Contains reference to traumatic birth, baby loss, sexual assault and domestic abuse.
Confined in a pitch-black hospital room, frightened and handcuffed to a man she’d never seen before, wasn’t how Joanne*, then 29 years old, imagined the birth of her firstborn. There was supposed to be a birthing pool, maybe some candles, at least some privacy.
At the tail end of 2022, Joanne says she was instead faced with a tiny room cramped with prison officers, the tight pinch of a handcuff digging at her wrist, exhausted and sticky with sweat, unable to urinate out of fear of irritating the various officers she was attached to. In 2021, she was 18 weeks pregnant and remanded at the privately owned prison, HMP Bronzefield, for a non-violent drug-related offence. When she gave birth, she was still awaiting trial.
One in three pregnant prisoners in the UK are on remand when their pregnancy is declared to the prison service. This means they’re held in custody before trial. The maximum limit for remand should be around six months, but like Joanne, many are in custody for longer without yet being convicted. The majority of women are in prison for non-violent crimes.
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According to HM Prison and Probation Service’s (HMPPS) own policy at the time, restraints during birth and antenatal appointments (if used at all) must be “removed upon arrival at the hospital, in the waiting room or on going into the consultation room”, unless a risk assessment has shown a particularly high risk of escape or threat to personal safety. Where possible, two female officers should be present, and never a lone male officer.
Joanne says she was never assessed as high risk, and so handcuffs shouldn’t have been used in her case. Like nearly 70% of women in prison, she’s a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, with resultant complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which made a male officer towering over her in the dark particularly distressing.
Joanne had a booklet outlining this policy, given to her by Birth Companions, a charity supporting pregnant women and mothers through complex situations. But in the words of Rianna Cleary, whose baby died in 2019 when she was left alone to give birth in a cell, “When it comes to prison, what's written on a piece of paper is never what happens in practice.”
”The day I was being induced, I thought, ‘I better grab that [booklet] just in case,’” Joanne tells us. “I highlighted a part of the policy that said ‘pregnant women shouldn't be handcuffed [unless in exceptional circumstances, as per prison service policy]’. And the prison officers just looked at it, then each other, and said, “We don't know what that book is, but we're telling you, you're wrong,” she claims.
Joanne alleges she was handcuffed for 34 continuous hours during the birth of her child, as well as during multiple antenatal appointments where intimate examinations took place.
When asked about this and other aspects of claims made by women Glamour has spoken to, HMP Bronzefield said it was unable to comment on individual cases.
HMPPS’ policy has since been amended and now states that handcuffs shouldn’t even be used while travelling to antenatal appointments, as well as during them and labour, unless in exceptional circumstances. HMPPS has also called for more training on the definition of ‘exceptional circumstances’ when handcuffing pregnant women.
Currently, there is no data collection on the use of handcuffs on pregnant women across prisons.
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“I was sobbing in the shower thinking, 'What’s going on? Why are they doing this to me?’, she recalls. “It felt really dangerous because I had a massive bump, it was slippery, and I was having contractions with a handcuff on me. The prison officer had to help me get dressed. I felt so humiliated and degraded.”
Later, Joanne was “doubled over on the bed having contractions in absolute agony”, and remembers officers “chatting away about the holidays they were going on.” “I was invisible to them,” she continues.
“The whole lead-up felt like a bigger ordeal than actually pushing the baby out,” she says. When the time came to push, she “had no energy”.
After over an hour of struggling to deliver, an incision and forceps had to be used, and Joanne suffered a haemorrhage, losing nearly three litres of blood. She believes the distress and sleep deprivation from being handcuffed made her less able to push, impacting her birth.
Pregnant women in prison are seven times more likely to suffer a stillbirth and twice as likely to give birth prematurely.
The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman and NHS England recognise all pregnancies in prison as high risk, while the Royal College of Midwives and Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) have said that prison will never be a safe place for pregnant women.
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Dr Laura Abbott, a midwife and Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, who specialises in research on maternity provision in prison, reiterates that “11 countries around the world don’t imprison pregnant women or new mums. I can’t see why the UK can’t join them…many women have been victims of crimes more serious than what they are actually in prison for themselves,” she says.
From 2023–2024, 215 pregnant women were held in custody and 53 babies were born to mothers in prison. Data on how often restraints are used during antenatal appointments and labour is not available, but Joanne’s experience isn’t an isolated one. Since February 2025, six women have publicly complained about the improper use of restraints at HMP Bronzefield.
As a result of these concerns and following an internal review, Lord Timpson, Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, commissioned a national independent investigation into the practice of handcuffing pregnant women in June 2025. This announcement didn’t come until after the Secretary of State for Justice (SSJ) was threatened with judicial review if they did not confirm an independent investigation would be carried out, says Jane Ryan, partner of Bhatt Murphy solicitors, who’s representing the women affected.
Still, progress was slow. A protest raising concerns about delays to investigations was led by Level Up and No Births Behind Bars outside the Ministry of Justice in December 2025. Six days later, after months of little progress, HMPPS and SSJ provided a draft Terms of Reference setting out the investigation aims.
However, the women continue to be excluded. While laying out the parties involved in the investigation, the Terms of Reference conspicuously did not invite the six women whose complaints led to the investigation. This, says Ryan, partner of Bhatt Murphy solicitors, was against procedural principles under Article 3 of the ECHR, which requires victim involvement in investigations into “instances of inhuman or degrading treatment”.
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As of this week, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, who has been commissioned to carry out the investigation, has invited women with experience of being restrained while pregnant in prison to come forward.
Although welcome, Ryan emphasises it does little for the women she is representing and still restricts victim involvement, particularly as the prisons, private contractors and staff will receive state-funded legal support. “It is grossly unfair to expect traumatised victims to negotiate a complex investigation against well-funded and lawyered-up state parties without their own lawyer,” Ryan says of the current Terms of Reference.
Eight months after being commissioned, an independent investigation hasn't been finalised. The six women are waiting for the Terms of Reference to be amended to ensure their accounts will be heard with the necessary funding for legal representation to allow their involvement.
Rianna Cleary gave birth alone in a prison cell and had to endure the death of her baby.
Laura*, another of the six women who have come forward, is worried the investigation might not hold those she believes are responsible to account, hoping it’ll scrutinise enough.
At 24 years old, she found out she was pregnant via a routine test after being arrested. It was her first time in England, and she spoke little of the language.
Laura alleges that she was handcuffed to different officers for 48 hours during labour while in excruciating pain. She says she asked for the cuffs to be removed or loosened multiple times, but was dismissed.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson declined to comment on individual cases, but said “our policy is absolutely clear, pregnant women should not be restrained for hospital appointments unless risk assessments have deemed it essential to do so.”
“We have announced an independent review into the use of restraints on pregnant women and are considering the Women’s Justice Board’s recommendations on how to ensure fewer women go to prison in the first place.”
Both Joanne and Laura say they were categorised as “low risk” throughout risk assessments completed by prison staff, including by escorting officers during labour. No behavioural concerns were noted or reasons to believe handcuffs were necessary during hospital visits.
The investigation will consider whether HMPPS practices involving the restraint of pregnant prisoners constitute a systemic breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (which prohibits torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment), and a breach of individual rights of pregnant women.
"It is outrageous that the practice of shackling imprisoned women while in hospital is still happening – 30 years after Birth Companions was founded in response to a national scandal on exactly this issue”, Naomi Delap, Chief Executive Officer of Birth Companions, comments.
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After her second induction procedure, Laura was told to walk around the room to help start labour. “A male officer wanted to be with me in the room even though I was bleeding,” she remembers. When she refused to be alone with him, “he stayed sitting in front of the door of the room blocking the passage until the nurses asked him to leave.” Laura also suffered a postpartum haemorrhage, classified as a critical event.
For Joanne, the hours after birth were just as “horrific”. “It wasn’t long until two officers were back in the room with me…I had to get my boobs out and try and learn how to breastfeed in front of them, because they refused to leave,” she says. “When you give birth, they’re really intimate, precious moments that will be with you forever, but I feel like that was taken away from me as well.”
Neither of the women will get the first moments with their babies back, but they hope the investigation will bring about change, and others won’t have to experience the same. “I hope that justice is done,” Laura emphasises. “For me and all those who suffered. Women in prison are vulnerable during childbirth and should be treated with humanity so that everything goes well with their babies.”
Of the women’s testimonies, a HMP Bronzefield spokesperson said, “We are unable to provide any specific comment on individual cases. We take the safety and well-being of the women in our care, and of the general public, very seriously and have robust assurance systems in place to ensure that current practice is fully within the guidelines appropriate to these situations.”
Joanne is married and pregnant with her second child now, but the joy she should feel is eclipsed. “I am really scared. I think the trauma from the first labour is affecting me with this baby as well. I still have nightmares,” she admits. Laura also understands that suffering from the fallout isn’t only hers to bear – it’s impacted her whole family, and continues to two years on.
The Sentencing Act was amended this year to ensure courts have a legal duty to consider pregnancy when deciding whether to grant bail or keep someone on remand.
If this policy had come in sooner, Joanne may have been on bail when she gave birth, avoiding this entire ordeal.
Delap from Birth Companions stresses, “The only solution is to end the imprisonment of pregnant women in all but the most exceptional of circumstances. It just shouldn't be an option for judges or magistrates to send these women and their unborn babies into a system that endangers them in this way.”
*All names have been changed to protect anonymity.
Nearly 150,000 children are being looked after by a kinship carer – a relative or close family friend who raises a child when their birth parents are unable to do so – according to new research. But unlike foster or adoptive parents, kinship carers do not receive parental leave, forcing a majority to quit their jobs in order to look after vulnerable children. Here, one kinship mum shares her story.
