Two U.S. senators are introducing bipartisan legislation to strengthen federal oversight of pregnancy care in prisons and jails after Georgia women testified about facing abuse and neglect.
The bill, known as the Births in Custody Reporting Act, would require states to give quarterly reports to the attorney general on the number of pregnant individuals in custody, their length of stay, and any births inside the facility or at a state hospital.
States that fail to provide these statistics would face up to a 10% reduction in federal funding.
Currently, there are no national statistics on how many pregnant people are behind bars or what happens to those pregnancies.
Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff, who is sponsoring the legislation along with Republican Sen. John Kennedy, has said he’s backing the bill to better protect people from the “humanitarian crisis” happening behind bars, calling it “one of the most extreme civil rights problems happening in the country today.”
Last summer, an investigation led by Ossoff, who chairs the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, uncovered more than 200 human rights abuses of pregnant women in prison.
Jessica “Drew” Umberger, who now serves as a care navigator for Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, testified before the subcommittee that she gave birth to her daughter in 2018 while serving a five-year prison sentence at the Helms Facility — a 100-bed medical prison in DeKalb County.
“I was told by prison staff that because I had a C-section 18 years prior, it was Georgia Department of Corrections’ policy that I had to have another one,” Umberger said. “Even though I told them I wanted to have a vaginal birth, they told me it was not allowed.”
She claims she got preeclampsia and was placed in solitary confinement without a change of clothes and very few feminine hygiene products for several days after giving birth.
Tiana Hill, who was incarcerated for seven months at the Clayton County Jail in 2019, also testified that jail staff refused to acknowledge that she was pregnant despite multiple tests proving otherwise, forcing her to give birth to her son in her underwear.
Her baby died five days later.
According to Motherhood Beyond Bars, a nonprofit that serves incarcerated pregnant and postpartum women in Georgia, the number of incarcerated women has skyrocketed by 525% over the past four decades.
Of the women held in jails, the nonprofit states that 80% are mothers to dependent children.
The Births in Custody Reporting Act would require each state attorney general to conduct a study using the information that’s reported to them to improve the treatment of incarcerated individuals who are pregnant or who have given birth in both local and state-run facilities.
The study would also help determine whether there’s any relationship between stillbirths, miscarriages, maternal deaths, neonatal deaths and preterm births and the actions of management in those facilities.
The Georgia attorney general’s office could not be immediately reached for comment.
