The Crisafulli government is facing mounting pressure to ban the “barbaric practice” of shackling women during childbirth after complaints that a mother was restrained in a north Queensland hospital while her newborn baby was in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Queensland Corrective Services have launched a review into the incident, where an Aboriginal woman was reportedly shackled by her ankle and wrist to the bed following a c-section birth at Townsville University Hospital.
Sisters Inside chief executive Debbie Kilroy said her organisation, which supports criminalised women and girls, was contacted last week by hospital staff who were distressed to witness the mother’s treatment.
According to Kilroy, staff asked for the restraints to be removed from the mother, who gave birth on October 10, while she was recovering from major surgery, and so she could visit her baby in the NICU without physical restrictions, but prison officers refused.
“The midwives, nurses and medical staff were advocating to take the shackles off because she can’t get around, and she’s in agony,” Kilroy said.
“[The mother became] highly distressed … [and over the week] her health was deteriorating before their eyes.”
Hospital staff told Kilroy prison officers made “racist and derogatory remarks” about the woman, and are in the process of formalising a complaint about her treatment by corrective services.
“[The staff] were all very distressed … and they were crying because the prison officers were so rude,” Kilroy said.
A spokesperson for Queensland Corrective Services said: “The management of this prisoner while at hospital will be subject to an internal review as restraints are only ever to be used as a last resort on pregnant prisoners where necessary to maintain public safety.”
Minister for Corrective Services Laura Gerber said she was aware of the incident.
“A pregnant woman can only be restrained as a last resort due to public safety and in this instance, I have been briefed by my department, the woman was not restrained during the delivery of the baby,” she said.
It comes after independent senator Lidia Thorpe introduced a bill into federal parliament to ban the shackling of incarcerated women during childbirth and the strip searching of children, which was blocked by Labor and Coalition MPs.
After the bill’s defeat, Kilroy said it was up to states and territories to legislate for this “barbaric practice” to end.
On Monday, state Labor MP Jonty Bush launched a petition calling for the Queensland government to “expressly prohibit the use of handcuffs, shackles and other custodial restraints on women during labour, childbirth and the immediate postnatal period”.
“It shouldn’t be occurring at all, there’s no justification for a practice like this,” Bush said.
“The most common justifications given are flight risk.
“Well, anybody that’s been in labour or been around a woman in labour would know how ridiculous that assertion is.”
Bush pointed to the United Nations’ rules for the treatment of women prisoners – the Bangkok Rules – which assert “instruments of restraint shall never be used on women during labour, during birth and immediately after birth”.
“These women are absolutely in fear for them and their babies, and we’re shackling them to beds and saying it’s for their own protection,” Bush said.
“It’s time for the state to enliven that [human rights] commitment that we’ve made and to use every lever that they have to make birthing as free as they can in a prison system for these women and their families.”
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