CategoriesJoin Us At:
|
"No One Should Go Through What I Went Through"That’s what Bethany Cajúne told me the first time we spoke about her experience in Montana’s Lake County Detention Facility. “No one should go through what I went through.” We filed a case earlier today to make sure that Bethany’s desire to protect other women becomes a reality. This past March, Bethany voluntarily reported to the detention facility to complete an outstanding short-term sentence for traffic violations. At that time, she was approximately four to five months pregnant, raising five small children, and attending GED classes four days a week. She was also about to successfully complete her first year in a medication-treatment program for a diagnosed addiction to opioid drugs. What Bethany didn’t know when she reported to the facility was that detention officials would withhold her medication, which was prescribed to suppress withdrawal symptoms and facilitate Bethany’s recovery, and was now critical for protecting the health of her pregnancy. Despite several attempts by Bethany’s treating physician and drug treatment counselor to ensure that Bethany continue receiving her medication, facility officials, including its chief medical doctor, denied her this care. As a result, Bethany suffered complete and abrupt withdrawal, experienced constant vomiting, diarrhea, rapid weight loss, dehydration, and other withdrawal symptoms, all extremely dangerous during pregnancy. Despite repeated warnings of the serious risk abrupt withdrawal posed to Bethany’s health and pregnancy, including miscarriage, the facility continued to withhold her medication. Instead of receiving appropriate medical care, she was at various times confined in an unsanitary and windowless solitary confinement cell, told to “tough it out,” and shackled during an ultrasound examination. It took the intervention of a public defender to secure her release so that she could resume the treatment. In the end, Lake County knowingly put Bethany’s health and pregnancy at severe risk for nine days. Luckily, Bethany’s story has a happy ending. After she resumed treatment, Bethany regained her health and gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She has also since completed her GED and is looking forward to the next chapter in her life. Part of moving on for Bethany is ensuring that no one else will go through what she went through. Learn more about Bethany’s experience and the case the ACLU filed today on her behalf by watching this video:
"Don't Tell and They Won't Ask": Reproductive Health Care in Immigration DetentionDetained and Dismissed: Women's Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention, a report released today by Human Rights Watch, sheds much-needed light on the unique harms immigrant detention centers inflict on the reproductive health and lives of women detainees. The report arrives just in time to get detainees' reproductive health needs on the national agenda. Responding to growing evidence of inhumane conditions and deplorable medical care for U.S. Immigration and Custody Enforcement (ICE) detainees, last month Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to adopt humane and legally enforceable standards for immigration detention facilities. Also, last December ICE released enhanced medical standards that will become fully effective by 2010. Thus, as policymakers finally start to address the unacceptable treatment of immigrant detainees, today's report confirms the need to explicitly address women's reproductive health needs as part of those efforts. Detained and Dismissed documents a disturbing patchwork of incomplete or inaccessible reproductive health services for female detainees. Basic services and options related to reproductive health, including emergency contraception, prenatal care, post-partum care, and abortion, are, according to today's report, available to some detainees, at some facilities, under some circumstances, if you know who, and how, to ask. For example, ICE officials told Human Rights Watch that postpartum and nursing mothers could obtain breast pumps, yet none of the interviewed women who were lactating while in detention were ever offered that option. Likewise, when pressed by the researchers, ICE officials indicated that emergency contraception and abortion care can be accessed, but as a practical matter, they are not offered or provided to detainees. As one interviewee explained "if I had the option I would have [had an abortion] . . . I didn't know that there were those kind of services available." This "Don't Tell and They Won't Ask" approach to reproductive health care for detainees is simply unworkable and unacceptable. ICE must comprehensively and explicitly remedy the service and information gap regarding women's reproductive health needs. That may be no small task. But actually telling women detainees about the full range of reproductive health services to which they are entitled is one easy place to start.
Meeting the Health Care Needs of Pregnant Inmates(Originally posted on Feministing.) Today, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health published a nationwide survey — "Incarcerated Women and Abortion Provision: A Survey of Correctional Health Providers," by Carolyn B. Sufrin, Mitchell D. Creinin, and Judy C. Chang. For the first time, we have a comprehensive understanding of whether incarcerated women can obtain abortion care in U.S. correctional facilities. The authors surveyed health professionals who provide clinical care in prisons; only 68 percent of respondents indicated that women in their facilities can obtain "elective" abortions. To state the disturbingly obvious flip-side of that statistic: more than 30 percent of respondents indicated that women within their facilities could not access abortion care. A few weeks ago, an investigative piece in the Texas Observer reported, "For pregnant women in immigration detention facilities, it is virtually impossible to obtain an abortion." Interviews with sexual assault counselors, researchers, and advocates reveal that pregnant detainees — including those who are pregnant as a result of having been raped while crossing the border — face immense, often complete, barriers when they seek abortion information and services. According to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson quoted in that story, of nearly 1,000 pregnant detainees in 2008 "no detainee has had a pregnancy terminated while in ICE custody," though as the article also makes clear, we know that at least some of these women would have requested information about terminating their pregnancies. What exactly is going on? First, let's put to rest any lingering doubts: The Supreme Court did notrecently decide that pregnant women lose their right to have an abortion when they are in prison, and the Bush administration did not push through a midnight regulation banning reproductive health care for incarcerated women. To the contrary, as I explain in a Viewpoint (PDF) piece published along with the Sufrin study, the law is clear -- women do not lose their right to abortion because of imprisonment, and correctional authorities must ensure that women in their custody have adequate access to abortion care. Likewise, pregnant women who plan to carry to term have a constitutional right to medical care throughout pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum recovery. Unfortunately, too often authorities disregard the unique health needs of pregnant women and assume that they have discretion to permit or deny care as they see fit. As Sufrin's survey confirms, when it comes to abortion, this can lead to a hodgepodge of policies, practices, and perceptions among correctional authorities and staff. This gap between the health needs and rights of pregnant inmates, and the services they can actually access, is, of course, not completely surprising. It is one more result of a system in which prisoners are subject to discretionary policies and practices that are largely shielded from public scrutiny. On the other hand, the widespread misunderstanding, and in some cases complete disregard, of the rights of incarcerated women is startling. Given sheer numbers, any facility that houses female inmates should expect to see pregnant women and must prepare to meet their unique health needs. Yet, in creating an online, state-by-state guide of correctional pregnancy-care standards in facilities throughout the country, I could not readily locate any relevant policies in 16 states. And, of the pregnancy-care standards located in 34 states and the District of Columbia, only 20 referenced both prenatal and abortion care, leaving a total of 30 states completely silent on abortion access. While the results of these recent surveys and reports may seem discouraging, I remain hopeful. As the treatment of incarcerated women has increasingly become a topic of advocacy, public health projects, policy making, and public discussion we have seen positive change. For instance, advocates and policy-makers are reforming the inhumane practice, common in many prisons and jails, of shackling pregnant women taken to hospitals for labor and delivery. In more and more states, community organizations are bringing family-planning services, and birthing and parenting classes directly to women in prison. And recent court cases in Arizona and Missouri have made clear that correctional facilities may not deny women access to abortion care. So, although our work is far from done, the Sufrin study offers another critical step forward for comprehensively addressing the range of health services incarcerated women need as they prepare to reclaim their lives, return to their families and re-enter the community.
Victory in the Regina McKnight Case
Earlier this week, the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Regina McKnight, a woman convicted in 2001 of homicide after suffering a stillbirth and admitting to cocaine usage, did not have a fair trial. In so doing, the court recognized that McKnight's counsel failed to make use of existing evidence that could have shown that factors other than McKnight's drug use could have caused the stillbirth.
The court's ruling has significant import for the dozens of pregnant women in the United States each year that, like McKnight, are criminally charged for continuing their pregnancies to term despite their struggles with drug addition. (A recent New York Times article profiles several such women and their prosecutions in Alabama.) While courts in other states have routinely rejected prosecutions of pregnant, drug-using women, they have not addressed the question of whether pre-natal exposure to substances causes harm to the fetus. Notably, this week's decision discusses the critical importance of hearing evidence regarding what is and is not known about the topic. As the court noted, adequate expert medical testimony would include "recent studies showing that cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor." The local prosecutor hasn't decided whether to retry McKnight. Local papers reported that C. Rauch Wise of Greenwood, who directly represented McKnight on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina Foundation, in partnership with Matthew Hersh and Julie Carpenter of the law firm Jenner & Block, would seek to have McKnight released on bail pending a new trial. National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) has been working on McKnight's behalf for nearly a decade. During this most recent round of litigation, NAPW, along with the Drug Policy Alliance and local South Carolina counsel Susan K. Dunn, filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of medical and public health groups and experts. In addition to challenging the validity of the state's claim that cocaine use caused the stillbirth, signatories argued that threatening pregnant women with jail time deters them from seeking prenatal care and other vital services. |
|
© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004 |
