Until ARRWIP’s “Pregnancy in Prison Statistics” (PIPS) study, there have been no systematic data on how many pregnant people are behind bars in the U.S. or what happens to those pregnancies. This historical absence of data shows us just how neglected incarcerated pregnant people are— women who don’t count don’t get counted, and women who don’t get counted don’t count. With the First Step Act of 2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics is now required to collect pregnancy outcomes data from federal prisons—but we have a long way to go for people in jails and state prisons.
The PIPS project collected these data for 1 year (2016-2017) from 22 state prison systems, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 6 jails and 3 juvenile justice systems. These data represent 57% of females in prison and 5% of females in jail.
This first-ever systematic study of pregnancy outcomes from carceral institutions in the U.S. is a piece of a larger strategy, we hope, of health care improvements and policy reform for this often overlooked group of people.
Funded by: Society of Family Planning Research Fund; National Institutes of Health (NICHD-K12HD085845)
