Carol is a 20-year old mother in Scotland and what she wants for her daughter Keira, only weeks old, is to know how "over the moon" she is about her baby. Even in the hardest moments of tantrums and colick and the third round of flu in a row, that is a feeling I think almost every mother understands. The hard stuff happens, but we want our children to feel full of the love we have for them.
But what if the hard stuff wasn't just about pediatrician co-pay or a babysitter who cancels or going through eighteen diapers in one day? What if the hard stuff we experienced as a parent was about giving birth while being in prison, fearing that our newborn would be taken out of our care and worrying about how the other convicts around us might impact how our parenting was perceived by social workers? That's the pain and the conflict for Carol, who is fortunate among women prisoners in her country to be housed in a facility designed for new mothers to keep and share care for their infants while they serve out their sentence.
Of course, this is controversial for people. The debate is over tough issues and involves crimes most of us in our daily lives would consider inconceivable. Some people say that mothers-to-be who are convicted of a crime, should be stripped of their rights while in prison, including the right to raise their babies once they are born. But the breadth of this topic is expansive, and I really believe that here and abroad we need to take a serious look at how children live out the sentences their mothers are serving, how just being with their baby might begin reforming a convict and how the crimes women commit in relationship to men impacts their choices as well as the babies they make. In a world I'd like to design, pregnant women and new mothers wouldn't be in prison. But given the systems we have in place, programs like this one in Scotland and nonprofits who intervene with programs for incarcerated women here in the United States, have got to be doing the world -- and these families -- more service than ignoring or attempting to strip women of their motherhood status while they are behind bars.
