Texas Prison Guards Put Woman in Isolation for Talking About Abortion
An incarcerated woman in a Texas prison is being kept in isolation and punished for talking to other women about abortion, The Nation reported on Tuesday. The punishment was doled out mid-April, shortly after the woman, Kwaneta Harris, began sharing information about sexual health and preventing pregnancy with other inmates.
Harris told The Nation the ordeal began when she heard several younger women talking about contraceptive methods in a way that was riddled with scientific inaccuracies. As a nurse prior to her incarceration, she began speaking to the women to offer clarification, hoping to protect the women from unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. At some point, the topic of abortion arose. When one young woman asked Harris about “partial birth abortion,” an inaccurate and stigmatizing term that anti-abortion activists use to refer to abortion later in pregnancy, Harris said she gave them the facts without realizing a prison guard was in earshot.
“There’s no such thing,” she told them. Harris told the women most abortions are medication abortions and dispelled with anti-abortion myths. At that point, a guard whose name Harris didn’t catch, but whom she identified as a young man in his 20s, intervened, berating the women and “yelling at Harris to shut up and threatening not only a disciplinary ticket for violating prison rules but even a new criminal charge, which could lead to additional prison time,” The Nation reports.
Shortly after the incident, at midnight, Harris says a prison lieutenant came to her cell and she was taken to a different, isolated cell at the far-side of her unit closed off from the others and facing away from the prison yard. For three days, she was cut off from making any phone calls. She’s currently unable to send or receive e-messages on her prison-issued tablet, forced to rely on prison staff to give her printed out messages that are days old and “in tiny print.” Harris, a mother, told The Nation she fears at any time the prison will cut off her communications with her kids.
https://news.yahoo.com/texas-prison-guards-put-woman-194023013.html
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