Mississippi, God Damn!

One of the greatest rappers, in my humble opinion, Tupac Shakur released a song in 1991 called  “Brenda’s Got a Baby”. The song was inspired by a true case that got national attention. The case concerned a young girl that was about 12 years old. She was sexually assaulted by her cousin and got pregnant. She was naturally thin and started to wear a large coat to hide her pregnancy. When she gave birth, she tried to dispose of the baby in the complexes’ dump where she lived in New York. The baby was found by the police. The cousin named Clarence Perry admitted to being the father of the child. He later pled guilty to secondary statutory rape, and was given six months in prison and five years probation. Prosecutors said they agreed to a plea deal in order to spare the victim from having to testify.

Recently a 13 year old girl in Mississippi gave birth to a baby boy named Peanut in August of 2023. Last fall, she was sexually assaulted by a stranger in her backyard in Clarksdale, MS according to her mother. For weeks, she didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even her mom. Her mother knew something was wrong. The 13 year old used to love going outside to make dances for her TikTok, but suddenly she refused to leave her bedroom. When she turned 13 that November, she wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. “She just said, ‘It hurts,’” Her mother remembers. “She was crying in her room. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want to tell me.”

On Jan. 11,the 13 year old girl  began throwing up so much that her mother took her to the emergency room at Northwest Regional Medical Center in Clarksdale. When her bloodwork came back, the hospital called the police. One nurse came in and asked the girl, “What have you been doing?” her mother recalls. That’s when they found out the girl was pregnant. “I broke down,” her mother said..

When it was found out the girl was pregnant, she happened to be 10-12 weeks along. Her mother asked if the pregnancy could be terminated. Seven months earlier, The girl could have gone to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, she lives in the heart of abortion-ban America. In 2018, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi enacted a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court felt differently. In their June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half a century. Within weeks, Mississippi and every state that borders it banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

The closest abortion provider for the girl would be in Chicago. At first, her mother thought she could drive there. But it’s a nine-hour trip, and the mother would have to take off work. She’d have to pay for gas, food, and a place to stay for a couple of nights, not to mention the cost of the abortion itself. “I don’t have the funds for all this,” she says. So the girl did what girls with no other options do: she did nothing. Now the child has a child. She has a child that she now has to raise that was conceived out of violence. The child is born within a family that is poor in a state that has opted out of Medicaid expansion that would have brought $1.5 billion in new revenue annually while creating jobs, helping bolster the budgets of struggling hospitals and providing up to 300,000 poor, working Mississippians with health coverage. 

According to Time Magazine, Clarksdale is in the Mississippi Delta, a vast stretch of flat, fertile land in the northwest corner of the state, between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The people who live in the Delta are overwhelmingly Black. The poverty rate is high. The region is an epicenter of America’s ongoing Black maternal-health crisis. Mississippi has the second-highest maternal-mortality rate in the country, with 43 deaths per 100,00 live births, and the Delta has among the worst maternal-healthcare outcomes in the state. Black women in Mississippi are four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as white women. 

Mississippi’s abortion ban contains narrow exceptions, including for rape victims and to save the life of the mother. As the 13 year old’s case shows, these exceptions are largely theoretical. Even if a victim files a police report, there appears to be no clear process for granting an exception.And, of course, there are no abortion providers left in the state. In January, the New York Times reported that since Mississippi’s abortion law went into effect, only two exceptions had been made. Even if the process for obtaining one were clear, it wouldn’t have helped the girl. Her mother didn’t know that Mississippi’s abortion ban had an exception for rape.

Talking points from anti-abortionists often cite religious reasons or fallacious statistics for why abortion should be banned. According to PBS.org, The divisions are epitomized in the country’s largest denomination — the Catholic Church. National polls repeatedly show that a majority of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops supports sweeping bans.

Among Protestants, a solid majority of white evangelicals favor outlawing abortion. But most mainline Protestants support the right to abortion, and several of their top leaders have decried the year-old Supreme Court ruling that undermined that right by reversing the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

For example, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, said he was “deeply grieved” by that ruling.

The decision “institutionalized inequality because women with access to resources will be able to exercise their moral judgment in ways that women without the same resources will not,” Curry said.

Even before Dobbs, it was perilous to become a mother in rural Mississippi. More than half the counties in the state can be classified as maternity-care deserts, according to a 2023 report from the March of Dimes, meaning there are no birthing facilities or obstetric providers. More than 24% of women in Mississippi have no birthing hospital within a 30-minute drive, compared to the national average of roughly 10%. There are just nine ob-gyns serving a region larger than the state of Delaware. Every time another ob-gyn retires, other ob-gyn’s get an influx of new patients. Often these patients are having to drive further to get the same care, then they’re having to wait longer.

Early data suggests the Dobbs decision will make this problem worse. Younger doctors and medical students say they don’t want to move to states with abortion restrictions. When Emory University researcher Ariana Traub surveyed almost 500 third- and fourth-year medical students in 2022, close to 80% said that abortion laws influenced where they planned to apply to residency. Nearly 60% said they were unlikely to apply to any residency programs in states with abortion restrictions. Traub had assumed that abortion would be most important to students studying obstetrics, but was surprised to find that three-quarters of students across all medical specialties said that Dobbs was affecting their residency decisions.

And so Dobbs has compounded America’s maternal-health crisis: more women are delivering more babies, in areas where there are already not enough doctors to care for them, while abortion bans are making it more difficult to recruit qualified providers to the regions that need them most. 

In an interview in a side bedroom, while the 13 year old girl watched TV with her baby  in another room, Her mom recounted the details of her daughter’s sexual assault, as she understands them. It was a weekend in the fall, shortly after lunchtime, her daughter, then 12, had been outside their home making TikToks while her uncle and sibling were inside. A man came down the street and into the front yard, grabbed her, and covered her mouth, her mother said. He pulled her around to the side of the house and raped her. The girl  told her mother that her assailant was an adult, and that she didn’t know him. Nobody else witnessed the assault.

Shortly after finding out her daughter was pregnant, her mother filed a complaint with the Clarksdale Police Department. The department’s assistant chief of police, Vincent Ramirez, confirmed to TIME that a police report had been filed in the matter, but refused to share the document because it involved a minor.

According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, justice’s primary definition is the ethical, philosophical idea that people are to be treated impartially, fairly, properly, and reasonably by the law and by arbiters of the law, that laws are to ensure that no harm befalls another, and that, where harm is alleged, a remedial action is taken – both the accuser and the accused receive a morally right consequence merited by their actions. Reading the story about the 13 year old SA victim that is now a mother, her mother who is now a grandmother that has limited resources, and a child brought into the world through violence, my heart breaks for them because I see no justice here. There is no fair treatment for the victim. There is no protection from alleged harm. There is no report for the accused to have been brought to justice. On the broader spectrum, Black Women in Mississippi are facing the brunt of the maternal health crisis including having little to no recourse to receive proper health care let alone bodily autonomy. 

As an advocate for reparations for the descendants of the enslaved in America, the issue of Black women’s health is part of this conversation. In a previous blog post entitled Covid-19, Vaccines, and Black America. Is there a Nefarious Correlation?, I wrote:

Black Americans have a major distrust of the Medical Industry. Their distrust is not unwarranted. Unfortunately, Black people in America have experienced a number of malpractice mishaps.  James Marion Sims is considered the ‘Father of Modern Gynecology’ who pioneered tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. Although he was very groundbreaking in this field, he developed his techniques by conducting research on enslaved Black women without anesthesia. He operated under a false and racist notion that Black people did not feel pain. Today, we know three of the names of the female fistula patients from Sims’s own records—Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. The first one he operated on was 18-year-old Lucy, who had given birth a few months prior and hadn’t been able to control her bladder since. During the procedure, patients were completely naked and asked to perch on their knees and bend forward onto their elbows so their heads rested on their hands. Lucy endured an hour-long surgery, screaming and crying out in pain, as nearly a dozen other doctors watched. As Sims later wrote, “Lucy’s agony was extreme.” She became extremely ill due to his controversial use of a sponge to drain the urine away from the bladder, which led her to contract blood poisoning. “I thought she was going to die…it took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely from the effects of the operation,”

Sims’s racist beliefs affected more than his gynecological experiments. Before and after his gynecological experiments, he also tested surgical treatments on enslaved Black children in an effort to treat “trismus nascentium” (neonatal tetanus)—with little to no success. Sims also believed that Black Americans were less intelligent than white people, and thought it was because their skulls grew too quickly around their brain. He would operate on Black children using a shoemaker’s tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls.

Moving to another event in Medical Apartheid history, one cannot also forget the Tuskegee Experiment which was an infamous study on Syphilis.  The Tuskegee experiment began in 1932, at a time when there was no known treatment for syphilis. After being recruited by the promise of free medical care, 600 men originally were enrolled in the project. The participants were primarily sharecroppers, and many had never before visited a doctor. Doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), which was running the study, informed the participants—399 men with latent syphilis and a control group of 201 others who were free of the disease—they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments.In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.

Cases like these and others like the unfortunate story of Henrietta Lacks whose cells from her cervix were bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world, would absolutely warrant any Black American who descends from Chattel Slavery to run screaming from any medical professional coming within ten feet of them. Even in the 21st century, Black Americans are still experiencing adverse disparities in healthcare driven by lack of health resources in our communities and also implicit biases that health care professionals possess. In an NCBI article entitled Health Disparities: Gaps in Access, Quality and Affordability of Medical Care, Wayne J. Riley MD, MPH, MBA, MACP writes,

“…analysis revealed even more objective evidence of major differences and raised the specter of the role of bias and discrimination with regard to populations with equal access to healthcare. Underscoring the resultant discrepant quality of care experienced by populations as manifested in the appropriateness of clinical care and patient preferences, and the often confusing and challenging nature of the healthcare system and its legal and regulatory environment, are the roles of bias, discrimination, and uncertainty.”

Mississippi in actuality, is a microcosm of health disparities that is rampant in the United States on top of being quite nonchalant when it comes to sexual violence against Black Women. According to the American Psychology Association: 

• For every black woman who reports rape, at least 15 black women do not report it.
• One in four black girls will be sexually abused before the age of 18.
• One in five black women are survivors of rape.
• 35% of black women experienced some form of contact sexual violence during their lifetime.
• 40% to 60% of black women report being subjected to coercive sexual contact by age 18.
• 17% of black women experienced sexual violence other than rape by an intimate partner during their lifetime.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that:

• More than 20% of black women are raped during their lifetimes—a higher share than among women overall.
• Black women were two and a half times more likely to be murdered by men than their white counterparts. And, more than 9 in 10 black female victims knew their killers.
• Black women also experience significantly higher rates of psychological abuse—including humiliation, insults, name-calling and coercive control—than do women overall.

I asked a question on a podcast called the Non-Prophets that I help to produce with the Atheist Community of Austin. I asked where is the empathy for the victim? To answer my own question, there is none. I wrote about the health disparities of Black Women who are largely Freedmen Descendants in 2021. We are still here. 

On May 22, 1962 in Los Angeles, CA, Malcolm X spoke these words:

“The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman. And as Muslims, the honorable Elijah Muhammed teaches us to respect our women, and to protect our women. And the only time a Muslim gets real violent, is when someone goes to molest his woman. We will kill you, for our women I’m making it plain yes, we will kill you for our women. We believe that if the white man will do whatever is necessary, to see that his woman gets respect and protection, then you and I will never be recognized as men. Until we stand up like men and pay the same penalty over the head of anyone, who puts his filthy hands out, to put it in the direction of our women.”

In 2023, we see unfortunately that Malcolm X’s words are not heeded. We still have a large disrespect and lack of protection for Black Women and Girls. Assuredly, I will make another post of a real life example of this. This will be the case when Black Women are continuously viewed and third and fourth class citizens. Until that narrative changes, we will still be here. 

• Cynthia McDonald C A M M CHW