Policy trends show that pregnant women have been detained in ICE facilities since as early as 2015. As the laws and policies have continued to shift, pregnant women have become more exposed to being detained. Executive Order 13768 made by former President Donald Trump effectively removed all protections against being detained for pregnant women. While the previous policy exempted pregnant women from being detained aside from in extraordinary cases, this executive order puts women at increased risk of being detained while pregnant. The Trump Administration's goal of protecting the American people and promoting national security puts women in a position in which their health status is no longer seen as a detention exemption. There is almost no published work on this topic. It is extremely under-researched and there is an urgent need for more academic, legal, and medical research on the impacts of detaining pregnant women. This paper functions to fill a very pressing research gap in order to highlight the experiences of pregnant women in detention centers and the health outcomes they face as a result of their status as detainees. I argue that detaining pregnant women is a form of gendered violence as it puts them at increased risk of maternal health complications, such as preterm birth, low birth weight, and more. While more women migrate to the United States, the laws and policies regarding detaining pregnant women are often contradictory and it is difficult to ascertain the true number of pregnant women in detention centers. In this paper, I examine the preceding factors to female migration, the climate of detention in the United States, the policies regarding pregnancy, and the outcomes that women experience.

This research highlights the experiences of mothers diagnosed with preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome through qualitative data analysis of social media comments. I collected 300 comments from the Instagram accounts @preeclampsia.foundation and @HELLPsyndrome. The two overarching themes found were: (1) Experiences with maternal healthcare and (2) Virtual Healing Spaces. These Instagram accounts represented unique communities that provide support and information that cannot be found elsewhere. These findings address gaps in the literature on maternal experience with preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome and identify directions for further research. The conclusions drawn add to current research that points to the need for reform in maternal healthcare.

The goal of this thesis was to better understand the lived experiences of an ethnically and linguistically diverse sample of mothers who gave birth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pregnant women experience higher risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes compared to non-pregnant women. Yet the impact on women’s psychosocial wellbeing may be just as problematic, given new mothers’ increased risk for depression postpartum coupled with the loss of multiple forms of support so critical during the postpartum period and new stressors created by the pandemic. A universal testing strategy at a Labor & Delivery Unit at a hospital in the Southwestern U.S early in the pandemic identified that Communities of Color – particularly resettled refugee women - experienced COVID-19 infection at higher rates compared to White women. Therefore, this study investigates stressors and coping strategies specific to the pregnancy, birth, and postpartum periods in a linguistically diverse sample of 140 women (Swahili n=18 , Kinyarwanda n=18 , Burmese n=13, Arabic=11, Spanish n=35, English n=45) who gave birth between May and December 2020. Across groups, the most severe health stressor was fear of self or infant contracting COVID-19, leading to strict adherence to prevention measures among women, and feelings of social isolation. This was followed by anxiety for lack of social support at birth, and, in some women, management of other health concerns related to increased risk for adverse pregnancy or severe COVID-19 outcomes. Coping strategies included looking to religion or spirituality for comfort, as well as spending more time with family. This analysis of how the pandemic affected women’s psychosocial wellbeing from pregnancy to postpartum informs adaptation of care for linguistically and ethnically minoritized groups and their infants.