No Births Behind Bars is a British advocacy group calling for an end to the incarceration of pregnant people.[1]
History
editIn March 2022, the group co-organised a protest in Parliament Square along with feminist advocacy group Level Up.[2] The protest featured a speech by Emma Hughes, who had been arrested as part of the Stansted 15 in 2017 and was pregnant at the time of her arrest.[3]
In June 2022, the group co-organised a feed-in protest outside the Ministry of Justice to pressure Minister of Justice Dominic Raab to respond to a petition that gathered over 10 000 signatures calling for the government to change sentencing laws to ensure that judges took pregnancy and parenthood into consideration.[4] Later that month, the group held a protest outside of HM Prison Styal in Cheshire to mark two years since an inmate at the prison serving an eight-month sentence delivered a stillborn baby after her calls for medical attention had been ignored for several hours.[5]
References
edit- ^ "No Births Behind Bars: Feed-In for justice". Counterfire.
- ^ Taylor, Diane (28 March 2022). "Mothers and babies join protest against UK imprisonment of pregnant women". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
- ^ Smoke, Ben (31 March 2022). "The fight to keep babies out of prison". Huck Magazine. Retrieved 21 July 2022.
- ^ "Locking up pregnant women damages mothers and children – yet the UK does it". the Guardian. May 16, 2022.
- ^ Scheerhout, John (June 20, 2022). "Campaigners call for an end to the jailing of pregnant women". Manchester Evening News.