OTTAWA – Advocates for female inmates are calling for an inquiry after a woman gave birth to premature baby on the floor of an Ottawa jail without the presence of a doctor.
Twenty-six-year-old Julie Bilotta spent hours in pain and crying for help before she delivered a baby boy on Sept. 29 in a segregation cell of the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre.
“She was screaming and yelling and the inmates were screaming and yelling,” Bilotta’s mother Kim Hurtubise told Global News. “By the time the ambulance got there, the baby was halfway out of her, hanging halfway out of her, feet first.”
The “horror” has an organization that advocates for the rights of female inmates calling on the provincial government for a sweeping inquiry into the state of health care behind bars.
“I wasn’t shocked there were issues around health care in institutions, but this was a new one for me,” said Bryone Baxter, executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society. “It was an extreme and egregious example of what I see is a continuum of a systemic issue.”
The risky breech birth came after an eight-months pregnant Bilotta attempted in vain to convince staff she was in labour, according to Hurtubise and Baxter.
The women allege Bilotta was brushed off twice by nurses who blamed her pain on indigestion and later on false labour, before moving her into a segregated cell when she refused to stop screaming for help.
But the labour was real and baby Gionni entered the world just hours later in a bloody cell into the hands of paramedics.
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“My daughter almost bled to death,” Hurtubise said. “She had to have a blood transfusion.”
Mother and baby were rushed to the hospital where Bilotta received a blood transfusion and premature Gionni was placed in an incubator. He was released from hospital on Wednesday and is being cared for by his grandmother in Cornwall, Ont., about 100 kilometres southeast of Ottawa.
Baxter said the situation could have ended in tragedy.
“The fact that you are having a breach birth, it’s your first birth without your doctor present put both the baby’s life and Julie’s life in danger,” she said.
Inmates are entitled to the same level of health care they would receive outside of jail. Baxter said in this case that care should have included a doctor, an internal exam, pain relievers and potentially a C-section.
Baxter said she has already helped Bilotta lodge a complaint with the provincial ombudsman and the Ontario College of Nurses. The province said it has already opened an investigation into what happened.
Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Service Madeleine Meilleur, who worked as a delivery nurse for 14 years, said the situation was not ideal, but that deliveries don’t always go as planned.
“We are investigating the case and want to make sure this does not happen again and to see if the procedures were followed,” she said.
Now the focus of Baxter and Bilotta’s lawyer Don Johnson is to reunite Gionni with his mother, who is still in jail pending trial on drug and fraud charges and breach of conditions.
“She desperately wants to be with her baby. She wants to hold him,” Baxter said. “She really feels not only for the circumstances she was put under, but the circumstance under which he entered the world. It’s really cutting her up.”
Johnson said he has contacted prosecutors and is waiting to hear whether they will allow a new bail hearing given the new circumstances. He and Baxter are requesting Bilotta be allowed out on bail and be held at an Elizabeth Fry Society facility where she could be with her baby – whom she has not yet held.
Johnson said he made a similar proposal – which was rejected – during the original bail hearing on Sept. 26, requesting Bilotta stay at a women’s shelter directly across the street from a hospital in Winchester, Ont.
If prosecutors reject the request, Gionni could be walking and talking before his mother actually gets to hold him as her trial date is set for next year.
Until then, any contact will be made through the glass of the provincial institution.
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