Pamela Winn entered prison pregnant with her third child. Corrections officers shackled her, causing a fall that killed her baby. Diana Sanchez gave birth alone in a jail cell, pleading for medical help. No one came, and the Denver jail that mistreated her says no one did anything wrong. Andrea Circle Bear died of COVID-19, which she contracted in prison. She gave birth on a ventilator and never met her baby.
None of these women were convicted of violent offenses. They were all serving short sentences. They had no history of violence toward corrections officers or other inmates that could possibly justify their treatment—not that anything could. The state-sanctioned police violence these women face goes largely unnoticed. Their abusers are almost never prosecuted, even when women and babies die.
Black women comprise a disproportionate share of incarcerated women, especially for nonviolent drug offenses. Research shows that white people are more likely to abuse drugs, but Black people are more likely to face drug searches, drug charges, and incarceration for addiction. It’s not an accident that prisons abuse Black women and their babies, any more than it is an accident that courts give them harsher sentences and police are more likely to mistreat them. The system is working exactly as designed.
Incarcerated Pregnant People: Who Are They?
Nearly 4% of newly admitted incarcerated women and 0.6 percent of all incarcerated women are pregnant. The overwhelming majority are there for nonviolent or unserious offenses and will return to society to raise their children. They will return having suffered immense abuse during pregnancy and birth. Their children will be forcibly separated from their mothers because we have collectively decided that the appropriate penalty for a woman with a drug addiction or a habit of bouncing checks is to be tortured while she gives birth and risk dying from lack of medical care.
The overwhelming majority of incarcerated women are mothers to dependent children. When they go to jail, their kids suffer too. In almost all cases, prisons and jails are not a necessity to keep society safe from dangerous offenders; they’re punishing women for drug addictions and for poverty. Perhaps even more alarming, more than half of incarcerated women are in jail, not prison. Jail is where people go before they are convicted. This suggests these women remain incarcerated not because they have convicted of terrible crimes, but because they cannot afford bail.
It’s the criminalization of poverty, addiction, and perhaps most of all, of being Black. The problem extends well beyond prison, too. Over a million women are on probation or parole. Technical violations, such as being unable to pay a fine or get transportation to a probation meeting, can send them back to prison—sometimes for years.
How Jails and Prisons Abuse Pregnant Women
Hundreds of women give birth while incarcerated each year. None of them receive the kind of care that research shows us birthing people need—continuous support, access to quality medical providers, a chance to bond with the baby, postpartum mental health care.
Shackling, including during labor, remains alarmingly common. Most jails continue to shackle women giving birth—and remember, women in jails usually have not been convicted of a crime. It is legal to shackle pregnant women in 26 states. Even in states where the practice is banned, guards who disregard the law rarely face any consequences.
The Prison Policy Initiative’s recent 50-state survey found that abuse isn’t just common; many states have no policies designed to protect pregnant prisoners from even the most obvious risks:
- Only about half of states specify that pregnant inmates should get medical exams as part of prenatal care.
- Twenty-three states do not screen prisoners for high-risk pregnancy.
- Twelve states have no policy at all on prenatal care.
- Thirty-one states have no policy on nutrition for pregnant inmates.
During the COVID-19 crisis, the risks to pregnant women are even higher. Pregnancy is a high-risk category for the novel coronavirus. And when a woman gets the disease, she exposes her baby—even if the duo is only together for a few moments after birth. Sixty-two percent of children under 1 year who get the virus end up in the hospital. Newborns are more likely than any age group under 60 to die of the disease.
Forced Birth in Jails and Prisons
Many pregnant incarcerated women were pregnant when they were sentenced, by judges who did not understand or did not care about the consequences of incarceration on a pregnant women. In some cases, mandatory minimum sentences require even sympathetic judges to condemn pregnant women to long periods of incarceration. Others are raped and impregnated while incarcerated. Prison rape allegations are rising—yet more than 80 percent of guards accused of raping prisoners are neither investigated nor punished.
Once a woman is incarcerated, she has little choice about whether to become pregnant. While pregnant women retain the Constitutional right to abortion even when incarcerated, their access to abortion clinics and reproductive care is virtually nonexistent. Some women may not confirm a pregnancy for months, thanks to a prison healthcare system that consistently denies even basic treatment and testing. Anti-choice jailers may delay transporting a woman until she is past the state’s legal abortion cutoff. In some states, a woman may have to seek a judicial order and pay for her own transport.
In one emblematic case, a Tennessee woman who could not afford her bond was denied access to an abortion until it was too late.
The world we’ve built in prisons and jails is a terrifying reflection of the world anti-choicers would happily create for all women: forcing them to get and remain pregnant, then denying them even the most basic care. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate in the wealthy world, with Black women dying at rates four times higher than white women. You won’t hear anti-choicers or the “all lives matter” crowd breathe a word about it. Their concerns have never been for human life.
Another few Trump justices on the Supreme Court will strip women prisoners of the few rights they do have, making it impossible to sue guards and ensuring that more women and their babies die for petty crimes. Fight back by voting.