New York Should Not Need Another Courtroom Birth to Stop Shackling Pregnant Women
New York Should Not Need Another Courtroom Birth to Stop Shackling Pregnant Women
By Michele Evans
New York City, New York
5/23/2026
Category: Courts / Criminal Justice / Advocacy
Albany, New York - New York should not need another horror story to understand that pregnant women in custody are still being treated as bodies to be controlled instead of human beings entitled to medical care, privacy, and dignity.
But another horror story is exactly what has brought this issue back into public view.
In a recent City & State opinion essay, State Sen. Julia Salazar wrote that a 33-year-old New Yorker who was nine months pregnant was forced to give birth in a courtroom “in front of a judge and other spectators,” while handcuffed behind her back, with no medical personnel present. According to Salazar, the woman was in court on low-level charges that were dismissed two days later.
That should have been unthinkable.
Instead, it became a legislative argument.
Salazar is using the incident to call for passage of two bills: an Anti-Shackling bill and the Compassion and Reproductive Equity Act, known as the CARE Act. The Anti-Shackling bill would prohibit the use of restraints on incarcerated individuals during labor, except in extraordinary circumstances, and would also protect pregnant people during custodial interrogation. The bill is currently in the Senate Women’s Issues Committee.
The CARE Act goes even further. It addresses the health, safety, and human rights of incarcerated pregnant individuals, birthing parents, and their children. The bill would require correctional officials to establish rules governing conditions and care for pregnant and postpartum people in state and local correctional facilities. It is currently in the Senate Finance Committee.
The fact that New York still needs to legislate this basic level of humanity says something disturbing about the system.
A pregnant woman in labor is not a flight risk in the way the system imagines. She is not a threat because her body is doing what human bodies do. She is not less deserving of privacy because she has been arrested. She is not less entitled to medical care because she is standing before a judge.
And she should never be forced to give birth as a public spectacle.
Salazar’s opinion piece also points to a broader pattern. She wrote about Rebecca Figueroa, now an activist with New Hour, who gave birth while shackled in Suffolk County in 2006. According to Salazar, Figueroa was handcuffed to a bed and restrained by a leg shackle while in active labor, then remained restrained after delivery while struggling to breastfeed.
That is not security. That is humiliation dressed up as policy.
The problem is not only shackling. It is also medical neglect.
The CARE Act’s legislative memo states that incarcerated people are significantly less likely to receive prenatal care and medical and behavioral health services during pregnancy. It cites studies showing that more than 45% of pregnant incarcerated people received no prenatal care at all.
That statistic should stop every lawmaker cold.
Pregnancy is not a side issue in criminal justice. It is a medical condition with urgent, time-sensitive needs. Prenatal care, delivery care, postpartum care, infant bonding, breastfeeding, nutrition, mental health support, and emergency response are not luxuries. They are the difference between a humane system and a system that uses custody as an excuse to ignore suffering.
The CARE Act recognizes that the issue does not end when the baby is born. The bill would require comprehensive and uninterrupted prenatal, perinatal, and postpartum care. It also addresses the right of a child to remain with a birthing parent in a correctional facility under defined conditions, and creates enforcement mechanisms when those rights are denied.
That matters because the harm of carceral birth is not limited to the person in labor. It reaches the newborn. It reaches families. It reaches communities. It can become a trauma embedded before a child even leaves the hospital.
The Anti-Shackling bill also addresses a loophole in existing law. New York has already recognized that shackling pregnant people is dangerous and degrading, but the current law still leaves room for exceptions broad enough to swallow the protection. Salazar’s bill would tighten those protections and make clear that no person in active labor should be subjected to restraints.
The courtroom birth should be treated as a warning sign, not an isolated embarrassment.
When a pregnant woman can go into labor in court, be restrained, lack medical personnel, and then have the underlying low-level charges dismissed days later, the public should ask a very simple question: what was the point of all that suffering?
What public safety interest was served?
Who was protected?
Who was accountable?
The answer cannot be that the system simply followed routine. Routine is the problem when it produces scenes like this. Routine is the problem when courtrooms, jails, and law enforcement agencies are allowed to treat pregnancy as an inconvenience instead of a medical reality.
There is also a deeper issue here: the criminal legal system often behaves as though custody cancels personhood.
It does not.
People in custody still have bodies. They still have pain. They still bleed. They still give birth. They still need doctors. They still deserve privacy. They still have constitutional rights, human rights, and medical needs that do not disappear because a court file exists.
New York lawmakers should not wait for the next woman to be forced into labor under public, degrading, medically dangerous conditions before acting.
The Anti-Shackling bill and the CARE Act are not radical demands. They are baseline safeguards.
No woman should give birth in chains.
No pregnant person should be left without medical care because she is in custody.
No newborn should begin life inside a system that could not even recognize the humanity of the person giving birth.
And no state that calls itself progressive should need another courtroom birth to prove that this must end.
*Michele Evans is an independent journalist, author, and former ESPN technical producer whose work has appeared in The New York Times.
Michele got her start in 2001 covering the NBA and NFL.
She now covers New York City courts, criminal-justice procedure, NYPD, FDNY, domestic-violence systems, media accountability, public safety, advocacy efforts, and New York civic life through courthouse observation, public records, legal analysis, and lived-experience reporting.
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