A woman who was shackled to a hospital bed by her wrists and ankles while giving birth has won a $750,000 settlement against the City of New York and its police department.
The unnamed mother-of-two was arrested two days after her due date on a misdemeanor charge which was later dismissed.
The black woman, who went into labor on the day she was arrested and was forced to give birth while handcuffed, filed a lawsuit for alleged emotional distress and a violation of her human rights, reports CNN.
She said she ‘felt like a failure’ to her unborn baby after she shackled to the bed, despite pleas from a nurse to have her released immediately.
A US district magistrate judge for the Eastern District of New York yesterday approved a $750,000 settlement for the woman and her baby.
A pregnant woman who was shackled to a hospital bed by her wrists and ankles while giving birth has won a $750,000 settlement against the City of New York and its police department. A file photo shows a person in custody, shackled at the ankles
‘That was not my birth plan,’ she told CNN. ‘I felt like a failure to my unborn because that wasn’t something that was planned for neither of us.
‘I just didn’t feel like myself anymore after that. I feel like my memory got taken away. And I’m still in pain.’
The woman said she was taken to a hospital in a different area of the city she had planned to give birth.
She added that the father of her baby, her family or the medic who had been providing her with prenatal care were not able to attend – only a nurse was able to hold her hand during the birth.
‘My only support was the nurse that was helping me,’ she added. ‘Nobody – not my family, not my friends – just complete strangers.’
At least one nurse at the hospital asked an officer to remove the handcuffs, but he allegedly claimed he could not do so due to an unspecified policy, the lawsuit said.
The officer only removed them after nurses said the shackles were preventing her from receiving pain relief.
‘He finally agreed to remove them after nurses informed him that (she) needed to begin pushing and that the handcuffs were preventing her from receiving an epidural,’ the suit said.
Just an hour after giving birth, the woman was handcuffed again and struggled to breastfeed her baby boy, the suit added.
The woman had filed the suit against the city of New York and several NYPD officers anonymously in October.
The woman, who went into labor on the day she was arrested and was forced to give birth while handcuffed, filed a lawsuit for alleged emotional distress and a violation of her human rights. A file photo shows an NYPD patrol car in Manhattan with the motto ‘Courtesy Professionalism Respect’ displayed on the side
‘The first breath that this baby had on this earth was one born out of violence. That was violence, what the NYPD did to her,” the woman’s attorney Anne Oredeko said.
‘This lawsuit was meant as a way to give her some type of solace, but there’s no repairing that – money will never repair that. And she cannot get that moment back.’
While being held in custody after being arrested on December 17, 2018 for a now dismissed misdemeanor assault, the woman experienced contractions and was made to lie in a cell so a female officer could inspect her.
The lawsuit says the woman told the officer she needed medical care and the officer allegedly told her to lie down on the prison cell bench and remove her underwear for an ‘inspection’ of her ‘vaginal area’.
‘I felt disgusted … because I’m in a dirty jail cell and an officer says I need to lay on something so she could look in my private area to see if my baby is coming,’ the woman told CNN.
The settlement states that it is not admission by the city of New York or the NYPD that they had violated the mother’s human rights.
The NYPD declined to comment on the settlement and the New York City Law Department did not respond to requests for comment.
New York banned the use of physical restraints on pregnant women during labor and delivery in 2009, and the law was expanded in 2015 to include in-custody transportation and the eight-week postpartum recovery period
But it still happens, according to the New York Correctional Association.
In February 2018, another pregnant woman said in a lawsuit she was shackled by the NYPD while in labor.
The woman, then 27, was shackled at the ankles for at least the first hour of labor on February 8, despite doctors telling NYPD officers that the restraints were illegal and needed to be removed, the complaint filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan said.
The woman was finally freed from all restraints after nine hours, only after a judge came to Montefiore Medical Center to arraign her in her hospital bed on a charge of violating a protective order, her lawyer said at the time.
As part of the settlement, the city paid the woman $610,000.
The law making it illegal to physically restrain pregnant women specifically during labor and delivery was expanded in 2015 to include in-custody transportation and the eight-week postpartum recovery period.
NYPD settled a similar lawsuit in 2017 stemming from an incident in July of 2015, according to the woman’s complaint.
In that case, another Bronx woman who was eight months pregnant was shackled to a bed at Montefiore under the charge of officers from the 43rd Precinct for three days after an arrest on charges that were ultimately dismissed.
A total of 26 states, including New York, ban shackling women in custody who are in labor, with some banning all restraints for all pregnant women, Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an assistant professor in gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said.
No state or federal laws limit the practice in the other 24 states, according to Sufrin.
Policies in place by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the United States Marshals Service limit the use of restraints on pregnant women.
The First Step Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation currently sitting in the Senate, would ban handcuffing pregnant women in federal prison, among other things.
