Janey Starling is co-director of Level Up, a feminist organisation that campaigns for an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers.
After seeing Clean Break's play Scenes from Lost Mothers, she writes about the power of culture in creating political change.
Pregnancy and motherhood in prison is, for the first time in a lifetime, comfortably in the cultural spotlight. Both EastEnders and Coronation Street have recently featured storylines with pregnant women in prison, and Clean Break’s new play Scenes from Lost Mothers was celebrated on BBC Woman’s Hour last week.
What does this tell us? Systemic change is on the horizon. Why? Because cultural shifts are critical in laying the groundwork for political change. Culture is the lens through which we view and understand the world; it is where our everyday attitudes, beliefs and opinions are shaped. Culture is a powerful vehicle for social change – and culture must change before the law does. And the law needs to end imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers.
The barbarism that pregnant women and mothers face in prison has only been possible for so long because prisons are deliberately kept out of public sight and mind. What prisons represent in the public imagination, and what they are in reality, are starkly different things. The very first step to breaking down prison walls once and for all is to break down the psychological and emotional barriers between the general public and incarcerated people – and this is what Dr Laura Abbott’s new research project, Lost Mothers, sets out to achieve.
Dr Abbott is the UK’s leading expert on pregnancy and new motherhood inside prison. She has published over 60 research papers on the horrors women face at the hands of the prison system. But this is the first one that has been turned into a play.
Scenes from Lost Mothers is a collaboration between Dr Abbott, Clean Break and women from the Birth Companions lived experience team. The play converts the research findings from the Lost Mothers research project, which explores criminalised women’s experiences of mandatory separation from their babies, into emotionally-charged theatre.
Scenes from Lost Mothers premier performance at University of Hertfordshire, 6 February 2025
For Dr Abbott, emotion and empathy are what’s at the heart of this project. “Papers and reports are great but very one dimensional,” she told me. “I wanted to reach a wide audience of as many people as possible.”
The play itself, written by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and directed by Clean Break’s Anna Herrmann, involves three women and a minimalistic set. Its power is in its pace and script. Different scenes chop and change to showcase the terror, humiliation, shame, grief and devastation that pregnant women and mothers are subjected to inside prison. The rigidity and callousness of the prison regime is laid bare, with the dehumanising power dynamic between officers and mothers made clear by the women’s descriptions of officers as ‘zookeepers’.
“When I was in labour, I kept asking them to call him, but the zookeepers said they needed authorisation. I asked and asked, started shouting. In the end, the doctor found his mobile and phoned him. He got stuck in traffic. I was gonna breastfeed but the zookeeper was watching over me, so I asked for a bottle. Afterwards, I walk out of the hospital with three zookeepers and a newborn cub, I catch sight of us all in a mirror and it’s a picture of a moving cage. It’s weird. People are staring. They can’t stop. I don’t blame them.” - Scenes from Lost Mothers, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti
While prison Mother and Baby Units are assumed by the public to be humane places, the zookeeper analogy underscores the fact that prisons, by design, are dehumanising and undignified places where caged women are stripped of their agency and autonomy – and for mothers, this is particularly damaging.
The concept of a caring prison is an oxymoron. This is driven home by the Prison Ombudsman and NHS categorisation of all pregnancies in prison as “high-risk” based on the fact that “a woman is held behind locked doors for significant periods of time.” By the government’s own admission, prisons will never be a safe place to be pregnant – and they are certainly no place for new mothers and their babies.
The reason that pregnant women and mothers of infants are still sent to prison isn’t because there’s a lack of research on the issue. The risks and harms are well-documented: pregnant women in prison are seven times more likely to have a stillbirth, five times more likely to miss midwifery appointments due to short staffing, and twice as likely to give birth prematurely. Incarcerated Black women are at a higher risk of premature or precipitous labour. Many mothers who enter prison will be separated - either temporarily or permanently - from their babies, which disrupts both breastfeeding and infant attachment. What’s been missing, for too long, is public interest in this – and this is where the power of culture comes into its own.
‘Shattering preconceptions’
Speaking on a panel after the launch of Scenes from Lost Mothers last week, playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti explained why theatre is such a powerful method: “The beauty of drama is that it allows an audience to put themselves in another's shoes, to feel what they may never feel in their own lives,” she said. “At its best, it fosters a spirit of deep empathy which enables people to explore perspective, shatter preconceptions and start to think differently.”
The timing of the play is potent. Years in the making, the public performances have coincided with a government Sentencing Review, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers.
And the ground for what’s on the table in the Sentencing Review has been laid by Level Up’s long-running public campaign to shift the cultural and political discourse on pregnant women and mothers in prison away from improvements in prison conditions to ending their imprisonment outright. The campaign’s media strategy has relentlessly pushed the stories of formerly incarcerated women into mainstream outlets like ELLE, Metro and Sky News and called for an end to imprisonment of pregnant women. A mum and baby protest movement ‘No Births Behind Bars’ has staged several demonstrations on the doorsteps of the Ministry of Justice and Royal Courts of Justice. As a result, the dominant conversation on pregnant women and mothers in prison is no longer about improving their care – but ending their incarceration through sentencing reform.
No Births Behind Bars demonstration outside the Ministry of Defence in September 2023
And this is precisely how the issue ended up on EastEnders – an EastEnders screenwriter who had been following Level Up’s social media was horrified at the statistics we secured via FOI requests that found pregnant women in prison are twice as likely to give birth prematurely. And so when lead character Sonia Fowler was imprisoned while pregnant, she decided to put that fact in front of 5m viewers in an emotional scene where Sonia expressed her terror at the risk of going into labour in prison. In response, mums and babies from No Births Behind Bars launched a ‘Free Sonia’ campaign video, which was then shared by several MPs.
Combining research with culture is a powerful formula to change hearts and minds. Prison is a notoriously difficult topic to campaign or win public empathy on. But while many mothers will never experience prison, the shared experience of pregnancy, childbirth and the deep bond between mums and babies creates a powerful solidarity between the general public and incarcerated mothers that overcomes class differences.
However, winning hearts and minds is not enough: we need bodies. Neuroscience has already proven that emotionally engaging narratives inspire action - and the action required of audiences moved by Scenes from Lost Mothers, or from hearing about the experiences of incarcerated women in the media more broadly, is to join the campaign to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers.
We need you to show up to the next No Births Behind Bars protest outside the Ministry of Justice on Friday 28 March. We need you to sign the petition calling for an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers. If you’re a lawyer, we need you to make use of the new legal toolkit for representing pregnant women and mothers in prison.
Polling has already found that the majority of the public would rather see pregnant women and mothers kept out of prison where a community alternative is available – so if you see Scenes from Lost Mothers and find yourself in agreement, now is the time to convert those feelings into political action.
