Written by Simone Weichselbaum
Two guards stood outside the bathroom door, waiting as
Brittany Seaver sat in a tub, naked and crying, hoping the warm water would
ease the pain of childbirth. She had waited until her second hour of labor
before asking a nurse to draw the bath, her preferred alternative to epidural
drugs. Up until that moment, the two corrections officers, both women, had been
silently observing Seaver from the end of the hospital bed as she gritted her
teeth through each contraction.
It wasn’t their job to engage or offer assistance; they were
solely there to make sure the 21-year-old prisoner wouldn’t try to escape. “I
was sitting in the bathtub by myself, having labor by myself,” Seaver said.
Seaver had two other children, but during this delivery, a
few months into a five-year sentence for burglary in Minnesota's only correctional facility for women, she was both
intensely watched and eerily alone. She repeatedly asked to see her
prison-appointed doula, Rae Baker, who is authorized to provide physical and
emotional support — but no medical help — during and after childbirth.
Finally, three hours after Seaver’s initial request, the
night watch commander of Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee called Baker
to tell her that Seaver was close to delivering at a nearby hospital. The
commander reminded Baker that inmates are only allowed to have their birthing
coach during the final stages of delivery. Baker already knew the rules.
At any given time, of the roughly 98,000 female inmates in state institutions, an estimated one in 25 reported that they were pregnant when admitted. A handful of
correctional facilities across the country, in places such as California,
Massachusetts, and Florida, have allowed the use of doulas, but Minnesota is
the only place to implement the policy statewide.
When Baker arrived, Seaver was back in her hospital bed,
writhing in pain. State protocol dictates that doulas can touch inmates during
childbirth and up to three hours after delivery. So, while she could, Baker
tried to provide physical comfort, holding Seaver’s hand, stroking her arm,
rubbing her back, feeding her ice chips, and occasionally blotting her forehead
with a cold towel.
She also offered Seaver a crucial piece of advice that she
gives to all inmates during childbirth: Don’t look at the guards. “Focus on
having a healthy baby,” Baker said. “Just remember, your situation is not
forever.”
Nearly an hour after Baker arrived and as the sun began to rise,
the baby was ready to come. A nurse asked the prison guards to retreat to a
back wall to make way for the doctor. Seaver inched forward in the hospital bed
to push. The doctor told her to reach down and pull out her baby girl.
Baker, and every doula she works with, will tell you that
the most painful part of any inmate birth isn’t the actual process of
delivering the baby, it’s what happens two days later: what they call “the
separation.”
The Minnesota Department of Corrections prohibits female
inmates from spending more than two days with their newborns after delivery.
(The limit extends to three days when a Cesarean section is involved.) Baker
had spent weeks lecturing Seaver on how to prepare for the moment of
separation. She was unflinching about the realities: That, as a mother, Seaver
would replay the memories of those two days with her child in her mind for the
remainder of her prison stay.
To make the most of those two days, Baker had coached Seaver
on how to develop an immediate bond with her child. She emphasized the
importance of Seaver keeping her infant close, having near-constant
skin-on-skin contact. She also encouraged Seaver to breastfeed as much as she
could. “It’s going to be the last time the baby is going to have your
milk,” she said.
In the United States, 10 states have prison nursery programs in
certain facilities that allow incarcerated mothers to stay with their babies
for a few months. In Washington state, that period extends to nearly three years. In New York, if an inmate is granted permission to be housed in a
facility with a nursery, she can stay with her child for up to a year. Minnesota, however,
has no such nurseries and does not allow mothers to nurse their infants after they leave the
hospital. Breast pumps are also prohibited in Shakopee, so once the new mothers
are returned to their cells, they have to find other ways of extracting the milk,
including squeezing it out in the showers. If the women don’t sufficiently
extract the milk, they risk getting a painful infection, known as mastitis.
Seaver barely slept during the 48 hours after she gave
birth. She obsessively held and nursed her new infant, whom she named Jazzlynn.
As mother and baby nuzzled, a rotating shift of corrections officers monitored
the pair. Seaver’s ankle remained fastened with a polyester belt to either the
bed railing or the nearby chair leg. Every few hours, Seaver asked to be
unstrapped so that she could make a trip to the bathroom, where she changed
sanitary pads and wiped away post-birth bleeding.
As Seaver and Jazzlynn’s two-day stretch together drew to a
close, Baker returned to the hospital to help the mother through the
separation. Two corrections officers placed metal chains around Seaver’s legs,
ankles, wrists, and torso — a form of bondage referred to as a “lockbox” — in
preparation for her van ride back to Shakopee.
When Seaver sat in a wheelchair, Baker covered the chains
with a blanket. “I didn’t want people to see the shackles,” she recalled. A
nurse pushed Jazzlynn in a bassinet down the hallway of the maternity ward as a
prison guard pushed Seaver in a wheelchair toward the elevator. Seaver leaned
over the baby and kissed her on the cheeks one last time, a few tears
dripping from her face onto Jazzlynn’s. The infant was going home with Seaver’s
mother, who was also the legal guardian for Seaver’s two- and five-year-old
sons.
As Seaver cried, Baker told her that eventually everything
was going to be okay.
In spring 2007, Erica Gerrity, a trained doula and a
freelance social worker, emailed fellow practitioners about an idea that she
had to create an organization that offers doula services to pregnant inmates.
Baker leapt at the opportunity. She had spent her teenage years writing letters
to an incarcerated older cousin and felt a particular kinship with female
inmates. For the next three years, Gerrity worked to persuade the Minnesota
Department of Corrections to loosen their strict no-contact policy with
inmates and approve her pitch. In January 2010, Gerrity, Baker, and their
fellow doulas at what later became The Minnesota
Prison Doula Project taught their first parenting class.
During the first 11 months of the Doula Project, seven of the 11 women they worked with had C-sections. Over the next two years, only one of 29 pregnant women in their program had the procedure, according to Rebecca Shlafer, PhD, a pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota who has been studying the program. Though Dr. Shlafer’s research provides no explanation
for the drop, the doulas believe that their weekly maternity classes with
inmates, in which women learn about their bodies and how to best advocate for
themselves during childbirth, have played a role.
Pending approval, Shlafer also plans to have two University
of Minnesota graduate students review inmates' files at Shakopee in attempts to
study the number of pregnancies, births, stillbirths, and miscarriages. Currently, only a
few states tally the outcomes of inmate births.
Last summer, the Minnesota Better Birth Coalition, a lobbying group focused on
women’s health, contacted Gerrity to seek her help crafting a law that would
reform how pregnant inmates in the state are treated. Gerrity aimed high.
She requested prisoners have access to doulas and midwives, as well as breast
pumps. She also asked that corrections officers stop
shackling pregnant inmates and performing strip-searches on expectant mothers,
many of whom are searched, mid-contraction, as they leave for the hospital.
Officials at the Department of Corrections balked at most of
Gerrity’s proposals. But, they agreed to limit the use of restraints during
birth. So far, 21 states and Washington, D.C. have enacted some form of anti-shackling
policy, but they vary widely. For example, pregnant prisoners in Connecticut can still be placed in leg irons up until the last trimester. In Louisiana, prison staff are prohibited
from using electronic restraint belts on expectant mothers after the fourth
month of pregnancy.
Minnesota also granted the right for prisoners, statewide,
to pair up with a doula as long as the cost of those services doesn’t fall to
the Department of Corrections. Much of Gerrity and Baker’s time is now spent
fundraising. By July 1, doula services will also be offered to women in the
state’s 84 county facilities.
Baker is in a rush today. She teaches two classes a week
while holding about a dozen one-on-one counseling sessions with prisoners. All
in all, she assists about 75 inmates. But, Thursdays are the hardest. She is up
at 6 a.m. in order to get her two-year-old, Vincent, to daycare by sunrise
(Baker also has two daughters). Her “Mothering Inside” class at the Hennepin
County Adult Corrections Facility outside of Minneapolis begins promptly at
8:30 a.m. In 2014, 20 inmates in the facility reported that they were pregnant.
The doulas’ classes cover a wide variety of subjects,
including nutrition and hunger, challenges in most facilities. At Shakopee,
Baker often advises the women to supplement their daily “pregnancy packs” —
comprising two packets of peanut butter, a packet of jelly, two slices of wheat
bread, two cartons of milk, and one orange — with hard-boiled eggs from
the prison kitchen, rather than unhealthy snacks from the commissary. Women also
have access to a daily regimen of vitamins; they can choose between a large prenatal pill or a double dose of chewable, animal-shaped children’s tablets.
When it comes to labor, doulas have to prepare women in
prison for the frustrating reality of not knowing when their due date is:
Prison staff alert the doulas days, even weeks, in advance of upcoming trips to
the nearby hospital. The inmates themselves, as well as their families, are not
informed of the news until the morning of the appointment. Even mothers with
planned C-sections aren’t told the exact date of the procedure until the
morning of the operation. The Department of Corrections spokesperson, Sarah
Latuseck, said the restriction prevents “outside persons” from planning and
assisting escapes.
Baker also instructs women on the emotional turmoil that can
follow childbirth, like postpartum depression, which is often exacerbated when
mother and newborn live apart. Some inmates,
Baker says, lose interest in attending group sessions as they settle into life
behind bars without their child. Others, like Seaver, show up, but talk less
and less.
Seaver shared few complaints during the first four months
after Jazzlynn was born. Her mother would bring the baby a few times each month
for a visit. But as Jazzlynn developed her ability to recognize faces, she grew
less comfortable around Seaver. The bond that Seaver tried so hard to establish
in the first two days of her baby's life seemed to have faded.
When Jazzlynn was 14 months old, Seaver told her mother to
stop bringing her to Shakopee. She couldn’t bear to watch her child throw
tantrums whenever she was near her mother.
During one Thursday class, nine women sat in a semicircle
sharing their worries. Gerrity and Baker passed around strips of paper and
asked each inmate to anonymously jot down her worst parenting fear. The notes
were placed in a bowl and the women took turns reading each other’s anxieties
aloud.
Kenyetta Taylor, a 43-year-old grandmother charged with drug
possession, read: “I am scared that she won’t be able to make the right
decisions when she is an adult as a result of my parenting.”
Gerrity then asked the class to discuss any other parenting
problems that came to mind. The inmates explained that friends and relatives who used to make
the trip to the facility could now only speak to them through a video monitor.
The doulas were unaware that the visitation rules had been changed, and Baker
suggested that the inmates write formal complaints to officials about their grievances.
Jena White, a 29-year-old inmate jailed on a trespassing
charge, cried as she recounted how her daughter, who was two-and-a-half, sobbed
through a televised visit. “[The video] don’t even come in good. It only shows half of you,” White
told the class. When asked about this restriction, a spokesperson said the
facility plans to revise the rule by the summer to allow children under the age
of 13 to have in-person visits.
If a former prisoner is still “on paper,” or on probation or
parole, the Department of Corrections forbids contact with any employee or
volunteer working at Shakopee. “Corrections controls everything,” Baker said. So, she was
surprised to learn that Brittany Seaver had been released in June 2014 and was
now two months pregnant with her fourth child. Seaver, it turns out, wanted to
hire Baker as her personal doula.
In September 2012, Seaver had successfully appealed her
sentence on the grounds that a juror had discussed her case in a hallway
outside the courtroom. As a result, her sentence was cut in half. Jazzlynn was
18 months old when Seaver returned home. Before the appeal, Seaver hadn’t expected
the reunion to occur until Jazzlynn was in kindergarten. Now 25 and “off paper,” Seaver is earning a living as an aesthetician at a salon. Jazzlynn remembers nothing about her trips to Shakopee
as an infant. For her, Seaver has always been in her life.
Preparing for birth this time around was completely
different. Baker told Seaver to eat a steady diet of fresh greens and
pineapples, which, she believes, makes for speedier deliveries. It was advice
she couldn’t give her client before — certain fruits and vegetables were nearly
impossible to find when Seaver was in prison.
On February 11, Baker drove Seaver to the
Mother Baby Center at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis at 3 a.m.,
where a large birthing tub with whirlpool jets awaited. Seaver’s mother
and a midwife stood in place of the guards. There was no one to ignore; Baker sat by her side.
It took 11 minutes for Seaver to deliver Serenidee Grace.
Baker held Seaver from behind and whispered, “Look at your baby.”