Pregnant Behind Bars: What We Do And Don't Know About Pregnancy And Incarceration
Pregnant women in prison face difficult circumstances, and data on their pregnancies has been scarce. New research lays the groundwork for addressing this neglected public health issue.
There are 111,616 incarcerated women in the United States, a 7-fold increase since 1980. Some of these women are pregnant, but amid reports of women giving birth in their cells or shackled to hospital beds, prison and public health officials have no hard data on how many incarcerated women are pregnant, or on the outcomes of those pregnancies.
A Thursday changes that. The study included 57 percent of the US prison population (New York, California and Florida were not included). It found that 3.8 percent of newly admitted women were pregnant and that in a single year, incarcerated women had 753 live births, 46 miscarriages, four stillbirths and 11 abortions.
