Description
- Abstract:
- Incarcerated women have historically been deprioritized in conversations surrounding the prison. While in the past decade there has been an increase in research studies about women’s prisons and an increased focus on the experience of incarcerated women in the national conversation surrounding police and prison brutality, there is still significantly less work that studies women’s experience with prison than men’s. This gap also appears in media depictions of the carceral experience; most books, films, and TV shows that deal with prison focus on male prisoners. Only a few works, such as Orange is the New Black, describe the harrowing experiences of women in prison. This project aims to add to this conversation about healthcare in women’s prisons in two important ways: 1) it focuses specifically on the intersection of reproductive health justice and prison, and 2) it will reflect the changes in reproductive health access that have come in recent years and seem likely to continue. Through storytelling, a powerful tool to help build empathy and connection, the project will 1) uplift systematically marginalized voices, 2) connect treatment inside prisons with current national attacks on reproductive rights, and 3) improve physician practice with one of the nation’s most devalued and mistreated populations. Preliminary work revealed common threads between women’s stories, which were divided by subject matter and not individual narrative to reveal similarities. In the selected quotations section, I discuss five aspects of the women’s experiences: babies, which incorporates pregnancy, contraception, and the family; breasts, which includes breastfeeding; blood, which includes menstruation; brain, which includes mental health, and; better, which highlights the role healthcare providers have in improving the system. The most common and most important thread found in this work, however, is that there is only one way to truly improve the reproductive healthcare crisis in prisons: abolition.
- Notes:
- Scholarly concentration: Medical Humanities and Ethics
Access Conditions
- Use and Reproduction
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- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
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Citation
Terry-Kantor, Elizabeth, Carbuccia, Koren, and Brown MD, Benjamin,
"'When You Lock Up a Woman, You Lock Up a Nation': Narratives of Reproductive Healthcare from the Rhode Island Women's Prison"
(2023).
Warren Alpert Medical School Academic Symposium.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:985pc4fj/
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Warren Alpert Medical School Academic Symposium
The Warren Alpert Medical School Academic Symposium is an annual event at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University that provides Year II medical students a venue to present their summer research in a poster format. Participation in the Symposium …...