The U.S. medical system is far from perfect, especially when it comes to pregnancy and maternal health care. The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Indigenous women face twice the risk. These statistics are an indictment of how this country values women’s lives.
But as bad as maternal healthcare is for most American women, the conditions are exponentially worse for women giving birth while detained by the U.S. government.
For a movement so concerned with “life,” I’d expect absolute outrage from anti-abortion groups at how pregnant women are treated in ICE detention centers. And yet they are silent. If you claim to be “pro-life,” you cannot support ICE. The two positions are fundamentally incompatible. Let’s dive in.
Before Detention
Your first hint that ICE and its supporters do not give a fuck about “life” is evident before they even detain women.
In Minneapolis last month, An ICE agent was filmed kneeling on a pregnant woman’s back and then dragging her through the snow by one arm. Then just a few days ago, a pregnant women was shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet/pepper ball at an anti-ICE protest in Los Angeles.
This is how ICE treats pregnant women in public, on camera. Imagine what happens behind closed doors.
Inside Detention
Let me tell you the story of one woman who gave birth in an ICE detention facility.
Guards separated her from her breastfeeding infant for months. When she was finally released, her milk had dried up. Her baby didn’t recognize her. The bond every medical organization says is critical (the same bond “pro-life” activists claim is sacred) had been deliberately severed by her own government.
Another woman, three days postpartum, was denied access to a shower. Guards told her she had to hold her baby at all times. She couldn’t put her newborn down to properly clean herself, to recover from childbirth, to tend to her bleeding and pain.
These are documented cases from Senator Jon Ossoff’s January 2026 investigation into U.S. immigration detention facilities. The investigation uncovered over 1,000 credible reports of human rights abuses since Trump’s second inauguration.
If this happened to your sister, you’d be calling every lawyer you know, demanding an investigations. You’d also expect every politician who runs on “family values” to be screaming about this from the rooftops.
And yet the politicians who campaign on “protecting babies” are also the loudest ICE supporters. The voters who claim “all life is sacred” celebrate more law enforcement, more detention, more of exactly what’s harming women and children. Here is the cognitive dissonance: you cannot hold both positions. You cannot claim every life matters while supporting a system that treats pregnant women and newborns this way. That tells you everything about what “pro-life” really means.
Continue reading over at the Women in America Substack.
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