By Victoria Law / The Nation
Paige learned she was pregnant two weeks after entering Illinois’s Winnebago County Jail in 2021. Through the jail’s electronic messaging system, she asked how to obtain an abortion. Illinois law states that every person has a right to reproductive care, including abortion. It also states that the “government cannot deny, restrict, interfere with, or discriminate against any person’s exercise of these fundamental rights.”
Despite the law, the jail’s response was an electronic message with a frowning emoji, Paige said.
“I was scared, sad, upset,” Paige recalled. Her previous pregnancies had been high-risk, requiring C-sections. Left to the tender mercies of the jail’s inadequate medical system, she was afraid of dying and leaving her four children motherless.
The jail medical staff did not follow up by scheduling her for prenatal care. Instead, Paige said, she had to request a visit with the jail’s doctor. She was also transported to an outside health center where she was able to see her physician and obtain prenatal care that the jail could not provide.
Each time, she was placed in handcuffs and accompanied by two guards.
During her first outside visit, her physician noticed that her placenta had attached itself to scar tissue from previous C-sections, a condition known as placenta accreta. He warned that her placenta might detach, which could be life-threatening, or it might grow so far into her uterus that she would need a partial hysterectomy. He needed to frequently monitor her condition.
But Paige had no control over whether jail staff scheduled or brought her to appointments. Jail policy prohibits incarcerated people from knowing when they have outside appointments to prevent the possibility of escape. This meant that guards occasionally pulled Paige out of the shower for her appointments. During the winter, where daytime temperatures often dipped below freezing, that sometimes meant going outside with wet hair, in shower shoes, and without a coat.
Other times, she would learn, the guards did not bring her to scheduled appointments. “You cannot keep missing appointments,” Paige recalled her doctor scolding her.
Eight months after her arrest, Paige agreed to a plea bargain. The plea agreement included a furlough, or temporary release from jail, once she was admitted to the hospital for labor.
The day after she took the plea deal, she began having contractions. Staff handcuffed her, she explained. When the ambulance technicians objected, jail staff removed one handcuff but cuffed her other hand to the gurney.
At the hospital, she wasn’t dilated enough to be admitted. She was handcuffed again, she said, and returned to jail where she was placed in the medical unit. She spent two days experiencing contractions in a loud, chaotic unit before being admitted to the hospital for a cesarean section. She spent three months at home with her baby girl and other children. Then, she had to turn herself in to serve the remainder of her sentence. She was released nearly two weeks after her daughter’s first birthday.
Paige’s story illustrates the many ways in which jails throughout Illinois continually deny, restrict, interfere with, or discriminate against pregnant people’s rights to reproductive care—from the initial denial of an abortion to missed medical appointments to being handcuffed while in labor.
But no one knows how often such violations occur. Local jails operate as their own individual fiefdoms with less scrutiny and oversight than state prison systems. At the same time, jails hold more women than state prisons. Across the United States, women’s jails confine greater numbers than state women’s prisons—84,000 (of whom over 51,000 have not been convicted) in jails compared with 77,000 in state prisons.
In Illinois, local jails held over twice the number of women as state prisons (3,433 women in jails versus 1,419 women in prisons).
A new report by the Women’s Justice Institute and ACLU Illinois sheds light on the reproductive health policies (or, in many instances, the lack of policies) in 98 Illinois county jails and the experiences of women imprisoned in a dozen of those counties. Expecting Justice: The Status of Pregnancy and Reproductive Health Care Policies in Illinois Jails describes flagrant violations of existing state law, such as Paige’s denial of abortion, placement in solitary confinement, or being handcuffed during labor. It is the first such report to examine policies beyond shackling in jails throughout the state.
Emily Werth, senior staff attorney at ACLU Illinois and a co-author of the report, said that this lack of information is partially due to the sheer number of jails. “Illinois has one state prison system versus 98 county jails, each of which are run independently,” she told The Nation. “It’s very challenging to keep the pulse on 98 jails.”
Even less is known about pregnancy in those jails. Nationwide, roughly 3 percent of women entering jails were pregnant in 2017. But, said Alexis Mansfield, senior adviser at the Women’s Justice Institute and a coauthor of the report, “we don’t know how many people are pregnant coming to [Illinois] jails, we don’t know how many are released.” And those in jails have no way to know their reproductive rights or how to notify someone if those rights are violated.
llinois became the first state to pass legislation prohibiting restraining pregnant people who are in labor, delivery, and postpartum recovery in the hospital in 1999.
Nearly a quarter-century later, only two-thirds of jails have written policies explicitly prohibiting restraints during labor and delivery, according to the report. Only one-third have policies about pregnancy and postpartum care, and fewer than one-third have policies about abortion access. Only six jails had policies complying with the 2023 law prohibiting solitary confinement for pregnant and postpartum people.
Werth acknowledges that policies alone will not stop reproductive injustices. But, she notes, “You cannot expect folks who work within these systems to follow the law and to provide the best standards of care if there are no standards, or expectations, through written policies.”
Mansfield agrees. “If there isn’t even a written policy, staff have no way to know what to do and those detained have no idea of what their rights are.”
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Women in the report also detailed problematic pregnancy treatment that is not currently covered by law, including inadequate nutrition and lack of prenatal care. One woman recounted that, when she attempted to advocate for herself, jail staff punished her by placing her in a belly chain when taking her to court or to the doctor for the rest of her pregnancy. Another remembered that guards refused to remove her handcuffs during an ultrasound despite the doctor’s request. Others recalled staff threatening them with solitary confinement when they attempted to seek help for medical emergencies. Like Paige, none of the women knew whom to notify about these injustices.
Previous research has shown that incarceration increases the risks of pregnancy and childbirth complications, including miscarriages, preterm births, and infants who are small for their gestational age.
The Illinois Department of Corrections, which operates the state’s prison system, has a Jail and Detention Standards Unit to monitor jails’ compliance with the state’s county jail standards. Those standards include a prohibition on using restraints on pregnant people held in any county with 3 million or more inhabitants or when they are in labor. However, the unit lacks any enforcement power. Instead, it is limited to referring jails which it deems in serious noncompliance to the Illinois attorney general’s office, which can petition a court on behalf of the IDOC’s director for an order requiring the jail to comply. Furthermore, counties are not required to report and the standards unit does not collect information about compliance.
In February, Illionis lawmakers introduced HB 5431, which expands the prohibition on restraints throughout pregnancy and up to six weeks postpartum. It requires jails and prisons to provide pregnant people with at least 300 additional calories each day and that the facilities document the number of pregnant people in custody and their pregnancy outcomes each year. The law also requires that jails and prisons distribute and post this information, including policies on abortion access, in units that house pregnant women. On Friday, the House committee passed the bill, which is now on the floor awaiting a vote.
Such a law might have helped Paige, who hadn’t known what rights she still had while incarcerated. Had she known, she said, “I would have contacted a lawyer. I would have talked to someone while I was in the situation.” Remembering that frowning-face emoji, she reflected, “I should have had that choice and they took that from me.”
The Winnebago County sheriff’s office declined to respond to The Nation’s queries about Paige’s pregnancy experiences. When asked about her allegations that she had been handcuffed while transported to the hospital, its FOIA office stated that the jail followed protocol, which prohibits restraints while transporting a person to the hospital for delivery.
In advancing policies protecting the rights of pregnant people, “Illinois has taken a stand that it intends to be a leader in reproductive rights,” Werth told The Nation. But, she added, as the report shows, the state’s stance on reproductive rights has failed to cover those behind bars. “If Illinois is going to truly be a leader in this area, we cannot leave behind those who are incarcerated. Their reproductive autonomy has to be as important to us as anyone else’s.”
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Victoria Law
Victoria Law is a freelance journalist who focuses on the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. She’s the author of “Prisons Make Us Safer”: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration (2021) and the coauthor of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (2020). Her latest article published by the Intercept is, “BLIND SPOTS – Sexual Assault Allegation Exposes Self-Policing Prison System.”