“There is something wrong”

Tuesday Olson found out she was pregnant the day before she went to jail.

She had missed court — twice — in a traffic violation case and was booked into the La Plata County Jail in 2013 on a bond she couldn’t pay.

So instead of visiting her doctor to learn more about her fledgling pregnancy, Olson went behind bars. After a couple of days, she started feeling severe cramps, and then she started bleeding, and she knew something was very wrong.

“They kept on going on the intercom and telling me, ‘You need to keep it down,’ and ‘You’re acting pathetic,’ and ‘You’re trying to get out of jail; you’re overreacting,’ ” she said. “And I was like, ‘No, I’m not; there is something wrong. I am going to lose my baby.’ ”

Olson recounted her experience to The Denver Post on Sunday as part of an effort by the American

Civil Liberties Union of Colorado to examine the policies, procedures and practices surrounding women’s reproductive care in Colorado’s county jails. More than 1,000 pregnant women passed through Colorado’s county jails between July 2018 and July 2019, said Lizzy Hinkley, reproductive rights policy council for the ACLU of Colorado. The organization is examining the policies at all 59 county jails in the state that house women and expects to publish its findings this summer.

Olson spoke about her experience in a video released Tuesday by the ACLU, and Hinkley hopes women who hear Olson’s story will be encouraged to reach out with their own accounts.

“I don’t want anybody else to go through what I had to go through,” Olson said.

Olson first called for help inside the La Plata County Jail when the cramping got bad.

“I pushed the button and I told them, ‘I think something is wrong,’ ” she said. “They told me to go lay down and rest.”

She did, but the pain got worse as the hours passed, and then the bleeding started. She asked, again and again, to go to a hospital, but was told each time to lay down and rest. “I started crying. I was in so much pain. I was crying and crying,” Olson said. “Several women in the pod started pushing the button and sticking up for me. They kept telling them to take me to the hospital.”

Eventually, Olson was taken in a wheelchair to the jail’s medical unit, where a nurse gave her two pads and told her he wanted to measure how much blood she was losing over time. Put in a cell by herself, Olson thought she was dying. “They put me in a medical observation room in the intake area, and they gave me like this mattress, this thin mattress, and left me in there,” she said. “I was crying and screaming and begging like, ‘Please help me, God.’ ”

Three days went by, and then she passed out.

She woke up in an ambulance, handcuffed and shackled, she said. At the hospital, she found out she was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy — a pregnancy outside the uterus. It’s a life-threatening condition if untreated. Doctors discovered Olson had been bleeding internally and required emergency surgery to remove her right ovary and fallopian tube, Olson said.

After the surgery, she went back to jail. Three days later, she felt again like something was wrong. Deputies initially refused to return her to the hospital, but eventually did, where doctors discovered additional internal bleeding and performed a second surgery.

“I ended up losing my baby, organs, undergoing emergency surgeries,” Olson said. “They didn’t give me proper medical treatment. They violated my rights and violated me as a person.”

In July 2018, Diana Sanchez gave birth alone in a cell in the Denver County Jail — a case, caught on video, that prompted national outrage in 2019, sparked a lawsuit and brought about policy changes at the jail, which cleared deputies of wrongdoing.

It also helped spur the ACLU to examine the issue of reproductive care in jails, Hinkley said.

In 2017, a woman said she gave birth in a toilet in the El Paso County Jail after her cries for help went unanswered. In 2009, a woman in the Pueblo County Jail gave birth alone and in a cell after she was unable to pay a municipal fine.

“Diana Sanchez’s story was a shock, not just because it was happening but because it was happening in Denver,” Hinkley said. “It definitely served as a catalyst for us taking a closer look.”

The ACLU of Colorado is sifting through the written policies and procedures for jails across the state, Hinkley said, but also hopes to talk to women who have been pregnant in jail or otherwise dealt with reproductive health while behind bars in order to see how the policies line up with what actually happens, she said.

“We’re seeing trends nationally that show that with the increased incarceration of women over the last two decades, many of their female-specific needs are going unmet when they are in jails and prisons,” she said.

Colorado women who are interested in discussing their experiences with the ACLU can visit aclu-co.org/repro-stories/ to submit accounts, she said.

Some accounts might lead to lawsuits, Hinkley said, while others, such as Olson’s, may have happened too long ago for a lawsuit to be filed. The ACLU will endeavor to follow up personally with each submission, Hinkley said, adding that details of each case will not be made public without permission.