Would You Rather Give Birth in Shackles or Alone in Your Cell?

As Rachel Roth more eloquently points out in an article in The Nation, prisons suck at dealing with pregnant women.

Many of these practices are borderline cruel and unusual punishment. Oh wait -- scratch borderline. In October, shackling incarcerated women during labor was ruled unconstitutional. Because it's, you know. Inhumane.

The big what-are-people-thinking question in my mind is: do prison administrators have zero inkling of how painful giving birth is? How much worse being pinned down by chains makes it? After all, I highly doubt that this is the moment a woman would choose to try to make a break for it -- fending off guards, busting down locked doors, and hopping fences while an entire baby is trying to push its way out of her body. Maybe we should come up with some kind of labor-simulation virtual reality device to get the message across better.

Roth catalogs a series of atrocities, from a woman who was left leaking amniotic fluid for weeks, to one who miscarried after being punched in the stomach and denied medical care, to the many women who end up giving birth in their cells, with just prison staff for help or completely on their own, after having their pleas to be taken to a hospital ignored. As one woman -- an incarcerated 19-year-old at the time she brought forth a life all by herself -- asked, "How does somebody have a baby will jail without anybody noticing?" I guess the guards were busy. Maybe there was a ball game on or something.

But perhaps we shouldn't be so hard on the good ol' prison-industrial complex. This utter disregard for providing basic health care and upholding human rights is probably just an anomaly, right? I mean, it's not like almost 1 in 20 inmates are raped or sexually assaulted in the course of a year. Or like the $2 billion industry for private health care providers has a history of failing to offer adequate physical or mental medical care -- so that, as the New York Times puts it, "10 Days Can Be a Death Sentence." Or like anywhere from two to nine percent, or more, of those prisoners are probably innocent anyway.

Oh wait.

Photo courtesy of Mushroom and Rooster's Flickr photostream.