We’ve written here at Feministe before about the common practice of U.S. prisons shackling pregnant prisoners in while they are in labor. And despite the increased recognition that such treatment is inhuman, it’s one that has not entirely ceased.
Now an article over at Alternet (originally published at The Nation) gives us awful if not hugely shocking news: shackling during labor isn’t the only atrocious and dangerous treatment that pregnant prisoners are receiving. Rather, many have been undergoing abuse at the hands of the prison system for months:
When women are brought to a hospital in shackles, the pain and humiliation they endure likely caps months of difficulty from being pregnant behind bars, months without adequate prenatal care or nutrition, or even basics like a bed to sleep on or clothes to accommodate their changing shape.
The lack of common sense and compassion with which imprisoned pregnant women are treated is chilling. Three stories illustrate the dangers women face when they cannot get anyone to take their medical needs seriously.
First, some women are not taken to the hospital until after they have already given birth, despite having informed staff members that they are in labor. Women wind up giving birth in their cells with the assistance of a nurse, corrections officer or cellmates. Others give birth in their cells with nobody to help. Both situations endanger the woman and her baby. Nineteen-year-old Terra K. screamed, pounded on the door and asked for the nurse in the Dubuque County Jail in Iowa, only to give birth alone in her cell. Afterward she asked, “How does somebody have a baby in jail without anybody noticing?”
The article tells the equally distressing story of a woman whose fetus died in utero due to a lack of needed medical care, only to have prison officials then delay getting the dead fetus removed from her body, as well as that of a woman who miscarried as a result of an assault by other prisoners, and who ended up requiring surgery and a blood transfusion because prison officials refused to take her to the hospital in a timely manner.
Further, while these incidents would be horrifying and entirely unacceptable even if they were unusual, sadly they’re not:
These are not isolated events; they are just a few that recently made the news. Institutions of confinement are not required to report the pregnancy outcomes of women in their custody. Until elected officials mandate such reporting, we will have to rely on the efforts of imprisoned women, journalists, human rights investigators, researchers, lawyers and advocates to document the reality of life for pregnant women inside prison walls. Reflecting on more than thirty years of experience, ACLU National Prison Project director Elizabeth Alexander says, “In virtually every case that I have handled involving healthcare claims of women, I have found women who lost their pregnancies or newborns due to the prison’s atrocious neglect.”
The denial of appropriate care to pregnant women is part and parcel of the general state of medical neglect in prisons in the United States. Access to timely, appropriate medical care is further undermined by the trend to contract out medical services to private, for-profit companies.
When it comes to these issues, I feel like we talk a lot about a lack of prison oversight — rather than why so many people are in prisons to begin with, whether prison is really the best place for most of these people to be, and why such conditions are allowed to exist at all. And while the first two are unfortunately a bit beyond the scope of this post and my knowledge base, I don’t think we can really begin to intelligently discuss this issue at all without looking at the last.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: this is what happens when we decide that people who have broken the law (or are merely accused of doing so!) have relinquished their most basic and inalienable human rights. This is what happens when we decide that punishing people is worth more than our Constitution, ethics, or simple decency. This is what happens when a system steeped in racism, classism, ableism, and misogyny is given complete control over people’s lives, with everyone else throwing up their hands and saying “they should have thought about that before.” And while I’m ranting, it’s also what happens when (usually privileged) people run around complaining about how “those criminals have better health care than I do,” both spreading a generally untrue, misleading, and dangerous myth, and also suggesting that health care is not something that ought to be a right for all, but something that is earned off of some kind of “objective” personal merit.
It would be easy to sit here and make arguments about the number of imprisoned women who have committed non-violent crimes, and to discuss the important subject of how unjust societal factors lead people to break the law, but I’m not going to reinforce the notion that this would somehow be acceptable for certain women. No person deserves to give birth alone on a cold jail cell floor. No person deserves to leak amniotic fluid for almost two weeks, pleading to be taken to a doctor, until her fetus’ skull collapses. No person deserves to live with an incomplete miscarriage for three weeks until they start bleeding almost to death, because a simple follow-up visit was not allowed to be attended.
This kind of treatment ought to be considered cruel and unusual by any standard. And it’s only allowed to exist as it does because we live in a bigoted society that wallows in a smug sense of superiority and believes it has the credentials and the prerogative to determine that some people don’t deserve the right to safety or even life. Not just because of a lack of oversight, but because so many non-incarcerated people don’t even want that oversight, and actively resist it. Not just because our government is prejudiced and cruel, but because many average people also think that the women living under these abusive conditions are getting exactly what they deserve.
