Mercy Global Concern - 2006

Mercy Global Concern: Report 3, March 2006

International Women’s Day

As some of us celebrate International Women’s day, perhaps we might ponder the fact in 2006 some women who are forced to give birth in chains!

America regards itself as an eminently civilized country, but many states female prisoners who give birth are required to be held in shackles during labor. Besides being grotesquely inhumane, this appalling practice is medically dangerous.

A report by Amnesty International U.S.A. finds that in nearly half of the state corrections departments have policies that expressly permit this practice. Prison officials justify the policy by saying that women are a flight risk, even if they were not doubled over with labor pains of strapped down on a delivery table.

It should not take a genius to see that chaining a woman’s feet together or handcuffing her arm and leg to the side of a bed is not a smart thing to do during childbirth. Yet doctors and nurses must sometimes fight with reluctant corrections officers if they want their pregnant patients unchained and effectively treated. Court papers in a lawsuit filed in Arkansas claim that because of resistance by the corrections guard, a mother-to-be remained shackled until she suffered severe and a permanent back injury.

The primitive practice of chaining women in childbirth should shame us all. “It sounds like something from slavery 200 years ago.”