In August, Tiana Hill testified before the U.S. Senate Human Rights Subcommittee about being pregnant while incarcerated at Georgia’s Clayton County Jail. According to The Appeal, those months were harrowing. “They basically put me on lockdown for having a baby in their jail,” she remembered. “Like I was being punished.”
When she arrived in 2019, Hill repeatedly told jail staff she was pregnant. They didn’t believe her. When she missed her next period, they refused to tell her the results of her pregnancy test. By December, she was passing blood, feeling her baby tumble as she struggled through pain. They still denied her pregnancy.
Eventually, they gave her another test – and it was positive. But they didn’t treat her any better. Staff joked about her weight. When she begged to go to the hospital, they forced her to give birth on a metal bed and then handcuffed her to a wheelchair. She saw her son briefly, then never again.
Five days later, her baby was dead. She wasn’t told how or why. “They didn’t care,” Hill said, “and they did not care about my baby.”
Hill had the courage to tell her story, which was similar to countless others. But this shouldn’t keep happening. From forced enslavement-era reproduction and sterilization to medical racism and the foster care system, the state has historically enacted anti-Black reproductive violence. With prisons, that violence stays alive.