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Q&A with maternal fetal medicine doctor on health care for moms in Mississippi

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Dr. Michelle Owens, a maternal fetal medicine specialist, is currently the National Secretary for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the president of the Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure and the clinical director at Mae Health. She has been practicing as an OB-GYN in Mississippi since 2004.

Owens spoke with reporter Pam Dankins following the death of three-time Olympic medalist Tori Bowie, from Sandhill, Mississippi.

In early May, Bowie was found deceased at her Florida home. According to the autopsy report issued by the Orlando medical examiner’s office, the 32-year-old was eight months pregnant, alone at home and undergoing labor at the time of her death. The 2012 University of Southern Mississippi graduate reportedly experienced complications such as respiratory distress and eclampsia, a rare high blood pressure condition linked to seizures.

Kimberly Holland, Bowie’s agent, stated to CBS that Bowie didn’t trust hospitals.

For Black women in Mississippi and across the United States, pregnancies and child births are even more dangerous. In Mississippi, the pregnancy-related mortality ratio had increased from 33.2 to 36.0 deaths per 100,000 live births in the span of three years.

The same report further showed the pregnancy-related mortality rate of 65.1 deaths per 100,000 live births for Black women was more than quadruple the death ratio for white women.

Owens explained in a sit down with Mississippi Today that policymakers, health care providers and communities must address underlying factors – hypertension, mental health, infections, etc. – within maternal health in order to ensure that all women, regardless of race or ethnicity, have access to care and support.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Pam Dankins: What was your reaction to the news of Tori Bowie’s death?

Michelle Owens: Well, I think my response might have been a little different because I have been doing work in this space. For me, I think it was sadness also mixed with a tinge of frustration because Tori wasn’t the first, and this is something that is increasingly more common. When I think about the people who I’ve had the privilege of caring for, who are in many instances, people from underrepresented groups and from marginalized communities, this is way too common in those communities.

It makes you think, ‘What can you do? Who is immune?’ You can be a highly competitive athlete at the top of your game, and this still occurs. Some of the complications of pregnancy are not just set aside for those people who are unhealthy.

The truth is that pregnancy complications, life-threatening pregnancy complications, can also occur in those people who we would think of as being, you know, the epitome of health. And so, it was frustrating and sad because we know that a lot of these deaths could be preventable. Every death is one more too many.

Dankins: What has been done to reduce maternal mortality in the state?

Owens: So in Mississippi, since 2017, we have a maternal mortality review committee (MMRC), and that committee has been charged with the responsibility of reviewing maternal deaths. They take a deeper dive into each of those situations and make recommendations about the issues that we discover that ultimately, will hopefully, help to decrease mortality rates.

Our State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney has decided to elevate maternal health as one of the priorities during his tenure. He’s tried to help by not only spreading the word but engaging the medical community and community partners by using the State Department of Health as a vehicle. This way the general public can be aware of the risks and how pregnancy complications can influence not only maternal health, but also health across the lifespan of a birthing person.

There are community organizations that are spread across the state, and there are community partners who are working to help raise awareness. For instance, Mom Me is an organization that kind of focuses on maternal mental health services. Six Dimensions is another organization that is really interested in helping to improve outcomes among Black birthing people.

I think through our Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative (a network of teams collaborating with the state Health Department to improve maternal and infant care), the MMRC (maternal mortality review committee) and the assistance of our state health officer, there’s a lot of positive movement in spreading awareness and helping people to understand the problem. The maternal health crisis is not just in Mississippi but in our country. And, the people who tend to know the least about it are the ones who are at the greatest risk and sense of potentially being most affected.

Dankins: How can you spread awareness to people who may have trouble accessing this information?

Owens: Well, I think the most important thing is meeting people where they are. It’s talking to people in where they live, like at churches and at sporting events. I hope that people understand that we can’t take our health for granted. And just because you are quote, healthy or healthier than most, it still doesn’t mean that you can’t have a life-threatening complication, especially when it pertains to pregnancy. I think that we need to be talking about this in our communities, neighborhoods, Facebook groups, group chats with our friends and wherever there are groups of people who care about each other. It needs to be part of the conversation.

Because only through making sure that people have awareness, do we really make significant strides in closing gaps once people have the awareness.

We also have to make sure that the people who are supposed to be listening, are listening and responding. It’s not entirely on the families of these individuals and themselves. There is a substantial portion of that burden that is also carried by the health care community, that when these concerns are raised, that we are doing our due diligence to fully investigate them in order to ensure that people are getting the care that they need and deserve.

Dankins: Why, with all of the resources the United States has, do we rank so poorly in this area in Mississippi specifically?

Owens: The answer to that is multifactorial.

I think we have challenges as a primarily rural state, and we have the challenge of maternal health deserts. There are so many counties within our state where people don’t have ready access to women’s health services. Like obstetrical care, how many places can you deliver? How many hospitals actually perform deliveries? How many places actually have an OB-GYN, a nurse midwife or a family medicine doctor who performs deliveries? Number one, there aren’t a lot of people that are doing this work. Number two, those people tend to be more highly concentrated in more populous areas. And so, our rural areas of the state have specific challenges because there can be broad swaths of land where there’s nobody providing care.

There are, of course, social challenges. I mean, the vestiges of structural racism that exist within our state, and not just our state, but within this part of the country. The socioeconomic divide and issues with people not being able to access affordable health care. Fortunately, most of the people who would fall into that category when they’re pregnant would have access to Medicaid, and thankfully now, will have coverage for up to a year after birth. Those are some of the small wins that hopefully will help to make a difference but there are many challenges.

That’s why it is going to take a concerted effort on all fronts for us to see the change that is needed. Because it’s not like there’s just one main contributor to the problem. There are several small things that we have to really work on. And once we do it right for a while, we have to be consistent and maintain our vigilance as we’re working to optimize maternal health. We can’t do it for a couple of years, see our numbers get better and then go back to the way things were. We have to make sure that the changes that we implement are sustainable, and that they continue to be passed on. We have to spread the things that work from institution to institution and from providers and practices on to other providers and other practices, so that we see this as a sustainable improvement for our state.

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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