‘How Our Tough-On-Crime Media Is Harming Unborn Babies’

When a court sentences a pregnant woman to prison, they sentence her to a high-risk pregnancy — and her baby to a high-risk birth.

It has taken four years from this acknowledgement by the prison ombudsman to result in any change. But following an open letter demanding reform — signed by the Royal College of Midwives, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and British Association of Perinatal Medicine — new sentencing guidelines from March now mean judges will have a duty to take reproductive realities into account.

Had this been put in place immediately, babies Aisha and Brooke may have survived their births. Their mothers’ cries for help were ignored and they were left to endure labour alone in a prison cell. Brooke was breech during birth, causing her mother hours of agony. Aisha’s mother had to bite through her umbilical cord.

Yet for the campaign group behind the new sentencing guidelines, the changes do not go far enough.

Pregnancy in prison may strike readers as a niche topic, but there are hundreds of pregnant women in UK cells, a third of them yet to be convicted of a crime. 50 babies are born in prison in a year, and babies born to women in prison are seven times more likely to die in childbirth than the norm.

Among those mothers is ‘Anna’, who shared her harrowing story on Media Storm this week under a pseudonym. Her trial, which came months after her imprisonment on remand, included no mention of her six-month baby bump; she was given the same food as everyone else while in prison (“crisps and sausage rolls”), and even her labour couldn’t grab the justice system’s attention.

Anna was eventually forced to give birth while handcuffed to a prison officer who told her “to be grateful she was putting me in long-cuffs and not short-cuffs”. Last month, Channel 4 reported on women at HMP Bronzefield being unlawfully handcuffed to male officers for up to 48 hours while giving birth.

Anna went on to co-found gender justice group Level Up’s ‘No Births Behind Bars’ campaign, fighting for this month’s sentencing changes, because “when you are sentencing these women, you’re just adding to a cycle of trauma and putting these children in unnecessary, unsafe environments.”

While the media may be aware of these statistics and stories, all many journalists want to know when they speak to Anna is her crime.

Anna generally does not tell them, because, she thinks, “it’s not the point”. Would Aisha and Brooke have deserved to die any more or less depending on the severity of their mother’s crime?

“It’s a difficult line to take,” admitted Janey Starling, media strategist, and co-director of Level Up. “But ultimately, if we say that prison is high risk for some women and not others, we undermine our own argument.”

Level Up therefore fights categorically for no births behind bars. This shifts their campaign from being quite an attractive cause for the media to get behind (replete with cute pics of baby birthday party protests outside parliament), to one many will not touch with a bargepole.

When Anna argues against disclosing her crime to a reporter, she has seen them turn against her. She felt “blindsided” after a radio interview in which she told the journalist before recording, “my crime was non-violent and I really feel like it’s irrelevant to the topic,” and he then introduced her segment with the declaration that Anna “refused” to disclose her crime — putting her on a backfoot without knowing.

Similarly, Starling had to contend with LBC’s Nick Ferrari’s phobia of a mafia of pregnant criminals stealing lamb chops with impunity. Ferrari pressed her: “[Pregnant women] only go behind bars if it’s a fairly major crime, Janey.” When politely corrected that by far the most common custodial conviction for women is shoplifting, Ferrari rebutted: “It won’t be one case of shoplifting though, it will be a pattern of repeat behaviour. It won’t be because they’ve nicked a few lamb chops!”

In typical combative style, he cut her off: “Let’s have them walk the streets then, and there won’t be a lamb chop to be found in Sainsbury’s.”

Starling responded on Media Storm: “For too long, the argument has been hypotheticals outweighing the lived realities of women in prison. We can talk about pregnant murderers roaming the streets, or we can talk about the fact that three babies have died inside custody in the last five years.

“We have to stick with the material reality of women’s experiences.”

Anna’s material reality was being imprisoned, pregnant, for a non-violent crime — and whether Ferrari believes it or not, a first-time offence. Women are more likely than men to be in prison for a first-time offence, and first-time offences cause over a quarter of female sentences.

Still, Anna told Media Storm, “We’re not saying don’t punish people if they’ve committed a crime, [just] punish people in a different way.”

Level Up points to alternative community sentences, as well as to other countries as examples — such as Costa Rica, which uses home detention curfew and house arrest for pregnant women who have committed a crime. 

Level Up’s strategy is step-by-step. Getting sentencing guidelines changed was a hard-earned win, resulting from “women helping women helping women helping women,” said Starling. Next on their hit list? “Bail for babies!” — looking at the number of pregnant women held in prison before their trial or sentencing. 

Watch out Ferrari, they’re coming for your lamb chops.

Media Storm’s episode ‘Pregnant in prison: The case to stop births behind bars’ is out now.