Republicans are behind a growing push to incarcerate pregnant women forcing them to give birth "like caged animals," an author tells Mother Jones in a new interview Wednesday.
Author Rebecca Rodriguez Carey’s new book, "Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prisons," reveals how pregnant women are a "fast-growing population" and often forced to give birth in shackles — even as leading medical groups denounce the practice, Mother Jones reports.
"Women are the fastest-growing population of incarcerated people," according to Mother Jones. "And if Republicans get their way, more pregnant women will be joining their ranks."
"They felt like they were caged animals," Rodriguez Carey said. "When you are in the state of giving birth, you are extremely vulnerable. You’re not necessarily at a risk of fleeing; there have been no documented cases to date of a woman trying to escape while in labor. Many of the women that I interviewed had cesarean sections, so they were on the operating table, numb from the waist down—you are not going anywhere at that moment."
And although some states have laws restricting the practice, it's unclear how many women are restrained during birth.
"A state may have a policy, but then we know that the policy is often different from the reality of what takes place," Rodriguez Carey said. "Many states that have issued restrictions on shackling still leave it up to correctional officers if there is a point of threat or perceived harm."
Amid rising immigration raids prompted by the Trump administration in the U.S., many of the targets and people taken into custody are pregnant women who oftentimes do not get the proper medical care they need. A report last month from the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) alleges "officials identified more than a dozen credible reports of the mistreatment of pregnant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which included not receiving adequate, or even urgent, medical care and being denied food."
"That’s because conservatives are behind a growing push to criminalize pregnancy outcomes nationwide, in part by giving full rights to fetuses," Mother Jones reports. "And while abortion opponents have long claimed they do not want to criminalize abortion-seekers themselves, since the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, a growing number of conservative lawmakers have begun introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide and criminalize abortion-seekers."
The move to enact these laws is likely to incarcerate more Black and Latina women, who are imprisoned at higher rates compared to white women.
In her book, the author spoke to nearly three dozen women who were incarcerated while pregnant throughout the Midwest. For many incarcerated pregnant women, they meet their child and say good bye to them — sometimes within a 24-hour period.
"After a woman gives birth, she’s sent back to prison, often within 24 to 48 hours of giving birth and asked to fall back in line as if nothing has happened, even though her world has just been rocked," she said.
Federal data has not kept up with the rising prison population. The Bureau of Justice Statistics released its first report on the state of pregnant women in prisons earlier this year.
It's still unknown exactly how many pregnant women are behind bars because they don't always have access to pregnancy tests.
The BJS report cites there were more than 320 pregnant women in state and federal custody in 2023. However, past research from advocates and scholars points to an estimate of about 3,000 pregnant people in the U.S. prison system each year.
“This invisibility,” Rodriguez Carey told Mother Jones, “really contributes to systemic neglect.”
