How jails fail unborn children and their pregnant parents
By Trey Flowers, NFL defensive end and Players Coalition Advocate & Tori Franklin, Olympian American triple jumper and Players Coalition Advocate
In this country nearly everyone agrees — at least in theory — that we should provide access to adequate care for pregnant women and their unborn children. But in practice, we are overwhelmingly failing to meet that goal. The United States has the worst maternal mortality rate among developed nations, and Black women are especially impacted by the lack of care, as they are three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women.
Nowhere is our neglect of women and their children more apparent than in this nation’s prisons and jails. Story after story reveals the many ways that we treat these women and their soon-to-arrive babies as less than human. In a Gadsen, Alabama Detention Center, officials denied a woman prenatal care despite her high blood pressure, forced her to sleep on a thin mat on a concrete floor, and gave her only Tylenol during her 12 hours of labor. She delivered her baby alone in a jail shower while standing on a concrete floor, and she almost bled to death. In Gainesville, FL, a woman held in the local jail started screaming while in labor, but guards ignored her. She gave birth in the jail, and the baby later died. Guards in Stafford County, Virginia kept a pregnant woman with serious mental illness in solitary confinement; she spent five hours alone and in labor there. Guards found her and her newborn child in a pool of blood. The child died soon after.
These cases are, sadly, not isolated examples. It is long past the time for elected officials, and especially those who run jails and prisons, to ensure that no person gives birth in a jail cell. Whether you think mass incarceration has gone too far or whether you are a lock-them-up and throw-away-the-key type, we should all be able to agree on two things: babies should be born in a hospital and their parents should be under the watchful care of a doctor. These principles should not be hard to get behind.
An estimated 58,000 people are pregnant when they enter a local jail or a prison, and yet there are few policies and standards that govern their care. Even when they do exist, many are not consistently followed. One study revealed that nearly half of pregnant women in prison said they received no prenatal care. As of 2019, 24 states failed to codify any requirements for how deliveries should occur. Twelve states allow jails and prisons to shackle women during pregnancy, even though it makes an already excruciatingly painful experience worse and prevents doctors from accurately diagnosing complications.
These policy failures have serious consequences. One study found a miscarriage rate ranging between 19–22% and more premature births. And they do not even touch upon the care that is restricted after labor. Ask any woman who has given birth in a hospital, and they will tell you that the nurses, rightly or wrongly, emphasized the importance of breastfeeding. And yet very few jails and prisons have policies allowing women to breastfeed their children.
Children of incarcerated parents deserve the same chance in life as those whose parents aren’t in jail or prison, but we aren’t giving it to them. To the contrary, we are telling these kids that we think less of them before they are even born, so much so that we are willing to let their moms bleed out on the floor during labor. We are saddling these kids with serious medical effects from a lack of care, but also negative psychological effects. We cannot very well expect a child to find self-worth after forcing his or her mother to give birth shackled to a prison bed.
With a growing incarcerated female population, the need to change these policies becomes even more urgent. Over the next year, we will work with Sheriffs who control jails and legislators to pass laws to establish policies that ensure pregnant people don’t give birth in a cell and that they receive both prenatal and postnatal care. We will push to establish standards on breastfeeding and nutrition, and fight so that no one ever gives birth alone in a cell again. It is sad that in 2024, this is a battle we need to have. But we will do it, because children and their parents deserve better. Anything less is inhumane.
