Motherhood in manacles? No

Astory of visceral distress and childbirth cruelties isn’t generally what we shoot for as a Mother’s Day read. But some stories command attention and this was one. It carried women’s bitter accounts of being handcuffed during the intensities and vulnerabilities of childbirth, straining against their restraints, freed only when contractions were at their peak then swiftly shackled again.

One mother, pleading that her ankle be chained rather than her wrist, was instead given the choice of which hand she wanted free for that first contact with her baby. It should have been one of the single most intimate moments of their lives.

These were not historical accounts of 19th century institutional cruelty, or tales involving some mad faraway sect. They were appalling, shaming depictions of childbirth from women under the care, or control anyway, of New Zealand’s Department of Corrections.

Let the record show that these accounts, published by Stuff on Sunday, conflict in vivid and explicit ways with the generalised assurances from the department about what its policy is. Let the record also show policies and practices have time and again proven to be markedly different things in our society, including in our government departments where training is not always all it should be.

The big book of rules does indeed say restraints may be used on pregnant women but not, in any circumstances, on labouring women. But reports emerge to say the wretched reality has been otherwise. It’s a practice that was slated 17 years ago by the Ombudsman. And yet a 2019 report from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner into the Mothers with Babies Unit (MBU) at Auckland Regional Women’s Corrections Facility, obtained by Stuff under the Official Information Act, found the practice had been continuing, even so.

The Children’s Commissioner’s inspectors found officers had varying interpretations of when, exactly, prisoners were ‘‘giving birth’’ – misinterpreting their own interpretive duties in the midst of the medical to-ing and fro-ing. One reportedly told a medic who questioned the need for a new mother to be handcuffed in the shower: ‘‘I don’t tell you how to do your job . . .’’

But let’s all of us tell Corrections what its job isn’t. It isn’t cuffing women during childbirth on a ‘‘can’t be too careful’’ basis.

Corrections National Commissioner Rachel Leota says the department’s commitment to maintaining the wellbeing of mother and baby has to be balanced against the need to consider any risk to safety and security. What’s the concern? That while their bodies are dealing with one of the most instinctively compelling and demanding tasks known to the natural world, there must be default suspicion about what else they might get up to?

Like springing to their feet, leaping beyond the grasp of those around them, somersaulting out of windows and outrunning all pursuit?

Either the Children’s Commissioner’s investigators have been snowed by a pack of lying women, or we have a serious lack of trained and empathetic Corrections staff – and of institutional accountability.

What’s to be done? An internal departmental inquiry simply will not suffice, and it may be tricky to find an acceptable inquisitor since the Ombudsman and Children’s Commissioner might themselves be called upon to reflect on the vigour of their own follow-up practices.

The Government must act immediately to stop this practice and follow its own rules.

Let’s tell Corrections what its job isn’t . . . cuffing women in childbirth on a ‘‘can’t be too careful’’ basis.