Detained Pregnant People Are Entitled To Full Medical Care. They Say It’s Not Happening.

Allegations of improper medical care for pregnant people in immigration detention are piling up. The 19th has spoken to two women who were pregnant while detained and four attorneys whose clients were pregnant while detained, and reviewed court records related to another similar case from last summer.

For a report published Wednesday from two advocacy groups, the Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights, researchers traveled to Honduras to spend a week interviewing recently deported people, including three women who were “visibly pregnant” and four who said they were recently postpartum. All four postpartum women had been separated from their children, including one who was just two months old, according to the report. None of the women’s names were published.

Three pregnant women said they had “little to no medical care, and lack of access to clean water or healthy food,” according to the report, which did not specify where they were detained. Only one said she was taken to a medical facility for prenatal care; she said she was shackled for the entire appointment and monitored by guards even when providing a urine sample. In the same report, Honduras-based medical personnel at a center that receives deported immigrants described additional instances of people arriving in the country after receiving limited care for pregnancy-related complications experienced in detention.

“You’re putting large numbers of people who might suffer from all kinds of health or life-threatening conditions in this place and then not being attentive to how their bodies might be having health or life-threatening infections,” said Zain Lakhani, a lawyer and director of migrant rights and justice for the Women’s Refugee Commission and one of the report’s authors. “With pregnant people and lactating women, there’s an additional level to the fact that pregnancy is always dangerous.”