An incarcerated Indigenous woman was shackled to a hospital bed in Queensland while she was in labour last weekend, an advocacy group has said. The birth happened just days before Labor and the Coalition blocked a bill to ban the “barbaric practice” of shackling incarcerated women during childbirth. Debbie Kilroy, the chief executive officer of advocacy group Sisters Inside, said an Aboriginal woman who gave birth via caesarean section to a premature baby on the weekend and was still in hospital had been “shackled on and off since she came into the hospital”.
Hospital staff rang Sisters Inside after trying everything they could to get the shackles removed, she said. As part of the UN, Australia has signed on to the Bangkok rules on the treatment of female prisoners, which state that prison should be a last resort for pregnant women and that “instruments of restraint shall never be used on women during labour, during birth and immediately after birth”. But the government said this week the criminal justice system was a matter for the states and territories while the Coalition said it understood the intent of the bill but would not support its passage.
The Queensland Liberal senator Paul Scarr broke ranks to say he was “deeply concerned” about the practice and would raise it with the Queensland attorney general. Kilroy said the woman in the Queensland hospital had been “spiralling” before the shackles were removed on Friday. Thorpe said on Friday that “the Albanese government had the opportunity to take a stand against this barbaric practice”.
Not a day later, we hear of another harrowing case,” she said. Thorpe said it was “a joke” for the commonwealth to leave it to states and territories because they “have the constitutional power to establish a national standard and they are choosing not to use it”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
