This article was published in partnership with Bloomberg Law.
Dozens of pregnant women who are jailed, often for petty crimes, are miscarrying or giving birth in excruciating pain into cell toilets and on filthy jail floors. Their babies are suffering infections and long-lasting health issues. Some die.
Bloomberg Law and NBC News analyzed federal lawsuits and found at least 54 pregnant women or their families alleged severe mistreatment or medical neglect in county jails from 2017 to 2024. The catastrophes they describe signal a much larger problem, since filing a federal lawsuit is difficult, experts said.
Most of the women in these cases were arrested on nonviolent charges that included probation violations, theft and drug possession. They were housed in jails, largely intended for short-term detention as criminal cases unfold, not prisons, which are for punishment after convictions.
Here is a look at their cases:
There’s no way to be certain whether the pregnancy complications the women experienced occurred because of their time behind bars. About 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Stillbirths occur in about 1 out of 175 births.
But unsanitary conditions and limited access to prenatal care, medical providers and critical medication are factors that can affect a healthy birth or contribute to preterm labor.
Methodology:
The 54 cases in this article are drawn from more than 200,000 civil rights and prisoner-related complaints filed in federal district court from Jan. 1, 2017, to Dec. 31, 2024. Reporters identified relevant cases by searching nine civil nature of suit codes declared by the plaintiffs, as well as keyword searching the text of complaints to identify terms such as “baby,” “mother” and “jail.” Pro se cases, in which people choose to represent themselves rather than hire attorneys, were largely excluded. The team also used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 to summarize complaints and OpenAI’s GPT-4o to answer questions including “Does this case involve harm to a pregnant person?” Reporters reviewed each of the potential cases and included them if they met the following criteria: The pregnant woman was housed in a facility that primarily incarcerates pretrial detainees and there were allegations of harm to the woman or her pregnancy while she was under the care of that facility.
