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Nonprofit fights for funding to open state’s first birth center

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Maternity health clinic owner and public health expert Getty Israel is still on a mission: to open Mississippi’s first freestanding, midwife-run birth center.

Should she be successful, Mississippi would join neighboring states such as Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida in providing an alternative to giving birth in a hospital setting for pregnant women who are low-risk. The birth center would also be a place for women to receive prenatal care from certified nurse midwives as well as postpartum support.

But after nearly a year working to secure funding for her nonprofit Sisters in Birth to open the center, she’s come up short – and she blames what she calls an unfair and unclear federal funding process funneled through the state’s members of Congress.

Israel applied for federal funds through a lesser-known program called Community Project Funding in which constituents can request their senator or representative recommend their projects for funding to the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. Only nonprofits are eligible for the funds, and lawmakers must also certify that they and their immediate family members do not have a financial interest in the organization.

She said despite providing ample evidence of the benefits of birth centers and midwife care to mothers and babies, plus a letter of support from State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney, Republican U.S. Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith – whom she refers to as “so-called pro-life” – and Democratic 2nd District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson did not refer her project for funding.

However, they did request funding for projects for nonprofits with millions in net assets and hired lobbyists – a point with which Israel, whose organization reported around $5,000 in negative net assets on its most recently available tax form, took issue.

Getty Israel, founder and CEO of Sisters in Birth, Inc., sits for a portrait at Sisters in Birth in Jackson, Miss., Friday, May 27, 2022. Sisters in Birth is a women’s health clinic that utilizes an integrative and holistic approach to women’s healthcare. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

“You should see the waste on the list. I identified 13 large, wealthy organizations, which primarily receive the bulk of this recommended funding for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 – they have total net assets of tens of millions of dollars,” she said. “Several of these organizations aren’t in Mississippi.”

She said small nonprofits in Mississippi desperately need funding but may not be aware of how to get it, much less successfully get on any congress member’s recommended funding list.

“There are thousands of nonprofit organizations in Mississippi; the majority are small and struggling to provide crucial services to Mississippians. These organizations likely have never heard of these federal earmark programs because our congressional members fail to promote it,” she said. “Consequently, only corporations with relationships to legislators or their staff will know to apply.”

Information about Community Project Funding is on each Congress member’s website, along with a page dedicated to information about applying for federal grants. General guidance for applying for Community Project Funding is online.

Neither Wicker nor Hyde-Smith responded to questions for this story. A spokeswoman for Thompson said no favoritism is given to particular applications but declined to answer specific questions.

“Each application stands on its own,” Alexus Hunter, press secretary for Thompson, said. “The federal government considers supporting a variety of federal programs. However, this application wasn’t selected through the (Community Project Funding).”

Wicker’s office requested $1.5 million for a D.C.-based group called Reading is Fundamental Inc. to implement a childhood literacy program in Mississippi. His office also recommended sending $997,000 to a group called Save the Children, also located in D.C., for a project that would provide learning resources to children and families in rural communities in the state.

Wicker is not the only Mississippian to steer funding to Save the Children – the well-regarded humanitarian organization also received TANF money from the Mississippi Department of Human Services in 2017. In 2021, Gov. Tate Reeves awarded the organization $460,000 in pandemic relief funds, and the organization also receives funding from the Mississippi Department of Education for literacy, nutrition and fitness programming in the schools.

Hyde-Smith’s requested projects for fiscal year 2024 included everything from $7 million for a road project in a wealthy area of Madison County to millions for training programs at universities and community colleges to $4 million for water supply improvements for the city of Byram.

In fiscal year 2023 – the year for which Israel first applied for funds through Thompson’s office – his office requested hundreds of thousands each to cultural projects like the Community Museums of African American History and Culture Project in Belzoni and the Catfish Row Museum in Vicksburg. Also on the list was $2 million for the construction of a new clinic in Greenville.  

A 2018 evaluation of a federal study of health and cost outcomes for mothers and babies on Medicaid showed women who received care in birth centers had better outcomes – including lower rates of preterm birth, low birthweight and fewer C-sections compared to other Medicaid participants with similar characteristics. Those in the study who received midwife-directed care at a birth center also cost an average of $2,010 less than their Medicaid counterparts.

Israel believes such a clinic would improve maternal and infant health outcomes by minimizing medical interventions and reducing Mississippi’s first-in-the-nation C-section rates. Midwives’ holistic approach, she said, could also have a positive impact on the state’s high rates of preterm and low birthweight babies.

There are currently about 400 birth centers open and providing care in the U.S., according to the American Association of Birth Centers. Mississippi is one of only eight states that do not have a birth center.

Jill Alliman, a certified nurse midwife who is on the board of directors of the American Association of Birth Centers, said birth centers are especially equipped to handle pregnant women with social risk factors such as mental health challenges, lower education levels or a history of domestic violence – common challenges in a community like Jackson.

Alliman said the presence of a birth center and the midwife-centered care that comes along with it could be “life changing.”

“I think that in states like Mississippi that have so many challenges with maternal and infant health, there needs to be a big effort to increase access to the midwifery model of care and to offer options for birth center care because it’s part of the solution,” she said. “We can see that doing what we’ve been doing for so long is not working.”

Mississippi’s maternal mortality rate is worsening, the latest data shows. The rate increased from 33.2 deaths per 100,000 live births in the time span of 2013 to 2016 to 36.0 deaths per live births from 2017 to 2019.

The worsening rate disproportionately impacts Black women, who had a rate of 65.1 deaths per 100,000 live births – more than four times the ratio for white women.

“The (maternal and infant health) outcomes are deplorable in Mississippi. Over the last 50 years, those numbers just seem to get worse,” Israel said. “ … Midwives put an intervention in place. She’s looking at the whole person and treating the whole person.”

State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney echoed Israel in a letter of support he wrote for Israel’s birth center, calling it “change that cannot wait” in Mississippi.

“As you know, many women in Mississippi are unable to access prenatal care and adequate labor and delivery options that are safe for both mothers and babies,” he said. “… The use of birthing centers, with affiliations with critical access hospitals, is one of those evidence-based options that has demonstrated success in improving health outcomes for mothers and babies.”

Officials with the Mississippi State Medical Association declined to respond when asked for the organization’s position on birth centers.

Israel has shifted her approach: she is now reaching out to private organizations for fundraising. She has also produced a documentary about birth disparities in Mississippi that she is promoting nationwide to raise awareness about the issues facing Mississippi and to let people know they can help by donating money to build a birth center.

She said she’s found an ideal location in the medical district in Jackson and plans to purchase it.

However, In the meantime, women are driving to Memphis and Baton Rouge for birth centers, she said.

“I’m done looking inside the state of Mississippi. I’ve knocked on many doors – corporations, foundations, city and local governments … There’s no (financial) support in Mississippi, but I know women want this. I’m not driven by these so-called leaders. I’m driven by what women want.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting. 

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID. 

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots. 

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion. 

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor. 

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking. 

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber. 

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said. 

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting. 

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice. 

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures. 

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.  

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.   

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.” 

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature. 

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube. 

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend. 

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session. 

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.” 

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass. 

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget. 

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said. 

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session. 

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget. 

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later. 

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said. 

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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