Everywhere Jessica Garvin, an assisted living and nursing home administrator, turned in 2018, somebody else seemed to sidle up and whisper, “You really need to run for the Oklahoma State Senate.” Garvin was perplexed. She had never held political office and had no plans to do so.
“It was pretty crazy,” Garvin tells IWF. “One day a friend called out of the blue and said, ‘Hey, if you ever get a chance to run for office, you should do it.’ I admitted to my then-boss that people were telling me this and that I thought the whole thing was stupid. He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Well, I don’t think it’s stupid at all. I think you should do it.’” More than just finding it an interesting idea, Jesica’s boss sat down and made a list of community leaders for her to sound out.
“That happened on a Monday morning,” Jessica tells IWF, “and that afternoon my son came home with spelling words to study, some of his words included: campaign, political, strategy, microphone, and speeches.” Jessica was intrigued but hardly persuaded. Tuesday was another day. Garvin went to her son’s school to volunteer, only to be approached by a teacher. You sort of know where this is going, don’t you?
Stopping Garvin in the school corridor, the teacher said, “I just feel like I need to tell you this. Whatever it is that God is planning for you is going to be really big, you need to listen, and stop trying to convince yourself otherwise.” Shortly afterwards, Jessica threw in the towel. Crazy as it had initially sounded, she was going to run for the State Senate.
A co-founder of Bison Health Management, which provides business consulting for health-related organizations, Garvin, 38, believes her extensive knowledge of health issues was a reason she was encouraged to run. “Oklahoma needed people who knew about industry because we were looking at Medicaid expansion, medical marijuana, and other health-related issues. I think people were just really longing for someone who had an understanding in general of the health industry,” she said.
But politics was something new. “I was on the legislative committee of the assisted living association, and was involved with the nursing home association’s legislative affairs too, so I had relationships with a handful of legislators, but that was it. I had never run for anything, let alone State Senate.”
While Garvin felt that God was prompting her to run, He hadn’t necessarily indicated whether she was going to win. The campaign was brutal. “The other side started a rumor that my child was not my husband’s biological child,” Garvin recalled of the GOP primary. “Since my daughter is the spitting image of my mother-in-law, it’s funny now, but it was very upsetting at the time. The campaign was so rough at times, but I knew if all that journey did for me was to give me a stronger faith, then that was enough.”
When the votes in the general were counted, however, Garvin had “won in a big fashion,” as her hometown newspaper put it. Garvin represents Oklahoma’s 43rd district in the State Senate. Garvin has been involved in family and health issues, where her healthcare background comes in handy. For example, she is author of a bill to codify rights to birth control.
“Planned Parenthood has gone across the country scaring people by telling them politicians are going to take away birth control,” she explains, “and it will be impossible to get an IUD, or at least that’s what we’ve seen here in Oklahoma. I have a bill that says nobody can take your right to preventative birth control. It may seem ridiculous that we have to do this, but it’s something we need to make clear because of that narrative from Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups.”
She has also signed IWF’s Women’s Bill of Rights. “It was important to me not just because I am the mother of girls,” she says, “but because we are getting to a point where we are sacrificing the safety and well-being of women. I’m personally maybe a little bit libertarian, in that I just don’t care what people do as long as it doesn’t impact me. Whatever makes you happy, just do whatever that is. But at the same time, do not jeopardize the safety and well-being of others at the expense of you doing whatever makes you happy.
“The Left preaches equity, but how is it equitable for a man to compete in sports against a woman, or a male to walk into a women’s space? There are tax credits that are available for women and minority-owned businesses. How are these tax credits for women going to be affected by the transgender movement?”
“Planned Parenthood has gone across the country scaring people by telling them politicians are going to take away birth control,” she explains, “and it will be impossible to get an IUD, or at least that’s what we’ve seen here in Oklahoma. I have a bill that says nobody can take your right to preventative birth control. It may seem ridiculous that we have to do this, but it’s something we need to make clear because of that narrative from Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups.”
Jessica Garvin and her husband Stephen, Chief Financial Officer of their family-owned hospice and a former Department of Human Services employee, are raising their three children in Marlow, Oklahoma, where Jessica primarily grew up. “I still have a lot of the same friends that I’ve had since elementary school,” Jessica says. “It’s very special because we’re all back here raising our families together. A lot of the same teachers who helped shape and mold me into who I am are now teaching my kids. My six-year-old daughter is in pre-K, and she has the same preschool teacher that I had when I was her age. Mrs. Ousley is in her 80s, but you would never know. The early childhood center in our town is named after her and her husband. She is still teaching, and she’s teaching my baby. I love that.”
When Jessica was in high school, she and her father were discussing the cost of college. She remembers her father saying, “I hope you aren’t expecting me to pay for all of your college, because I am still paying for mine.” Jessica’s father was the son of immigrants from Mexico. He had planned to be a preacher, but his best friend, who was a medical student at the University of Oklahoma, convinced him to take a shot at being a physician too. Jessica’s parents met when he was traveling across Oklahoma preaching, but he soon changed his career path earning a medical degree from the University of Minnesota.
“My mom worked two or three jobs to put him through medical school,” Jessica recalls, “and they lived in a tiny apartment. I remember my dad telling me once that, when we were little, we would huddle in the biggest closet with a space heater during the cold Minnesota winter nights because it was less expensive than heating the entire apartment.”
After medical school in Minnesota, when the family was in Kansas for his residency, Jessica’s father received a call from the friend who had urged him to become a doctor. Seems he had bought a shut-down hospital in Marlow. “Having no idea where Marlow, Oklahoma was located, my parents got out a paper map and found it. We ended up moving here so my dad could open a private practice with his best friend, and the rest is history. My parents are still in Marlow, and my dad is still practicing medicine here, thirty-four years later.”
Garvin has signed IWF’s Women’s Bill of Rights. “It was important to me not just because I am the mother of girls,” she says, “but because we are getting to a point where we are sacrificing the safety and well-being of women.”
When Jessica went on to the University of Oklahoma, she planned to go on to pharmacy school, but a summer internship changed her direction. The internship was sponsored by a company that provided long-term care pharmacy services to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and facilities for people with disabilities. “I found during my internship that the part of working for the pharmacy that I enjoyed the most was reading through medical journals. I quickly fell in love with research, statistics, and data,” Garvin says, “It was extremely fascinating, and so I ended up changing my major to communication, because at the University of Oklahoma, communication is a research-based degree and includes various statistics courses.”
“I learned a lot about writing journal articles, conducting polling and gathering data, public speaking, leadership, and management. I also have a minor in psychology with a focus on industrial and organizational leadership, which is learning how to develop successful structures for businesses and organizations. After graduating, I ended up going to work for that closed-door pharmacy company right out of college.”
Garvin worked for the company for eight years, doing sales and market research. “I got pregnant with our second kiddo,” she recalls, “and at that point I was traveling all the time, like all over the country, and I just knew with two kiddos, it was going to be too hard. I wasn’t really looking for a new job, but one of my clients asked me if I knew anybody who would want to serve as his administrator for his little assisted living in my hometown.” Garvin did have a candidate for the job—herself. She was hired, and that is where she was when so many people started telling her she had to run for the State Senate.
Garvin has been a visible Senator. When it was argued that a tax on tampons should be eliminated, Garvin thought such a measure, regardless of whatever symbolic meaning it carried, wouldn’t help women. Women needed something more. “The more that I started diving into the issue of period poverty,” she says, “the more I realized that it could potentially be a really astronomical investment from the state because of all of the complications that women have when they don’t have access to sanitary products. In Oklahoma, 25% of women live in what is considered period poverty. So, that means they don’t have access to sanitary products.”
“There was a high percentage of women who reported having missed school or work during their menstrual period. That has a huge economic impact on our state when women can’t go to work because they don’t have access to sanitary products. The same thing for kids. If high school students or middle school students skip school because they don’t have access to tampons or pads, we have really low health outcomes and really low educational outcomes in our state. We don’t need them failing in school because they can’t afford tampons.”
“What I ended up doing, instead of eliminating that tax, I actually took a portion of the sales tax on menstrual products, about a million dollars, from our tax commission to put into a revolving fund so that the health department could help provide access to education and products to women who were living in period poverty. The biggest impact of that particular bill, in my opinion, is the financial savings or the fiscal savings that we have on the Medicaid system.”
“I asked the state’s Medicaid Director to provide me a list of how many women were hospitalized or treated for things like toxic shock syndrome, or UTIs, or other types of staph infections, or anything else that was related to a menstrual cycle complications—and I found that our state in one year spent almost ten million dollars related to complications from using unsanitary products.” Although this bill has now made it through the Senate three times, the House never has taken up this measure. I am hopeful that 2024 will be the year we get it to the Governor.”
Garvin has been a visible Senator. When it was argued that a tax on tampons should be eliminated, Garvin thought such a measure, regardless of whatever symbolic meaning it carried, wouldn’t help women. She had a better idea.
While Garvin did not support the expansion of Medicaid, the Oklahoma Medicaid Expansion Initiative passed in 2020. “I’m not a fan of expanding Medicaid as a social program, but it’s in our state constitution now, so we can’t go back. Now that the people have voted it into law, we have had to figure out a way to make the best of it and ensure that we are putting guardrails in place to protect taxpayer dollars from fraud, waste, and abuse. Oklahoma elected to use managed care organizations to oversee patient care for qualifying populations, which means the legislature has also had to spend time developing a plan to ensure insurance companies were not dictating patient care.”
Although Garvin’s State Senate race was difficult and full of mudslinging, she believes that even if she had lost, it would have been worth it. “I felt like God was telling me to run,” she says. “He never told me I was going to win, and I had that peace knowing his call may have stopped with just running. If I win, great, but if I lose, at least I did what I was called to do. Following His call was enough for me, but it has been incredibly special because my two girls didn’t even know what a senator was, let alone that they wanted to be one when they grew up, but both of them say that now. My son got to watch his daddy support me through this process, and not just be a bystander, but as somebody who was extremely involved in my election and campaign. I hear people often talk about the glass ceilings we have as women, but my husband shattered mine.”