The image of pregnant women giving birth in chains seems like something out of Game of Thrones or some other fictional or historical era. Yet in the last 30 years, as the number of women incarcerated in the United States has grown by more than 800%, this picture has become commonplace in our own time. The majority of states routinely shackle women during pregnancy and childbirth, dehumanizing the woman and increasing the potential for harm to the child.
Restraining women with waist chains, hand cuffs and leg irons during labor and delivery limits doctors’ abilities to make sudden adjustments to secure the child’s safety, especially in emergency procedures such as C-sections, where delays as short as five minutes are enough to result in permanent brain damage. These restrictions during labor also make women less able to manage the extreme pain of childbirth. Two thirds of these women are non-violent drug offenders who pose little threat to security. Because of this, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading experts in maternal and child health in the United States, has come out in strong opposition, stating that shackling, “interferes with the ability of physicians to safely practice medicine and is demeaning and unnecessary.”
On April 14, 2014, Governor O’Malley signed the Healthy Births for Incarcerated Women Act, making Maryland the 19th state to ban shackling girls and women who give birth behind bars. The law applies to every jail, prison and juvenile detention facility across Maryland. Enforcement of this statute will be crucial to preventing unduly harsh treatment of pregnant inmates. However, there is still no federal policy regarding what happens to children of incarcerated mothers after birth. The vast majority are immediately separated from their mothers, placed with relatives or in many cases in foster care.
The indignities continue. Many prisons designate breast pumps as contraband, barring new mothers with short sentences from producing milk until they return home. As a result, many babies born behind bars have no chance of being breastfed even after their mother’s release, despite the fact that breastfeeding improves babies’ immune systems, reduces the risk of respiratory illness, sudden infant death syndrome, diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer, as well as improving lifelong cognition.
Prison nursery programs allowing mothers to parent their infants (for a limited time period) in a special housing unit within the correctional facility exist in just nine states: California, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Nebraska, New York, South Dakota, Washington and West Virginia. Such programs make sense on a human level, and they reduce future offending. A report from the Women’s Prison Association found that women who participated in prison nursery programs had significantly lower rates of lifetime recidivism, with no harmful effects observed for the children later in life.
Providing basic dignity to women giving birth behind bars and increasing opportunities for them to bond with their children is good for the mother, the child, and society as a whole. Surely we are not the barbaric society that these practices conjure up. Maryland has moved to give these babies a better start – now we need to give them and their mothers a real shot at the benefits of being a family.
Citations can be found here.
