The vast majority of the 10,000 babies born to US
prisoners each year are deprived of their mothers – and their mother’s milk
About 10,000 babies are born to women in US prisons
each year. Photograph: ITV
Last July, as my parents and I sat munching Bugles
around a visiting room table with my incarcerated sister in an Illinois state prison, a
cry rang out from the table next to us. There, a bawling infant lay cradled in
the arms of a visitor. She smoothed the baby’s soft hair, then surreptitiously
opened her shirt to nurse it. The baby simmered down immediately, happily
sucking away.
Our conversation went silent, and my sister averted
her eyes. She was 34 weeks pregnant herself. “Well,” she said, patting her
gigantic moon of a belly, “that’s not gonna be us.” Like almost all jails and
prisons, her current locale didn’t accommodate either breast pumps or nursing
during visits.
Instead, my sister had this to anticipate: 24 hours
after giving birth – in a scheduled, induced labor, with guards standing by and
no family permitted – her newborn would be taken
from her (pdf). After that, she’d be serving two and a half more months in
prison. By the time of release, her body would have long stopped producing
milk.
Although between 4 to 7% of female prisoners
are pregnant, few are permitted to breastfeed, to use a breast pump to
provide frozen breast milk to their babies, or even to “pump and dump” milk so
they can breastfeed upon release.
For prisoners, the denial of the right to breastfeed
is systemic, yanking the option from mothers deprived of almost all other means
to care for and bond with their newborns. Skin-to-skin contact cements the
mother-baby connection in the critical earliest months of life, and even the
chance to pump and provide milk (without contact) promotes
maternal attachment. For babies, that maternal bond may well be the
number-one predictor
of healthy child development. For prisoners like my sister, who have
already been severed from their communities in many ways, that maternal-baby
bond could be a key path to reconnection, heightening
their chances (pdf) of avoiding re-offense and recidivism.
When I asked around about why postpartum prisoners
couldn’t even use breast pumps to keep the milk flowing until their release
(most new mothers have relatively short sentences, so retaining the ability to
produce milk is a useful goal), advocates told me that state departments of
corrections tend to deem breast pumps a “security violation”. In fact, in a Nevada case (pdf) in
which a prisoner was medically prescribed a breast pump, the pump was
confiscated upon reentry into the prison.
And so the vast majority of the 10,000 babies born to
prisoners each year are not only deprived of the most important thing in the
world to them – their mothers –they’re also deprived of the possibility of
mother’s milk.
The right to breastfeed is, at its base, a community
health issue: studies
show that breast milk plays a powerful role in nurturing babies’ immune
systems. It carries crucial antibodies, reducing the risk of respiratory
illness, diarrhea, allergies and Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome. As they grow older, kids who were breastfed are less
likely to develop diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer. Breastfeeding has
even been shown to improve lifelong
cognition.
Thus, the breast milk barrier denies prisoners’
children access to a natural (and cost-free) source of preventive health care. Children
of color and poor children are disproportionately punished, since those
populations are significantly overrepresented in prison, and also seriously overrepresented
when it comes to illness.
In the month after our visit to my sister, I wrote to
lawmakers, advocacy groups and the Illinois Department of Corrections, seeking
the reasoning behind the lack of breast pumps and the absence of avenues for
breastfeeding. Many were surprised that I was asking. No immutable anti-pump
policies existed on the books, but since no laws demanded that breast pumps be
permitted, they just weren’t.
However, changes occurring at isolated prisons carry
a bit of hope. Several localized advocacy programs have recently made headway,
such as Massachusetts’ Prison Birth
Project, which aids women in gaining breast pumps and delivering frozen
milk to their babies. And thanks to help from state representatives and
advocacy groups, my sister’s prison, too, has acquired a breast pump.
Hopefully, this case will provide an important precedent for other prisons.
This victory leaves me overjoyed. But it also immediately
points to larger challenges. With mothers placed so far from their babies, few
of them (including my sister, who’s four hours from home) will be able to take
the step from pumping to skin-to-skin feeding during regular visits. And more
broadly, if the early months of a baby’s life are so critical – and maternal
connection plays such a large role in healthy development – a primary goal must
be to prevent new mothers’ incarceration to the greatest extent possible.
We’re not making communities safer by depriving these
infants and their mothers of the early contact and public health benefits that
come with breastfeeding. In fact, we are quietly sentencing thousands of
babies, the second they leave the womb.
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