This article was published in partnership with Bloomberg Law.
Dozens of pregnant women imprisoned, often for minor crimes, suffer miscarriages or give birth in excruciating pain in cell toilets and on filthy prison floors. Their babies suffer from infections and lasting health problems. Some die.
Bloomberg Law and NBC News analyzed federal lawsuits and found that at least 54 pregnant women or their families alleged serious mistreatment or medical neglect in county jails between 2017 and 2024. The disasters they describe signal a much larger problem, because it’s difficult to pursue a federal lawsuit, experts said.
Most of the women involved in these cases were arrested on non-violent charges that included probation violations, theft and drug possession. They were incarcerated in prisons, intended largely for short-term detention as criminal cases unfolded, not in prisons, which are intended for punishment after conviction.
Here is an overview of their cases:
There is no way to know for sure whether the pregnancy complications the women experienced were due to their time behind bars. About 10 to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Stillbirths occur in approximately 1 in 175 births.
But unsanitary conditions and limited access to prenatal care, medical providers and essential medications are factors that can harm a healthy delivery or contribute to premature labor.
Learn more here.
Methodology:
The 54 cases presented in this article are drawn from more than 200,000 civil rights and prisoner complaints filed in federal district court between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2024. Reporters identified relevant cases by searching for nine civil suit codes reported by the plaintiffs, as well as by keyword searching the text of the complaints to identify terms such as “baby,” “mother” and “jail.” Pro se cases, in which people choose to represent themselves rather than hire lawyers, have been largely excluded. The team also used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 to summarize complaints and OpenAI’s GPT-4o to answer questions like “Does this case involve harm to a pregnant person?” » Reporters reviewed each of the potential cases and included them if they met the following criteria: the pregnant woman was housed in a facility that primarily incarcerates pretrial detainees and there were allegations of harm caused to the woman or her pregnancy while in the custody of that facility.
