time, taking aim at bathroom breaks and time off policies related to COVID-19.
Some of the latest criticisms come from workers who take CDC information calls and say the call center isn’t giving workers the proper time off if they test positive for COVID-19.
“Right now, some of us only get one day of paid leave when we test positive for COVID-19, even though the CDC recommends that anyone who tests positive for COVID quarantine for at least five days,” Hattiesburg worker Jennifer Dundit said in a statement. “Therefore, if we don’t have any accrued time off, we might be unable to properly quarantine to recover and help prevent community spread.”
In a statement, Maximus said it follows the CDC’s workplace guidelines. Workers, the company says, have “24 hours of paid administrative leave,” which equates to three eight-hour shifts, if they test positive. But call center workers told Mississippi Today they only get one day off before having to dip into their earned time off – and that’s if they’ve accrued it. Often, they say, workers have to take unpaid time off while isolating – something they usually cannot afford.
Maximus’ Hattiesburg workers are about 80% female, according to union group Call Center Workers United. Despite the largely female workforce, workers say in addition to poor time-off policies they’re also given strict six-minute bathroom break rules outside of their allotted 15-minute breaks and 30-minute lunches. After the story published, Maximus clarified that “bathroom breaks are allowed for everyone and can be longer than 6 minutes if needed.”
“We need more than six minutes to use the bathroom,” Dundit said, “and should not have to risk discipline or shame for doing so.”
Maximus did not respond directly to the bathroom-break allegations, instead pointing out workers get two short breaks and one long lunch break during an 8-hour workday.
Since March, workers have called out Maximus for exorbitant health insurance costs. Workers have told Mississippi Today they struggle to stretch their paychecks to cover food, bills and basic medical costs.
Call Center Workers United recently announced a new “solidarity fund” to help support workers who choose to walk off the job in protest of working conditions.
Maximus cut health insurance deductibles from $4,500 to $2,500 since workers began speaking out. Maximus has said it meets regularly with employees to address issues and has a hotline where workers can report complaints anonymously.
“We welcome the opportunity to work directly with our employees and discuss and hopefully resolve their concerns,” Maximus told Mississippi Today after May’s protest. “We respect our employees’ legal right to attempt to organize, and any information we provide is designed to help them make an informed decision about union representation.”
Clarification 8/8/22: This story was updated with more detail about Maximus’ COVID-19 leave and bathroom break policies.
Have you ever wanted to relive your old memories? What would it mean if you could?
Jennifer Egan Credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem
In “The Candy House,” author Jennifer Egan imagines a technology — Own Your Unconscious — that allows users to upload all of their memories into a cube-shaped hard drive and review them with a headset. The technology evolves into the Collective Conscious, a shared database of memories anyone can access for the price of their own consciousness being added to the collective.
The novel exists in the same universe as Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning hit, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” but shifts the focus to new characters and the way the Collective Conscious reshapes their life. “The Candy House”is also written in the same structure as its predecessor — each chapter is an individual unit with its own style, and chapters jump back and forth across time, but loosely connect.
Egan, who will be appearing as a featured guest at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 20, spoke with Mississippi Today about her newest work.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited for clarity and length.
Mississippi Today: I didn’t realize when I started it that “The Candy House” is a sort of sister novel to “A Visit From the Goon Squad” — another book to add to my reading list.
Jennifer Egan: I actually think that going in the direction that you’re going, starting with “The Candy House,” I think is optimal. It’s not a sequel, it’s just a related world.
MT: I’m curious, why do you think that’s optimal?
Egan: Well, I’ll back up a little, I had originally thought that “A Visit From the Good Squad,” would go in a backwards chronology. That ended up not working very well, so I ended up having no chronology, just organizing it around curiosity. But the reason I thought it would go backwards was that I was really delighted with the kind of unexpected surprise of, instead of saying, “Gee what’s gonna happen?” you’re saying, “Oh, what was that like?” So a kind of backwards pattern of curiosity, having curiosity be satisfied backwards instead of forwards.
I was very interested in that because there are all kinds of advantages that it gives the reader. The reader already knows the future, so the reader experiences the present with a particular character in a very different way than we do if we’re just wondering, “Gee, what’s gonna happen?” as the character is. That kind of relationship to time and narrative has been exciting to me from the very start. I couldn’t make it work in a straight backwards chronology, but it’s my general feeling that in books like this, finding out what did happen is as fun or more fun than finding out what will happen. That’s what makes me think starting with “The Candy House” would be more satisfying. It’s not a neat sequence. But I think that those surprises of hearing about events that came and went and then being plunged into the middle of them, that particular form of surprise and satisfaction is going to be more present going from “Candy House” to “Goon Squad” than the other way around.
MT: But in terms of the chronology of your experience of writing these books, you were choosing to return to this world, even if not really continuing the narrative that you had before. How did you decide to do that?
Egan: Well, another aspect of books constructed this way is that there’s no real end to them exactly. There’s a story arc in both books for sure, but because they’re such ensemble creations and each character has its own constellation of history, people, experience, et cetera, and new peripheral characters to be curious about and turn into major characters, there’s no clear end to it except the exhaustion of curiosity. That’s what would put an end to it, the exhaustion of my curiosity. That definitely had not happened after “Goon Squad.”
… Beyond just the kind of structural curiosity that is built into books like this, another reason that I think I was so eager to continue is that there’s a high failure ratio writing books like this. In other words, I would say about 50% of the first draft material that I created for both books really didn’t end up being viable. I think part of that is when you’re trying to take a different narrative approach every time, you’re going to strike out a lot. But what that means is sometimes I end up in a strange position of knowing things about my characters that the reader doesn’t know because I learned them in chapters that didn’t end up in the book. That’s sort of a strange feeling. Usually, in my books, I don’t know any more than I’m letting my readers know. I don’t withhold information. So that feeling of knowing things that the reader didn’t know led me to feel very naturally that this was stuff that I had to share in some way. These stories were not complete.
The final thing I would say is I really do love taking genres that are out there in the culture and using them to write fiction, and these kinds of books are a great way to do that. I wouldn’t want to have written an entire novel in Twitter at 140 characters, but it was a lot of fun to write one chapter like that. These books, if I can make them work, just become a really good vehicle for lots of development and experimentation on my own part.
MT: It sounds like a really exciting process personally that you work through when you’re building each chapter narrative and how they fit together.
Egan: It is. It’s a very intuitive process. It’s not cerebral — well, that’s not true. It’s an alternation between intuition and analysis. I rely on my intuition to come up with a very improvisational draft, and then I evaluate them very critically. That’s why 50% of it ends up on the cutting room floor, as they say. I take the best and try to work with that and shape it into something meaningful. So that’s my process. It’s an alternation, but I place a high value on intuition and improvisation. It’s where I get a lot of my best stuff.
MT: So, when you were saying that you were still curious about the characters 12 years ago, and that’s what drew you back to it — do you feel like you still have that curiosity?
Egan: I can’t totally tell, to be honest. There are definitely forms that I want to try. That list is still active — things that I haven’t done yet, or haven’t managed to pull off, frankly, that I hope I can. I am curious about certain characters, but I’m not sure the curiosity is at the fever pitch that it was after I finished “Goon Squad.” I think right now, I feel very eager to move away from the present day, which I did after “Goon Squad.” I wrote a historical novel set in the thirties and forties, which took a huge amount of research and was a very different kind of book told much more traditionally. Shipwreck, survival at sea, wartime, combat, I mean, it’s just really different. But I had written a bunch of first draft material for “The Candy House” before I kind of dove deeply into that book. This time, I think I’m going to move into writing about the past, possibly without dabbling anymore in these characters for a bit. I’m not quite sure why. I think part of it is writing about the present day feels inevitably like writing about technology, and I feel a little bit weary of that. I was after “Goon Squad” too, but more so this time.
MT: Well, technology plays a more central role in this book too.
Egan: And a more central role in our lives. That combination, I find it just wearisome in the end. I’m not anti-tech, I think that’s clear in this book, I take a pretty playful approach to it. It was a very useful tool, narratively, for me to engage with because it lets me do all kinds of things that I couldn’t have done otherwise. That was really how I arrived at the tech in the book. I did not start out with it. It was an invention that could do all the things I wanted it to do. But I also feel a real eagerness to move away from it, back to a time that I actually remember — no internet.
I was in my thirties before I ever got online. It’s really refreshing to imagine in the pre-internet period. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the internet. It does a million things for us, and it was a big help to me imaginatively in “The Candy House”, but the fact that all roads lead there just closes off a lot of dramatic possibilities. If you think about movies that involve technology, we spend more and more time staring at people clicking away on computers, and that’s not interesting dramatically. So the pleasure of going back in time is the pleasure of more dramatic situations that would be ridiculous now because these problems would be solved in ten minutes online.
MT: So the issue you were more interested in exploring in this book was more about memory than the tech. The tech was kind of just a tool to reach that question. Would you say that?
Egan: Not exactly, but obviously memory is a big part of it. I was interested in enabling connections and shared experience between people that was impossible without the machine, but my awareness of the machine came about very incrementally. For example, one of the early chapters I wrote was “Rhyme Scheme.” In it, Lincoln is trying to figure out how to make his colleague fall in love with him and he very briefly considers the idea that he could view her consciousness — that term gray grab was very instantaneous. I remember the moment when I wrote it and I thought, “oh, I see, I get what that is.” He has a way of being able to see inside her consciousness, so there must be some sort of sharing possibility there. That was my first inkling of what the device would be. And it just comes and goes, because he considers it and then immediately disregards it because there is clearly an interdiction against that. But that’s the kind of little clue that I got.
Then a moment when things became really clear was when I wrote the chapter called “What the Forest Remembers.” I started out with Lou and his pals going on this adventure to the marijuana farm, and then there came a moment where Charlene says “How could I possibly know all this?” and that was a moment where the machine really crystallized for me.
“Ah, I get it. She’s using a device that lets her see memories through other people’s eyes.” That was so exciting to me because it let me do something that you really can’t do in fiction that easily, which is to justify being in two people’s first-person viewpoints at the same time. I mean, of course, you can kind of do anything in fiction, but I love the idea of a technology that enabled and justified that.
Once I defined the machine and was really leaning into the way people fetishize the color that their cube is and etcetera, I would sometimes imagine myself giving one of these cubes a big kick and just having it disappear. Inside, there’s just the book that we’re holding in our hands. Because in a way, what I’m doing in the book is moving through a collective of different points of view and memories as I move through my 14 characters’ points of view.
MT: The end of the book and that image both seem to be an inclination towards fiction over tech, which I’m sure is natural as a writer, but I was curious if you agree with that.Egan: I would say that, as a general matter, we should spend less time looking at pictures and more time engaging with language. It’s important to keep our brains fit and pictures don’t do that. It’s a very lazy way of consuming information. I think we all feel that. Does anyone feel good after spending two hours scrolling on social media? I would love to hear from that person …
I don’t include watching a movie in that lazy category, but reading is different from all of this because there are no pictures. We have to supply them. Reading is harder to do if you fall out of the habit of doing it. And I think that we would all, and I include myself in this, be well advised to pick periods of the day when our phones are not near us, and it’s amazing how quickly you forget about them actually.
… I think that reading books is really important, not only for our mental fitness — there is a kind of learning and experience that we can have reading if we are fit, that we can’t have looking at pictures. It’s a very simple fact that’s inarguable.
Fiction is the only narrative art form that takes us authentically inside the minds and points of view of other people. If you are staring at a picture, you are, by definition, having the opposite experience. You are on the outside, anything the human in that picture tells you is performative. So I would argue that fiction still does something no other narrative art form can do. And therefore, it is worth staying fit in order to be able to have that experience.
MT: Do you worry there will be a day when the machine that you imagined or something similar becomes real and the experience of fiction becomes less relevant?
Egan: I think that there are so many other things to be frightened of if that machine ever came to pass that the disappearance of books is almost not even on the list. My assumption was that such a machine could not exist because we don’t understand the brain well enough, but people have been telling me since “The Candy House” came out that I’m actually wrong and that we are closer to that than I think. That is truly horrifying.
And I have to say, I think if that happened, a kind of resistance of the sort I’m imagining actually could be the response — where people are so unwilling to be represented in this collective that they actually might consider as radical a step as shedding their identities and starting over. That actually becomes imaginable to me if there is an online collective that contains actual consciousness. Right now, it contains performative consciousness, and inadvertent consciousness in the form of all the information we don’t realize we’ve given up as the price of access to A, B or C. But I really cannot fathom that such a machine could exist. I just don’t think we understand the brain well enough to replicate it. If we can’t fix mental illness, if we can’t solve schizophrenia and still don’t even understand what causes it, how on earth could we externalize consciousness? I truly don’t believe it.
MT: That feels funny though, for people to have told you since the book was released, that the impossibility you’ve created on purpose is actually possible.
Egan: It is funny. But I will say this. Sometimes things that seem ludicrously impossible do come to pass, and that is something I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Sometimes the ridiculous things do happen, but I share your feeling that this doesn’t even hold together as an idea if you look too closely, much to less a reality. One reason I think it feels so imminent is that to a certain degree, the internet already functions as a kind of collective consciousness, and that may be why all of this feels so possible. You can spend time on social media and learn an enormous amount about someone, far more than they probably realize. There is a collective of information. It’s not consciousness exactly, but it gets a lot closer to it than anything we’ve had before.
MT: This feels funny to say, in terms of this conversation — I don’t remember if this was something I thought to myself or something I read that someone else wrote, but reading “Candy House” feels a bit like an expanded version of scrolling through an Instagram feed. In a much more in-depth capacity, but because it’s an interconnected world, it’s like my interconnected circle of people who know each other and who overlap very loosely, and you’re like taking little snippets of each piece. Like, “Here’s a moment. And then here’s a completely separate moment, but it’s a little bit related, and here are the threads as to why.”
Egan: For sure. That’s to some degree intentional, in that I like the feeling of moving among consciousnesses as a way of moving among worlds. And I also connect that to gaming, something like dungeons and dragons where we move among pre-created worlds that are imaginative, but also have these hand-drawn corollaries.
I also want to say one more thing about what you said, “I’m not sure if I thought this or I read it,” which complicates our conversation a little bit — I would argue that consciousness is always collective to some degree. In other words, our individual consciousnesses consist of enormous amounts of shared understanding and cultural awareness that we share with everyone who is alive at this moment. We are always calling on knowledge that is not exactly “ours” originally but is in the culture around us. There’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t think of, that I don’t even know consciously, that ends up in my books. Names are one of the most obvious places that I see this. Here’s one example from “The Candy House” that was just pointed out to me recently: in the chapter called “Rhyme Scheme,” which is really where we first come to understand the sort of Orwellian future we’ve ended up in, there’s an important character in that in that chapter called O’Brien who ends up being the defier of this new reality. O’Brien is the name of the protagonist in George Orwell’s “1984”, but I had forgotten that. These sorts of name clues pop up again and again in my books. What they show is that I, like you, don’t know whether I thought of things or whether they were already in me from other things I had read and done, because consciousness is collective.
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Nicole Akins Boyd, R-Oxford, a first-term state senator, talks with Mississippi Today’s Geoff Pender and Bobby Harrison about ways to improve the lives of mothers and children in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. She is chairing the nine-member Senate Study Group on Women, Children and Families created by Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann.
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In Mississippi, like Kansas, the Supreme Court has said the state Constitution provides a right to an abortion.
The Kansas Supreme Court made its ruling in 2019. The Mississippi ruling came in 1998.
In an effort to supersede the Kansas Supreme Court ruling, the Legislature placed on the ballot a proposal to proclaim that the state Constitution does not include abortion rights.
That proposal was defeated Tuesday by Kansas voters by a 59% to 41% margin, meaning abortion remains legal in the state viewed as one of the most conservative in the nation.
Mississippi’s Supreme Court ruling said, “While we do not interpret our Constitution as recognizing an explicit right to an abortion, we believe that autonomous bodily integrity is protected under the right to privacy … Protected within the right of autonomous bodily integrity is an implicit right to have an abortion.”
There are two ways to reverse that 1998 Supreme Court ruling. The high court in a new case could overturn it. But since there is no abortion case pending before the Supreme Court, it is difficult to ascertain how such a reversal could occur. Another option would be to attempt what Kansas tried to do and amend the Constitution to state explicitly there is no right to an abortion. Like in Kansas, the proposal to amend the Constitution also would require voter approval.
The question then is whether the outcome in Mississippi would be different than in Kansas. Most observers were surprised that the anti-abortion proposal in Kansas was defeated. Mississippi Center for Justice attorney Rob McDuff, who has defended abortion rights, said he is not so sure the outcome here would be different than in Kansas.
“Mississippi is a conservative state in many ways, but a lot of people here believe in the rights of the individual and believe government should not dictate a person’s beliefs,” McDuff said. “For centuries, people have debated and disagreed about the fundamental question of when life begins.”
McDuff continued: “When a woman is faced with the possibility of carrying a pregnancy inside her own body and bearing a child against her will, I think most Mississippians believe this is a decision for her to make in light of her own beliefs, and perhaps in consultation with her family and her doctor and her pastor, and not a decision for the majority of the state Legislature. That is what Mississippians said the last time they were asked this question in 2011, when, by a wide margin, they voted no on an amendment that would have banned abortion for purposes of our state Constitution. I expect the answer would be the same today. Recent polling in Mississippi bears that out.”
A recent poll commissioned by the ACLU of Mississippi found 51% opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade that provided a national right to an abortion.
In 2012, after Mississippi voters rejected the so-called “personhood” amendment that stated life begins at conception, Speaker Philip Gunn authored a resolution saying abortion was not a constitutional right. That resolution died in the House Constitution Committee. Had it been passed by a two-thirds vote of both legislative chambers and been approved by voters, it would have overturned the 1998 Supreme Court ruling saying the Mississippi Constitution granted the right to an abortion.
Gunn, who was in his first year as speaker in 2012, said recently he did not remember details about the proposal. When asked if the House might take up a similar proposal in the 2023 session, he said, “We are looking at a lot of things.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, ignoring the Supreme Court ruling, recently said, “I don’t think we need a constitutional amendment in Mississippi because we have a state statute which speaks to that. The only abortion clinic that operated in our state is now closed, I don’t know that it has to be in the Constitution.”
It’s true that laws banning most abortions in the state went into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the national constitutional right to an abortion in a landmark case from Mississippi. The practical effect of those laws is that abortions are not being performed in Mississippi.
But that 1998 decision hangs out there. At some point, there could be a conflict in the Mississippi judicial system between that constitutional right to an abortion as cited by the Mississippi Supreme Court and the normally lesser-in-the-eyes of the judiciary laws or statutes.
At the very least, by ignoring that Supreme Court ruling, a precedent is being established in the state that the Mississippi Supreme Court can be — well, ignored.
A simple way to resolve the conflict between state law and the Mississippi Constitution is to let the people vote like they did in Kansas.
Joseph Pilates, a German physical fitness trainer, developed a series of exercises for the body and mind as an effective way to alleviate the aches and pains of dancers.
Controlled breathing, fluid movements using lower back and abdominal muscles, tone and shape without the pain associated with high-impact exercises. Over time, “Pilates,” as it’s come to be known, has become a popular alternative to the grind of a gym workout.
Angela Brown opened her Pilates of Jackson studio 13 years ago at the Canton Mart Square shopping center, located in northeast Jackson.
Walking into Pilates of Jackson, you’re immediately breathing in and exhaling slowly. The lighting is dim, a calming ambiance, filled with giggles, light banter and the aroma of scented candles. A decorative, painted stone above the door reads, “Namaste y’all.”
Brown is welcoming, encouraging and demanding without being a drill sergeant. Her charges follow her lead in swirling legs in circles, holding balls between knees while lifting and holding rumps high in the air, or gently shadow-boxing using a series of spring-controlled pulleys.
“Lift up and hold it,” Brown tells a class of women, slowly counting backwards to the sounds of their collective relief. “C’mon, ladies. One more set, and then we’ll take a break.” Sighs fill the air, and the leg lifts begin again.
In her mid-50s, Brown is a testament to the benefits of practicing what she teaches.
“I was always a gym rat. After having three kids, I wasn’t happy with how my body changed,” said Brown, while stretching using a series of straps and pulleys. “I worked out, killing myself, but never really lost weight. I fell in love with Pilates and joined a studio in Ridgeland.”
As the women’s session ends, a group of Jackson State football players are the next group to file in. Brown greets them all by name as they prepare for their session.
“See these guys breaking a sweat?” Brown asks, her hand sweeping in a semi-circle to include all the grunting and grinning young men. “They never would’ve believed this kind of exercise could help them. They’re believers now,” she says with a satisfied smile.
A few groans in agreement emanate from the footballers.
Brown works the room, adjusting the placement of a foot, the bend of a knee or the height of lifted legs.
“Being a mom of three, Pilates helped me get back to my pre-baby shape with a stronger core, better balance and flexibility,” she said, while kicking off her sandals to join the young men. “Pilates began to change my mind, body and spirit. It’s a series of core exercises where the leaner muscle you build, the more weight you lose. It focuses on a lengthened and stronger core. Being low-impact, your joints and muscle don’t hurt, and it’s still a great workout.”
“Isn’t that right, fellas? Okay. Everybody take five,” Brown says, releasing the group from a series of core building leg lifts.
Four-year-olds enrolled in state-funded pre-K through Head Start did not perform as well as their counterparts enrolled through school districts last school year, which state officials attributed to more time spent in virtual learning.
Early learning collaboratives (ELCs) are one form of public pre-K, made up of partnerships among school districts, Head Start agencies, childcare centers, and nonprofit groups. Collaboratives follow the same curriculum and share professional development opportunities and resources, with the goal of providing all students enrolled with the same quality of instruction.
Last month, the Mississippi Department of Education released the most recent results from the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment, which measures public pre-K and kindergarten students on their early literacy skills. It is used as an instructional baseline for teachers, and students who meet their benchmark score have been shown to become proficient in reading by the end of third grade. This spring, 48% of students in an ELC through Head Start met the benchmark score, while 71% of the other ELC students did.
Edshundra Gary, the Greenwood Leflore School District’s early learning director, attributed this decline to a few weeks of lost instructional time teaching students who never attended daycare how to behave in a classroom and how to observe COVID safety protocols.
Students who participate through Head Start, a federally-funded program that promotes school readiness in children from low-income families, are shown in data from previous years to score a little bit below their ELC counterparts, but still score well above the state benchmark for reading readiness. During the pandemic, all students started lower, but the gap between Head Start students and other participants widened compared to previous years.
Jill Dent, the bureau director of early childhood for the Mississippi Department of Education, primarily attributed this difference to virtual learning. While it did vary locally, she said more Head Start students were virtual than other ELC students.
Despite this, Dent expressed confidence that students will be back on track with their reading scores soon.
“This next kindergarten year is really going to help them,” she said. “They’ll have a solid full year in school, and I expect they’ll catch up and be back on track by the end of the year.”
Leigh Ann Reynolds, director of early childhood for the Sunflower County Consolidated School District, has also identified ways that the gaps can be made up. The Delta Health Alliance, which operates Head Starts in the county, also has a summer program which she said has been shown to get children to the correct benchmarks by the end of the summer.
This discrepancy may be resolved soon, as every Head Start in Mississippi will be fully returning to in-person instruction this fall according to the Mississippi Head Start Association. Nita Thompson, executive director of the organization, said it was a combination of federal guidance and local decision making whether to keep students virtual over the last two years, but that being able to resume home visits and engage parents in the classroom will help students get back on track.
Thompson also pointed out that there are still significant benefits to participating in pre-K programs, including emotional and cognitive development and learning to form relationships outside the home. Research has also shown that participation in early learning decreases the likelihood of students getting held back and increases the likelihood of graduating from high school.
Thompson said that a student’s early learning experience is not only impacted by time spent in person, but also by community resources like access to transportation, parks and playgrounds, healthy food options, and healthcare.
“All of those things will impact development, and particularly attendance, and we know that there is a direct correlation between attendance and growth,” she said.
Micayla Tatum, associate director of early childhood policy at Mississippi First, elaborated on this point, saying Head Start, by design, serves students from a low socio-economic status, which research shows means they are more likely to struggle with literacy because of higher levels of stress. She also said that low socio-economic status individuals were also more vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic, which results in many Head Start students needing additional assistance to achieve at the same level as their peers.
“Families recognize that their children haven’t learned as much these past two years as they would have in a full-time program, so I think families are also ready to re-engage and connect to make sure their children make those gains,” Thompson said.
