Pregnant Behind Bars: What We Do And Don’t Know About Pregnancy And Incarceration

March 21, 2019




NPR’s Ailsa Chang spoke with Dr. Sufrin to discuss the study.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.


Pregnant incarcerated people are one of the most marginalized and forgotten groups in our country. People in general don’t often think about what happens to people behind bars. People think even less about the fact that there are pregnant women behind bars, or even consider it as a possibility.

That trickles down to who gets counted and who doesn’t. We’ve seen tremendous neglect in understanding what is happening to pregnant women behind bars.

Why has this research been personally important for you?



And given that the rate of increase of incarcerated women continues to rise we can’t assume that these numbers from decades ago are accurate. That prompted me to fill in that gap because when we don’t know the numbers, when we don’t know what’s happening that means that no one’s looking and anything can happen to these women.

They can be shackled during childbirth …. I’ve seen it firsthand. They can be placed in solitary confinement. They can have their complaints of contractions, bleeding, labor complaints ignored and deliver babies in their jail cells or prison cells. They can be denied their right to access abortion. They can be denied access to quality prenatal care. When you don’t have any numbers to pay attention to them, then anything can happen.

What do we already know about pregnancy in prison?


How did you try to learn more?


So they reported this on a monthly basis for a year and that’s how we collected the data.

What did your study find?


How is it different?


What happens to the babies born to an incarcerated mother?


The consequences of being born to a mother who’s incarcerated or even having a parent who’s incarcerated for the next generation are profound especially when we consider the deep racial disparities in incarceration rates.

This is a matter of equity, of racial justice. And we know that children who are separated from their mothers because they’re in custody are more likely to end up in the foster care system even from birth and not have visits from their parents.

Kids starting out in the foster care system already have a lot stacked against them in terms of their opportunities for emotional stability and support, stable housing and education. They’re also more likely to be incarcerated themselves in the future. So the impact of these pregnancies on the next generation on families on communities particularly communities of color is profound.


It’s a starting point. We now have a better idea of what’s going on, how many people there are, and the scope of their problems. You need to know what’s going on. You need to know how many people there are. We’ve laid the groundwork for developing programs or healthcare standards that could serve these women.


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