Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch filed another brief in support of the argument that states with strict abortion bans should be able to deny emergency medical care to pregnant women if that care involves an abortion. 

The filing in the Idaho case is called an amicus curiae brief, which allows interested parties not directly involved in a court case to submit legal documents voicing their opinion. 

The case began when the Biden administration sued Idaho for barring abortions when a pregnant woman’s health is at risk. 

Fitch added Mississippi to the amicus brief in 2022, immediately after the Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Nineteen other states now stand with Mississippi, according to the newest court filing.

Fitch’s office declined to comment for this story. 

At the heart of the case, explained Mary Ziegler, one of the country’s preeminent experts on abortion law and a professor at UC Davis School of Law, is a discussion of health versus life – which she says is less of a philosophical distinction and more of a political strategy. 

“There are plenty of things that go wrong in pregnancy that can really affect your health that aren’t going to necessarily imminently kill you. But if you’re coming from a movement perspective, you see all these health justifications basically as loopholes that people are exploiting,” she said. “So, some states responded to that anxiety like Texas by having a health exception but having it be very, very, very narrow, and other states like Mississippi responded by just not having a health exception at all.”

In fact, national health policy organization KFF does not consider Texas’ health exception – to prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function” – to be an exception at all. Mississippi is one of six ban states which does not have an exception for the health of the mother. 

Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas are the other five, according to KFF. All six have exceptions to protect the life of the mother.

The federal law at odds with these state bans is called EMTALA, or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires medical providers to stabilize everyone entering the emergency room before discharging or transferring them. The Biden administration argued that treatment should include abortion and should apply to mothers in ban states – if the mother’s pregnancy poses a risk to her health. 

These 20 states, including Mississippi, that have joined the “friend of the court” brief have “a profound interest in preserving the federalist structure, their power to regulate for the welfare of their citizens, and state laws adopted by citizens’ elected representatives to protect unborn children from intentional destruction,” according to the brief. 

While the argument of the amicus brief relies heavily on the principle of state rights, it also presents several anti-abortion defenses, including that doctors should not be allowed to prioritize the health of women over unborn children. 

“That EMTALA imposes obligations on hospitals to pregnant women does not allow hospitals to ignore the health of unborn children,” the brief reads. “Hospitals cannot ‘pick and choose’ between their dual obligations. They must stabilize both women and unborn children.”

But allowing states to treat life and health differently, Ziegler said, doesn’t create a distinction as much as it causes confusion. 

“If you’re going to lose an organ or be permanently disabled – does that fall under life exception or not? And some states say ‘well, yeah, our life exception doesn’t require you to be imminently dying, it just requires that there be a threat to your life, and certain organ damage could qualify.’ But it’s also sort of unclear.” 

After Mississippi’s abortion ban took hold in July 2022, the state’s number of abortions plummeted to nearly zero – despite the fact that Mississippi’s ban has two exceptions: to protect the life of the mother, and cases where the pregnancy was caused by rape and reported to law enforcement. 

Cases like Ashley, the 13-year-old Delta girl TIME magazine wrote about who was raped and forced to carry her baby to term, show that the exceptions can be theoretical.

Only four abortions were performed in Mississippi in 2023, according to data from the Mississippi State Department of Health.

If the Supreme Court votes in favor of the states, Ziegler says it probably wouldn’t change much for a state like Mississippi. If, however, the Supreme Court votes in favor of the Biden administration, it could change the landscape – not of abortion generally, but in those instances where a woman goes to the emergency room for pregnancy complications and doctors are deciding if they can legally treat her. 

“If the Supreme Court ultimately said that EMTALA does cover a universe of physical emergencies that are not imminently life-threatening, and here are some of those examples, it would be very hard for Mississippi prosecutors to go after anyone who performed procedures in those circumstances,” Ziegler said.

A similar case is playing out in Texas.

The Idaho case is currently awaiting an oral arguments hearing in December, after which the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will issue an opinion. If appealed, it will return to the Supreme Court.

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

Faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi are pushing back on an administrative plan to cut low-enrolled programs. 

Earlier this month, the faculty senate voted no-confidence in the program review process that President Joe Paul announced earlier this school year as part of his administration’s efforts to afford future faculty pay raises. 

The vote came after the administration shared a list of dozens of programs that could be cut or consolidated, such as bachelor degrees in criminal justice and philosophy, graduate programs in public relations, mathematics and computational science, and multiple music and theater programs.

The process for reviewing this list of programs was determined by the provost, Lance Nail, and will be based on a data-based analysis that looks at enrollment and program revenue. Nail’s office will meet with the deans and school directors to determine the future of these programs, and will make a recommendation on whether a program should stay with a corrective action plan, be consolidated or be cut. 

That’s a problem for faculty, who say that any matters affecting teaching and learning at the research institution in Hattiesburg should be conducted by the people who know it best — the faculty, not the administration. 

“As I explained to our administration this month and in prior meetings, other faculty and I probably have very strong opinions about who should be coaching football at USM,” Josh Bernstein, the faculty senate president, said during the Oct. 4 meeting. “We also have thoughts on recruitment and enrollment or how to oversee the finances of the university or what kind of lasagna should be served at the fresh, but it is not our job to be the primary advisers on those things.” 

Bernstein went on to call a program review process that did not have faculty input dictatorial, dangerous and “a disservice to students.” The English professor added that the faculty senate had requested more involvement in the process over the course of at least five meetings with the administration but now, morale was tanking.  

“Bluntly, I said faculty were in a panic,” Bernstein said. 

In response to the no-confidence vote, the university’s administration said that faculty’s involvement in the process could not come at the exclusion of the administration and that it listened to and acted on the senate’s concerns.

“Faculty in affected degree plans will have, and in many cases already have had, direct
involvement in discussions about the future of their degree plans,” the administration’s response states.

The president, Joe Paul, previously told faculty his goal is to help the tuition-dependent university afford future raises and remain solvent as it works to reverse years of declining enrollment. 

Meanwhile, the third-largest university in Mississippi is also dealing with inflation, escalating property insurance, aging facilities and increased competition for a declining pool of high school graduates going to college. 

Layoffs are a possibility, according to documents the administration recently shared with faculty about the program review process.  

“While layoffs are a possible outcome of this process, the committees, councils and administration will remain mindful of the impacts of these decisions on faculty and staff,” a white-pager stated. University policies will be followed if layoffs become necessary.”

Before the vote was taken, Nail attended the faculty senate meeting with Doug Masterson, the senior associate provost for institutional success. Masterson took questions about a report he had recently shared that determined which programs were on the administration’s “red light list.” 

The data analysis showed how more than 35 programs were or were not financially contributing to the university, among other data points. Not all programs were in the red but some, like a doctoral degree in computational science, cost the university $1,070 per credit hour. 

“Those numbers are tied to people, and those people are graduates,” Masterson said. “It’s not just a number. It’s a number with a person and an interest in a program.” 

Some unquantifiable factors the administration will look at include how the degree serves USM’s mission or engages with the community. 

“Philosophy has been a program that has continuously not met our enrollment requirements,” Nail said. “That’s been put on stipulation on a rolling basis because it has been deemed critical to the university’s mission.”

One aspect of the process faculty took issue with is that USM’s requirements for program enrollment is higher than IHL’s. The review looks at cumulative graduates over a three-year period, but USM’s baseline is twice what IHL requires. 

Nail noted that some of the university’s programs were already in the process of creating plans to boost enrollment and graduation numbers because they had been flagged by IHL due to the recent drop in student population.

“The rapid decline in enrollment is triggering a lot more of these reviews than we’ve ever had before,” Nail said. “When your enrollment is down 12-13% over three years, all of a sudden that starts to flow through and the graduation numbers decline.” 

USM has directed faculty who will be required to revise their degree plans to evaluate the market demand for their program based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics or other sources of potential job growth in Mississippi. 

“The degree plan should prepare students for their future careers, graduate school or professional programs, and to adapt to changes in the job marketplace,” Masterson’s report states. 

The fate of the least-enrolled programs will be determined by the end of the semester, according to the white-paper. The process will repeat in the spring for programs that meet IHL’s minimum standards, but not USM’s.

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

Oct. 15, 1883

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 as unconstitutional, saying the government could not control the prejudices of people or companies. 

Black Americans had sued theaters, hotels and transit companies, which refused them admittance, but Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in an 8-1 decision that “legislative power extends only to the subject of slavery … and the denial of equal accommodations in inns, public conveyances and places of public amusement … imposes no badge of slavery or involuntary servitude upon the party.” 

Bishop Henry McNeil Turner raged that the “world has never witnessed such barbarous laws entailed upon a free people as have grown out of” this ruling, which “has made the ballot of the black man a parody, his citizenship a nullity and his freedom a burlesque. It has engendered the bitterest feeling between the whites and blacks, and resulted in the deaths of thousands, who would have been living and enjoying life today.” 

In a dissent, Justice John Harlan decried such discrimination, saying the goal of government is to “mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political.” Harlan called such discrimination a “badge of servitude, the imposition of which Congress may prevent under its power, through appropriate legislation, to enforce the 13th Amendment.” 

Black Americans would have to wait eight decades before Congress passed another civil rights law barring discrimination in public accommodations and employment.

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