> They probably want to make sure that the women have actual medical care when delivering, rather than having a baby when nobody is around.
there should never be a time when someone we've locked in a cage is in need of medical care when "nobody is around". Prisons should be staffed at all times and prisoners should have ready access to adequate healthcare whenever the need arises. That may mean prisons in remote locations need more onsite medical staff, but nobody should have to go without access to medical care.
When the state takes away someone's freedom and locks them up, the state assumes responsibility for their care and their needs and it's long past time we started insisting they do their job.
Great idea in theory, but there's just not enough obstetric practice at a typical prison for a doctor to retain their skills; you can't just do it once a month, and to be accredited you have to have an available operating room on the labor and delivery floor at all times - so if you only have two OR's, you can't start a section in the second one until the first has been cleaned. And we see women who aren't prisoners who come in 6 cm dilated after an hour or so of labor and deliver within 30 minutes. 1.5 hours is a really short time to arrange medical prisoner transport and get them to a hospital.
Specialist medical care is really not that easy to do outside relatively urban areas, and people don't generally like living near prisons.
I'm not sure what the solution really is, short of a small locked ward that's attached to a real hospital where they can spend every day after 38 weeks. But that gets expensive fast.
> short of a small locked ward that's attached to a real hospital where they can spend every day after 38 weeks. But that gets expensive fast.
Yeah, I'd guess if they're too far from a hospital to be safe it'd be best to keep them at a hospital until the baby is born. They might not need an entire ward for that though. Just handcuffing them to a bed and posting a guard outside their room should be fine for most inmates. Even that won't be cheap, but it shouldn't be too often someone pregnant ends up behind bars.
there should never be a time when someone we've locked in a cage is in need of medical care when "nobody is around". Prisons should be staffed at all times and prisoners should have ready access to adequate healthcare whenever the need arises. That may mean prisons in remote locations need more onsite medical staff, but nobody should have to go without access to medical care.
When the state takes away someone's freedom and locks them up, the state assumes responsibility for their care and their needs and it's long past time we started insisting they do their job.