A Maryland mother has filed a lawsuit alleging she was forced to give birth in a jail cell after her pleas for medical attention were ignored by staff.
Jazmin Valentine is suing Washington County, PrimeCare Medical, five nurses employed by the county and three jail staff members for the traumatic incident on 4 July 2021. In the suit filed Tuesday, Ms Valentine argues that nurses laughed at her and said she was going through drug withdrawals when she alerted them she was in labour, The Baltimore Sun first reported.
Ms Valentine, who had been arrested for an alleged parole violation, desperately screamed for help and at one point slid what she thought was her amniotic sack under the door cell to prove she was not lying, court documents show. The first-time mother claims that she only obtained medical assistance after her baby was born and that as a result of the unsanitary conditions of the cell, the newborn developed a highly resistant bacterial infection.
“Ms Valentine experienced one of the most profound and painful moments in anyone’s life, alone, on a filthy cell floor with no sanitation, no medical care, and no assistance of any kind. She had not so much as a blanket for comfort,” the lawsuit alleged.
The filing argues that Ms Valentine and her baby’s constitutional rights were violated. She is now seeking compensatory and punitive damages against the defendants for what she said was a callous disregard for her and her child’s wellbeing.
When she was arrested, Ms Valentine told deputies and medical staff present at the jail that she was mere days away from her due date, but once inside her cell, the nurses allegedly disregarded Ms Valentine’s pleas for help and said she was “not in labour” but instead going through a drug withdrawal.
At one point, a nurse allegedly told her: “You were checked out on day shift and you are not in active labour, you are withdrawing. You are not going out to the hospital.”
“What should have been one of the happiest days of her life was instead a day of terror, pain, and humiliation that continues to cause her ongoing emotional trauma. Ms Valentine was forced to deliver Baby JRB alone, with no medical care or assistance of any kind, on the filthy, cold, hard floor of a cement and steel jail cell at the Washington County Jail,” the suit reads.
Ms Valentine said she first alerted staff of her contractions around 7pm on 3 July 2021. She was then forced to walk to the door of the cell to get her medication when the nurse refused to hand them to her inside the jail or bring her to an examination room.
An inmate who heard Ms Valentine’s screams eventually called a friend who in turn called Ms Valentine’s partner. The man unsuccessfully tried to contact the jail and get a hold of Ms Valentine.
“Ms Valentine overheard a PrimeCare Medical nurse laughing while talking about Ms Valentine’s boyfriend calling the jail in an effort to obtain medical attention for the mother of his child,” Ms Valentine’s attorney wrote in the filing.
PrimeCare Medical nurses allegedly continued to laugh and told Ms Valentine that she was “playing games trying to get out of [her] cell.” The ordeal continued for six hours.
Around midnight, Ms Valentine gave birth to a baby daughter, who was only noticed by jail staff around 15 minutes after she was born. An ambulance arrived at the jail approximately 40 minutes after her birth and the mother and daughter were examined by staff at the hospital another 30 minutes later.
“Had Ms Valentine been properly cared for and hospitalized, her partner would have been there to witness the birth of his daughter,” an attorney for Ms Valenine wrote in the lawsuit.
“He would have cut the umbilical cord instead of an emergency medical technician, and Ms Valentine would have celebrated the birth of her daughter with her family instead of spending the precious first minutes of JRB’s life in fear that they would also be the last minutes of JRB’s life.”
