She’s sitting on the couch in a relative’s apartment in Clarksdale, Miss., wearing camo-print leggings and fiddling with the plastic hospital bracelets still on her wrists. It’s August and pushing 90 degrees, which means the brown patterned curtains are drawn, the air conditioner is on high, and the room feels like a hiding place. Peanut, the baby boy she delivered two days earlier, is asleep in a car seat at her feet, dressed in a little blue outfit. Ashley is surrounded by family, but nobody is smiling. One relative silently eats lunch in the kitchen, her two siblings stare glumly at their phones, and her mother, Regina, watches from across the room. Ashley was discharged from the hospital only hours ago, but there are no baby presents or toys in the room, no visible diapers or ointments or bottles. Almost nobody knows that Peanut exists, because almost nobody knew that Ashley was pregnant. She is 13 years old. Soon she’ll start seventh grade.
It’s a nightmare:
In the fall of 2022, Ashley was raped by a stranger in the yard outside her home, her mother says. For weeks, she didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even her mom. But Regina knew something was wrong. Ashley 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,’” Regina remembers. “She was crying in her room. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want to tell me.” (To protect the privacy of a juvenile rape survivor, TIME is using pseudonyms to refer to Ashley and Regina; Peanut is the baby’s nickname.)
The signs were obvious only in retrospect. Ashley started feeling sick to her stomach; Regina thought it was related to her diet. At one point, Regina even asked Ashley if she was pregnant, and Ashley said nothing. Regina hadn’t yet explained to her daughter how a baby is made, because she didn’t think Ashley was old enough to understand. “They need to be kids,” Regina says. She doesn’t think Ashley even realized that what happened to her could lead to a pregnancy.
On Jan. 11, Ashley began throwing up so much that Regina 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 Ashley, “What have you been doing?” Regina recalls. That’s when they found out Ashley was pregnant. “I broke down,” Regina says.
Dr. Erica Balthrop was the ob-gyn on call that day. Balthrop is an assured, muscular woman with close-cropped cornrows and a tattoo of a feather running down her arm. She ordered an ultrasound, and determined Ashley was 10 or 11 weeks along. “It was surreal for her,” Balthrop recalls. “She just had no clue.” The doctor could not get Ashley to answer any questions, or to speak at all. “She would not open her mouth.” (Balthrop spoke about her patient’s medical history with Regina’s permission.)
At their second visit, about a week later, Regina tentatively asked Balthrop if there was any way to terminate Ashley’s pregnancy. Seven months earlier, Balthrop could have directed Ashley to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, Ashley 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 place the could go was Chicago. So they had no choice. They did nothing. That little girl had to go through childbirth.
There’s an exception for rape in Mississippi but nobody knows what process you need to go through to get one. And it’s useless anyway since there are no abortion clinics anywhere near them anyway. And Mississippi doesn’t provide much of anything for pregnant women who want to have children. It is, essentially, a war on poor, pregnant women. They lose either way.
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. “People always ask me: ‘Why do you choose to stay there?’” says Balthrop, who has worked in the Delta for more than 20 years. “I feel like I have no choice at this point.”
It’s also a war on poor children:
Gov. Tate Reeves’ office says Mississippi won’t participate in a federal summer food program for children because of his desire to reject “attempts to expand the welfare state.”
But officials at the state’s welfare agency that Reeves oversees, which participated in a similar federal program earlier in the pandemic, offered a different reason for opting out of the program: a lack of state resources to administer it.
The Summer EBT program would provide the families of students who receive free or reduced lunch during the school year with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards that can be used to purchase groceries in the summer. For each eligible child, families would receive $40 per month for a total of $120.
Thirty-five states, all five U.S. territories, and four Tribes will be participating in the program for its first year, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it expects will benefit nearly 21 million children. The other states that have opted out include Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming.
Mississippi previously administered the pandemic EBT program, which gave a similar summer benefit and provided assistance during the school year if school was conducted primarily virtually or hybrid for at least one month. The cost of running the pandemic-era program was covered fully by the federal government but the new summer version would require states to cover half of the administrative expenses, something other states have pointed to as a reason not to participate.
“Both (the Mississippi Department of Education) and (the Mississippi Department of Human Services) lack the resources, including workforce capacity and funding, to support a Summer EBT Program,” said Mark Jones, a DHS spokesperson.
Republican governors in some other states have also said they chose not to participate in the program because of their opposition to expanding federal benefits, according to Chalkbeat.
Not a priority, I guess.
