OurTupelo

Mississippi Today reporters Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender interview – or more accurately listen – as longtime state Sen. Hob Bryan of Amory vents about massive tax cuts passed in the 2022 legislative session. Bryan says the state has too many infrastructure, education and other needs to be making such huge cuts in revenue.

The post Podcast: Sen. Hob Bryan discusses 2022 legislative session appeared first on Mississippi Today.

On this episode of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-At-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with Rita Soronen, President and CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Leading the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, a national nonprofit public charity, since 2001 and the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption-Canada since 2004, Soronen works to find adoptive families for the more than 150,000 children waiting in North America’s foster care systems.

Under her leadership, the Foundation has significantly increased its grant-making while developing strategic initiatives that act on the urgency of the issue. In 2021, the Foundation dedicated more than $40.9 million to grants and award-winning programs, such as Wendy’s Wonderful Kids, Adoption-Friendly Workplace and National Adoption Day.

Additionally, through public service announcements, social media campaigns, articles, events, sponsorships and more, the Foundation is building awareness around the growing need for foster care adoption. Marshall caught up with Soronen when she was in Mississippi to announce a partnership with the Mississippi Department of Children Protection Services.

The post Mississippi Stories: Rita Soronen appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Gov. Tate Reeves has been vocal in his opposition to the teaching of critical race theory and his support of the nation’s and state’s “patriotic” history.

Critical race theory, normally taught at the college level, explores the impact of race on various aspects of society. Opponents, though, say critical race theory is an effort to divide the country along racial lines. While opposing critical race theory, the Republican Reeves has long advocated for the teaching of “patriotic” history or history that portrays the state and nation in a positive light.

Reeves, a self-proclaimed “numbers guy” who worked in banking and finance before entering politics in his late 20s, offered a history lesson recently when vetoing a bill that would ensure people whose felony convictions were expunged would regain their right to vote.

“Felony disenfranchisement is an animating principle of the social contract at the heart of every great republic dating back to the founding of ancient Greece and Rome,” Reeves wrote in his veto message. “In America, such laws date back to the colonies and the eventual founding of our Republic. Since statehood, in one form or another, Mississippi law has recognized felony disenfranchisement.”

Granted, the loss of voting rights for those convicted of felonies was once common in America. But most states — at least 40 of them — now restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies at some point after they complete their sentence.

And perhaps people convicted of felonies in ancient Rome and Greece also lost their voting rights. Perhaps, a question for the governor is whether the slaves in ancient Rome and Greece could vote.

In Mississippi, the issue of felony disenfranchisement intersects with the state’s sordid history of slavery and systematic racism. The narrative of the day made it clear that felony disenfranchisement was among a litany of provisions placed in Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution to keep African Americans from voting.

At the time, the Mississippi Supreme Court said the disfranchisement of felons was an effort “to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race” by targeting “the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.” The provision’s intent was the same as the poll tax, the literacy test and other Jim Crow-era provisions that sought to prevent African Americans from voting.

Heck, murder and rape — the two crimes that would be disenfranchising if any were — were not listed in the 1890 Constitution as disenfranchising. They were added much later, in the 1960s.

While most states have moved on from lifetime bans on voting for people convicted of felonies, Mississippi holds tightly to the process placed in its 1890 Constitution. Under that process, a person either has to obtain a gubernatorial pardon or approval by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Legislature to regain the right to vote.

Because of that difficult process, Mississippi leads the nation in percentage of residents who have lost their right to vote. This past session, the Legislature passed bills restoring voting rights to only five Mississippians. Reeves opted not to sign those bills, instead allowing them to become law without his signature.

The bill Reeves did veto would have clarified that people whose felony convictions are expunged by a judge also would regain the right to vote. It should be pointed out only a limited number of crimes under specified conditions are eligible for expungement.

At any rate, some jurisdictions are restoring voting rights when crimes are expunged. Others are not. The bill was an attempt to clarify what many said was the Legislature’s intent — to restore voting rights when crimes were expunged.

But Reeves said to restore the rights, the state Constitution needs to be amended through first legislative action and then a vote of the people.

There are legal experts who agree with Reeves’ assessment that a change to the Constitution is needed to bypass the Legislature or a gubernatorial pardon to restore voting rights. Others do not believe a change to the Constitution is required to do so.

Still, Reeves used the occasion of the veto to brandish his version of history, which was absent the racial components surrounding Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement rules.

When the Legislature debated a bill that supporters said would prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in Mississippi classrooms, some voiced concerns that passage of the anti-critical race theory bill would prevent the teaching of the impact of race on the state’s and nation’s history.

Supporters of the anti-critical race theory bill said it was not their intent to downplay the impact of race.

But Reeves, who signed the critical race theory bill and who touts the importance of teaching “patriotic” history, seems intent on ignoring the racial component of the state’s felony disenfranchisement provision.

The post Reeves ignores racist history of state’s felony voting ban with vetoes appeared first on Mississippi Today.

My late and great friend Willie Morris once confided, “Rickey, you know, we all write best about what we care about most.”

In that case, what follows should be a doozy.

Bobby Cleveland  – Robert Hayes Cleveland, Jr. – was my younger brother by 21 months. Our daddy, a sports writer before us, often instructed us both: “Make sure you get the news in first.” So, I will: Bobby died Thursday of injuries suffered in an automobile accident. He was 67, and he had lived every day of his time on this planet to the absolute fullest – and then maybe to overflowing.

He was a big man with a huge appetite for life. I was older but Bobby was always larger. My big little brother, I called him. He was an expert fisherman and hunter – and a gourmet chef. Let’s put it this way, a lot of seafood and a whole lot of love went into his gumbo. It was always rich and spicy.

He loved the Saints, the Braves and his alma mater, Southern Miss. A quick story, when Sid Bream slid safely into home plate to send the Atlanta Braves into the 1992 World Series, Bobby leaped from his chair and let out a roar – and then a howl. He wore a bandage on his hand for weeks to protect a wound from the ceiling fan. I can also report that until his dying breath he never forgave the officials who robbed the Saints of a second Super Bowl with the worst no-call in football history.

Some other things Bobby loved: sunrise, his sweet Mama, dogs, Bloody Marys, anything John Prine wrote and sang, pranks, The Big Lebowski, anchovies, Pink Floyd, olympic curling, Thai food (Thai hot), puzzles of any kind, tequila, oysters, telling stories, sunset and good friends of which he had so many.

Some things he hated: bullies, racists, light beer, yard work, dress shoes, closing time, long stories that should have been shorter, dull headlines and anything overcooked.

Bobby was the younger brother but he was the one named after our daddy. And that was appropriate because he was Ace Cleveland made over. As Bobby aged, he looked more and more like our pop. Acted like him, too. Ace had a quick and often devilish wit. Bobby took that to another level. Both Robert Hayes Clevelands could seem gruff to a new acquaintance. But both had tender hearts. Both were smart enough to have been successful in any profession they tried. Both did what they loved. Both had personalities that filled a room.

Many long-time Clarion Ledger readers will remember Bobby’s splendid outdoors writing. My column ran on the front page of the sports sections, Bobby’s on the back cover. And I can’t tell you how many times people would come up and say they enjoyed reading my columns but they always read Bobby’s first. He wrote stories the way he told them, filled with wit and expertise. Often, in his fishing and hunting stories, he was the butt of his own jokes.

Bobby once told me, “I figure by the time people get to the back page of the sports section, they are tired of reading about wars and murders in the news section and reading about how their teams lost in the rest of the sports section. When they got to me, they are ready to be entertained.”

They were. I also can’t tell you how many times people told me they neither fished or hunted, but they always read what Bobby wrote.

LISTEN: Crooked Letter Podcast with Bobby Cleveland

What many readers didn’t know was that Bobby for years was the editor and designer of the CL’s Sunday sports sections, which were annually judged among the nation’s best. During football seasons, Bobby often produced sports sections as hefty as 28 pages that were the equal of sports sections in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. He had a knack for page design, and he was hands-down the best headline writer I ever worked with.

After leaving the CL, Bobby continued as a free-lance outdoors writer and went to work for the Barnett Reservoir and Pearl River Supply District doing public relations work and putting on the various events that make The Rez a special place. He took particular pride in the branding – “The Rez.” Those handsome car tags you see – The Rez – were his idea.

We thought we had lost Bobby 27 years ago. At age 40, he suffered a heart attack that very nearly killed him. His Widow Maker artery clogged and a vein turned into an artery and saved him. Bobby changed the way he cooked and the way he ate – and added some exercise into his daily schedule.Those of us who love him are so thankful for all that. My big little brother made good use of that 27-year bonus. He met Pam, the love of his life, appropriately in a bait shop. We are thankful for the way they loved one another. We are thankful for how he loved his grandchildren, and a niece and nephew who adored him as the second father he became.

And I am thankful to have shared 67 years of playing, working, cooking, laughing and loving with my brother, my best friend.

The post Bobby Cleveland lived 67 years on his terms and to the fullest appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Registration is now open for GRAMMY Museum® Mississippi‘s Summer Session FastTrack — a weeklong day camp that will give young musicians ages 9 to 14 insight into the creative and technological processes of recording and performing music.

The camp will take place from June 27 through July 1 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The cost is $25 per child, and the deadline to register is June 4 at 5:30 p.m. CST. Sponsors for Summer Session FastTrack include Hard Rock Biloxi, Maddox Foundation, Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, Entergy, and Mississippi Arts Commission. 

“We are so excited to host our Summer Session FastTrack weeklong day camp for young musicians, and we’re thankful to our wonderful partners for making this experience possible,” said Emily Havens, Executive Director of GRAMMY Museum Mississippi. “We call it ‘fast track’ because these young music makers are going to learn so much about the process of recording and performing music in a short amount of time. We’ll also dive into the influence of Mississippians on American music. It’s going to be a fantastic week of music and learning.” 

Taking place at GRAMMY Museum Mississippi, the weeklong day camp will give participants the opportunity to: 

• Learn about the influence of Mississippians on American music and our cultural heritage 
• Study work by Mississippi artists featured in the Museum 
• Receive instruction on recording techniques, music production and live performance 
• Explore song structure, harmony, melody, lyric writing, and vocal technique 

The participants will also collaborate with industry professionals and each other for a final production inspired by the Mississippi artists featured in the Museum. The final production will be featured on the Museum’s social media channels. 

Registration is required to attend the Summer Session FastTrack. Limited space is available. Parents can register their children for the camp at grammymuseumms.org. The $25 cost includes lunch and snacks that will be provided during the camp. Registration is open now through June 4, and a deposit is required at registration. 

The post Registration open for GRAMMY Museum Mississippi Summer Session FastTrack appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Leo “The Lip” Durocher once said: “Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.”

Count me in the few — and maybe that’s why I love it so.

Baseball confounds us as no other sport. Every time we think we understand, we learn we don’t. Take this season in Mississippi college baseball. Go ahead. Step back. Take a look.

Mississippi State came into the season as college baseball’s defending national champion and with several key players back. Ole Miss, with a lineup filled with proven sluggers, was ranked No. 1 in the nation this season back in March. Meanwhile, after losing probably its top three pitchers from last season, Southern Miss dropped to an unimpressive 10-6 record after being swept by Dallas Baptist in mid-March.

So here we are, in late April, and look: Southern Miss is ranked No. 4 in the nation and is on a school record 15-game win streak heading into a weekend series at UAB. After starting 9-0 and 12-1, Ole Miss is 14-17 in its last 31 games and in danger of not even making the SEC Tournament. Mississippi State is 24-18 and has much work to do – and not that much time to do it – to even make the NCAA field. Meanwhile, most college baseball experts now rank Southern Miss as a high national seed.

If you predicted all this back in mid-March, good for you. Nobody else did.

Let’s take a look at where all three stand heading into the last month of the regular season:

We’ll start with Southern Miss, where Scott Berry might well have the best team in school history. Southern Miss is 33-8 overall and 16-2 in its last season in Conference USA. The Golden Eagles’ RPI now sits at No. 10. Probably more impressive than the 15-game overall win streak is the fact Southern Miss has won 12 straight road games. The Eagles also boast a 15-7 record against team ranked in the top 100, RPI-wise. Only Tennessee, which is playing like a Major League team against college competition, has won more games than Southern Miss.

The challenge for Southern Miss is to stay hot through May and into June. Recent injuries will make that difficult. Left fielder Reese Ewing, a productive .304 hitter with 29 runs batted in and eight home runs, is out with a broken hand and could miss another two to three weeks. Designated hitter Slade Wilks (.319, six homers, 15 doubles) has missed four straight games with a strained oblique muscle but should be back soon. 

But here’s the deal: Pitching – three terrific weekend starters and a deep, talented bullpen – are what has carried Berry’s team. Berry, who should become the Golden Eagles all-time winningest coach this weekend, knows how quickly all that can turn around in baseball. And if he doesn’t, he can just look north to Oxford and Starkville.

Both Ole Miss and State desperately needed to get on a roll headed into last weekend’s Ole Miss-State weekend series and Tuesday night’s Governor’s Cup. Neither did. They split the four games, two victories apiece and still have mountains of work to do over the last month.

Let’s take Ole Miss first. The Rebels are 23-17 overall, 6-12 in the SEC (ahead of only Missouri), have a No. 62 RPI and a 7-14 record against Top 100 RPI teams. What has happened? The Rebels haven’t pitched it well enough and they haven’t hit well when it matters most.

They are not dead in the water but they are floundering. They have 14 games remaining, beginning with three this weekend at Arkansas. They need to win that series – a difficult task – and also win SEC series against Missouri (home), at LSU and at home with Texas A&M. That would get the Rebels easily into the SEC Tournament and get that RPI up into NCAA Tournament range. A May 11 road non-conference game at Southern Miss is also an opportunity for an RPI boost. Bottom line: There is little, if any, room for error where Ole Miss is concerned.

Mississippi State shares that leaking boat. The Bulldogs are 24-18, 8-10 in the SEC. They have a No. 81 RPI and an 11-15 record against Top 100 teams. Frankly, none of that is NCAA Tournament-worthy and State must turn it around fast in order to have the opportunity to defend its national championship. Like Ole Miss, the Bulldogs have 14 games remaining, including road series against Missouri and Texas A & M and home series against Florida and Tennessee. The Dogs have midweek games remaining at Samford and at home against North Alabama.

This weekend’s series with Florida and a regular season-ending series with top-ranked Tennessee (currently a ridiculous 38-3) will give the Bulldogs an excellent opportunity to boost their NCAA resume. They might well need it.

The post Let’s step back and take stock of this unusual Mississippi baseball season appeared first on Mississippi Today.

I’ll write more about this in my newsletter Sunday, but let’s just say this one is personal. I was blessed to work with Bobby Cleveland (Rick’s brother) for many years at The Clarion-Ledger. And as I wrote on Twitter, “In the South, we say nice things about people when they die. But let me reassure you — Every great thing you read about Bobby Cleveland is true.”

Heaven is full of laughter today. Down here? Well, a bunch of us are still in shock.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Bobby Cleveland appeared first on Mississippi Today.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Tenure Track appeared first on Mississippi Today.

For the first time since the launch of a federal grant to expand reproductive health care decades ago, the state health department won’t be running the program in Mississippi. Instead, a nonprofit will.

For years, Jamie Bardwell and Danielle Lampton worked at the Mississippi Department of Health, learning how the state’s family planning programs worked– or didn’t. 

They left the Department in 2018 and founded Converge, a nonprofit focused on reproductive health. Their team conducted training for Mississippi health care providers and helped clinics learn how to affordably expand birth control offerings. 

Then, earlier this year, Converge beat out the health department to win a critical $4.5 million federal grant, called Title X, to provide family planning services around the state. 

Access to Title X-funded services in Mississippi has long been more theoretical than universal. Patients sometimes struggled to get through to clinics over the phone, even though the health department offered family planning services at almost every county health department. Wait times for appointments could be long. And most people wound up with less effective methods like the pill or male condoms, instead of long-acting IUDs or implants. 

In Mississippi, a majority of Title X patients are at or below the poverty line, and a majority are uninsured, according to federal data.

The consequences of poor access to care are clear: The majority of pregnancies in Mississippi are unplanned. The state has the highest rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea of any state in the country, and the sixth-highest rate of HIV. 

Over the last decade, Converge’s cofounders say, they have learned Title X’s complicated rules and regulations and built relationships with providers and patients they hope will enable them to ensure every Mississippian has real access to high quality care. 

“It has taken us that long to be experts in this topic,” Bardwell said. “And it’s a topic and a subject area that there aren’t many people in Mississippi that are clamoring to be experts on.”

They plan to offer services at a smaller number of clinics than in the past, prioritizing areas with the highest need rather than the biggest population. Scott County, for example, is a target area because it has no federally qualified health center focused on serving people without health insurance. 

They also want to add telemedicine so people can get birth control prescriptions without having to make a trip to a clinic. 

“We see Converge as one of the primary drivers for change in how people get family planning care,” Lampton said. “And most importantly, in increasing how much family planning care is person-centered, by which we mean, care that is about the preferences, the desires, the values and needs of the patient.”

June Gipson, president and CEO of Open Arms Healthcare Center in Jackson, is cheering: Her clinic, which focuses on serving marginalized people, has been a Title X subgrantee for about five years, and she expects to see changes under Converge. 

“They care,” Gipson said of Converge’s co-founders, whom she has known for years. “They actually care about women.”

In other states, nonprofits are already running Title X programs. Every Body Texas has overseen the state’s now-$15.4 million grant since 2013. In Georgia, an FQHC has administered Title X since it beat out the state health department in 2014. 

Just after the change, the number of Georgians using Title X services fell from 115,000 to about 86,000. But by 2020, the program served 170,000 people–the largest number of patients in any year since 2006. 

In Georgia, state leadership said it was “deeply concerned with the federal government’s decision” when it lost Title X funding. In Mississippi, the health department is striking a different tone. 

State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs told Mississippi Today that reproductive health care has been transitioning away from county clinics for decades and that the department is “excited” that Converge will be able to expand partnerships with other providers. 

“We are working with Converge to ensure a seamless transition in service delivery,” he said.

He added that the department received an extension on previously unused grant funds that will allow the state clinics to operate for at least a year while Converge sets up its network. 

Many of the barriers to accessing reproductive health care in Mississippi are the same ones that limit access to all health care. Particularly in rural areas, there simply aren’t enough doctors and nurses. People without transportation may not be able to get to a pharmacy to pick up a birth control prescription. 

And if providers don’t want certain patients to have birth control, they don’t have to give it to her. 

“Title X alone is not going to solve all of the problems,” said Caroline Weinberg, the founder of Plan A, a mobile clinic focused on reproductive health care in the Delta. “But money helps everything.”

Since 1970, Title X has funded clinics around the country to ensure all Americans can access birth control and family planning services. Services can include birth control, sexually transmitted infection (STI) tests, breast and cervical cancer screening, basic infertility treatment and more. Patients with family incomes below the federal poverty line pay no fees for services, while others pay on a sliding scale. 

The health department has administered the program in Mississippi at least since the late 1970s, if not earlier, offering some level of services at nearly every county health department. It also distributed funds to eight subgrantees in 2021, mostly federally qualified health centers. 

But in 2018, even before the pandemic and Trump-era regulations battered Title X programs across the country, the program served only about 25,000 Mississippians, a small fraction of the state’s women of reproductive age. 

The health department commissioned Converge to assess the quality of its family planning services in 2019.  The report documented basic problems that had serious consequences for patients, as first reported by Erica Hensley for Rewire News Group and later obtained by Mississippi Today through a records request. 

Referring to the landscape of family planning care in Mississippi, Lampton said the state has ended up “with a broken system that gets an F.”

When patients called during working hours, the phone could ring with no response. Or the patient could be put on hold until the line would cut off. 

Staff gave incorrect information about service costs, saying things like “You will get a bill if you have no insurance” instead of explaining that fees vary by income and are waived for people below a certain income level. 

At the time, the health department required patients to come in for an exam before receiving a full supply of birth control. But it could take months to get an appointment. 

“In that time period a patient would go without birth control and possibly experience an unplanned pregnancy,” the report noted.

A study published in December 2021 by the Mississippi Reproductive Health Access Project at the University of Texas at Austin summarized findings from 498 “mystery client calls” to health department sites, federally qualified health centers and private practices. Sometimes clinic staff said patients couldn’t choose the type of birth control they’d receive. 

“It is up to what the doctor wants,” one caller was told. 

The Converge report found some clinics were running out of condoms. 

“Within any operation there will be anecdotal issues and opportunities to improve on standardization and customer service,” Dobbs said. “Staffing shortages have exacerbated issues no doubt. Having Converge as a partner will allow us to better focus our resources of specific need. We are also restructuring our oversight structure in counties to ensure better quality.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic caused family planning visits to health department sites to drop somewhat, but it was state policy that pushed a broken system closer to collapse.

Hensley reported for Rewire that Mississippi was one of at least four states to use an emergency rule to get federal authorization to divert Title X staff to COVID-19 response. Data provided by the health department shows the steepest decline in visits came nearly a year into the pandemic: Hensley reported the department had shifted staff to the vaccination rollout. 

From December 2020 to January 2021, total visits to health department sites fell 33%. The next month, they dropped another 45%. 

Visits ticked up again the rest of the year, but by the end of 2021, the number of family planning visits to county health departments had fallen by about 30% from 2020. 

Dobbs said the state’s “severely depleted” health workforce had been tasked with extraordinary duties, particularly early in the vaccine distribution effort. 

“These public health heroes worked countless overtime AND ensured TB, STIs and other challenges were addressed,” he said. “Although follow-up appointments were delayed, refills were maintained to ensure continuity of treatment.”

Wyconda Thomas opened Healthy Living Family Medical Center in Gunnison, a town of a few hundred people in Bolivar County, in 2018. The nurse practitioner grew up in Rosedale, eight miles away, and wanted to serve the community that raised her. 

She calls herself a one-stop shop, and her clinic motto is “Delivering quality care where it’s needed most.” The nearest hospital is 30 minutes away. 

“The ambulance service, it used to come to Rosedale two days a week,” she said. “So you had to pick which day you had a heart attack.”

These days, she doesn’t see the ambulance stationed in Rosedale at all. 

Thomas became a Title X subgrantee in 2021. In her first year, health department data shows, her clinic reported 426 family planning visits– more than all but two other sub-grantees and five county health departments that year. The $40,000 grant enabled her to add family planning services for the patients she was already seeing regularly. 

She also sees a lot of teenagers, and during their well child exams, she takes the opportunity to offer some basic information. 

“We also include the family planning of just education about their bodies, changes in their bodies, what their bodies are capable of, which is getting pregnant,” she said. “We discuss the different types of birth control if they’re interested in that. We talk about how to avoid pregnancy.”

Lack of access to care and lack of information are related. “People can’t know a lot about what they don’t have access to to begin with,” Tyler Harden, Mississippi state director at Planned Parenthood Southeast, said.

Thomas sees that link every day with her patients, who rely on her for information about their options, the potential side effects of different contraceptive methods, and her thoughts on what might work best for them. 

“If they don’t know something, it falls on me,” she said.

Converge leaders say they plan to actively promote services, rather than waiting for patients to find them. And they want to give patients information, too.

On Personally, the website Converge built to help patients find a clinic, users can search by services offered and payment types accepted. 

“We wanted patients to be able to see things before they even get to their visit,” said Jitoria Hunter, director of external affairs. “Like how to talk to your providers and looking at the different methods that they have access to.”

Nonprofits, community health clinics, hospital-based clinics and county health departments can apply to join the Title X network online, on a rolling basis. 

Current and prospective subgrantees are waiting to see what changes under Converge.  

Thomas said she would like to see more opportunities to attend trainings and conferences. 

“Just like resources where I could go and learn more to take back to my patients,” she said. 

Gipson expects Converge to be more responsive to subgrantees’ questions and suggestions. She hopes the program will offer less red tape and more support for innovations. 

Before joining Plan A as program coordinator, Desiree Norwood served as mayor of Sunflower in the Delta, and saw firsthand how people living in communities with few options for health care reacted to a visit from the mobile clinic. Plan A hopes to apply for and receive funding under Converge. 

Norwood said her understanding is that Converge “would fund small, innovative programs, such as Plan A, those programs that are rooted in the community.”

Converge is taking over Title X administration just as the Supreme Court looks set to overturn or substantially weaken Roe via a ruling in a Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

But in Mississippi, Roe didn’t fully protect abortion access anyway. Just one clinic remains open, down from 13 in 1982. 

Now, reproductive health advocates see an effort to blur the line between abortion and contraceptives: In Missouri, some Republicans have argued that IUDs are “abortifacients.” 

And the Title X program has already been a target in the past. In 2019, a Trump administration regulation prohibited grant recipients from referring patients for abortions, causing about a quarter of all sites to leave the Title X network. 

To be effective in the future, Converge may have to do more than expand access to good health care. The organization may also have to defend Mississippians’ right to birth control. 

“I think it’s really important that everyone knows that seeking family planning care at a Title X site is legal,” Lampton said. 

“If Roe is overturned, family planning care is probably next on the agenda,” Bardwell added. “It’s about reproductive autonomy. It’s not lost on us that we have to make sure people know, like Danielle said, this is health care. This is basic health care.”

The post A nonprofit beat the health department to win a key grant for family planning. Can it transform a broken system? appeared first on Mississippi Today.