An Unshackled Birth

February 22, 2021

An Unshackled Birth

By Susan Simensky Bietila

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Susan Simensky Bietila has been a Registered Nurse as well as an activist artist for 50 years. She lives in Milwaukee, WI, and makes artwork in collaboration with movements for justice: for Health Care as a Right, Immigrants Rights, Midwest Indigenous-led movements to protect water from mines, pipelines and oil trains and in support of Public Education, and more. Her work is regularly published in World War 3 Illustrated magazine.

References

  1. “Wisconsin Senate Bill 316,” LegiScan, accessed January 28, 2021, https://legiscan.com/WI/bill/SB316/2019.
  2. Lori Teresa Yearwood, “Pregnant and shackled: why inmates are still giving birth cuffed and bound,” The Guardian, January 24, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/24/shackled-pregnant-women-prisoners-birth.
  3. “First of its Kind Statistics on Pregnant Women in U.S. Prisons,” Johns Hopkins Medicine Newsroom, March 21, 2019, https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/first-of-its-kind-statistics-on-pregnant-women-in-us-prisons.
  4. Jennifer G. Clarke and Rachel E. Simon, “Shackling and Separation: Motherhood in Prison,” AMA Journal of Ethics 15, no. 9 (September 2013): 779-785, https://doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2013.15.9.pfor2-1309.