“I was six months pregnant when I arrived at the prison. I was visibly pregnant, but no information was given to me,” Anna* told me over Zoom last week.
Anna, who was being held on remand in a UK prison while waiting to be sentenced, feared she would “end up stuck and giving birth in a prison cell”. “I went into labour in the early hours of the morning and called for help,” she said. “Nobody got me from my cell for two hours.”
Anna says it took five hours before she was taken by ambulance to a local hospital. She describes how she was taken in handcuffs. She says an officer told her to be “grateful” that she was in longer handcuffs rather than shorter ones.
