Mothers in Prison: Why Is the Philippines Detaining Pregnant Women in Congested, Poorly Run Jails?

By Rights Report Philippines · March 18, 2026 · 11 min read ·

A new policy brief from the University of the Philippines argues that jailing pregnant women puts mothers and babies at serious risk — and that the country already has the legal tools to do better. The question is why are those tools unused?

HUNDREDS of pregnant women pass through Philippine prisons and jails every year, many of them held in facilities so overcrowded that basic prenatal care is all but impossible. A policy brief published in February by the UP Center for Women’s and Gender Studies is now pushing the government to stop treating imprisonment as the default for pregnant women and to embrace alternatives already available under Philippine and international law.

The brief, titled Should We Imprison Pregnant Women? and authored by five researchers from UP Manila and UP Diliman, documents a detention system in crisis.

Philippine facilities regularly operate at 300 to 400 percent of their intended capacity. Women made up 9.8 percent of the total prison population in 2021 — more than 16,000 individuals — a share that exceeds the global average. Between 300 and 600 of those women are pregnant at any given time, according to government data cited in the brief.

The surge in incarcerated women is closely tied to the Philippines’ Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002, or Republic Act 9165, which criminalized a wide range of drug-related offenses. Researchers note that drug enforcement between 2016 and 2018 drove a sharp increase in women entering detention — and that punitive drug laws globally, including in the Philippines, have hit women harder than men. The Philippine prison population rose from around 95,000 to more than 165,000 between 2015 and 2021, largely on account of drug-related cases.

A System Built for Men, Pushed Far Beyond Its Limits

To understand what pregnancy looks like inside a Philippine jail, it helps to understand what the jail itself looks like.

With an overall congestion rate for pre-trial jails of around 322 percent, the Philippines sits among the world’s most congested prison systems, in the company of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Uganda. According to UN News and UNODC reporting, at the Manila City Jail, prisoners curl up on their sides in cramped dormitories, often using their immediate neighbor as a pillow, with no mattress or bed in sight. One long-term detainee described sleeping “in rows of maybe 200 to the end of the dormitory” where “it’s difficult to move.”

A Commission on Audit report found that nearly 70 percent of Philippine jail facilities are congested, with overcrowding rates reaching as high as 2,141 percent in some cases. At a National Decongestion Summit, Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo disclosed that the occupancy rate in some jails has gone as high as 2,748 percent of their standard capacity.

As of May 2025, the 426 Bureau of Jail Management and Penology-managed jails were running at an average of nearly three times their intended capacity — an improvement from a year earlier, but far from adequate, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In many detention cells, the lack of space forces detainees to sleep sitting or even standing, with many resorting to discarded cardboard boxes or makeshift hammocks attached to ceilings. Sanitation is dire, with toilet facilities that either do not exist or are poorly maintained — in one cell documented by the Commission on Human Rights, a hole connected directly to sewage served as the only toilet.

In overcrowded jails, detainees fight for sleeping space and access to water, toilets, and medical care, while cramped and poorly ventilated conditions accelerate the spread of illness among inmates, jail staff, and visitors alike. The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted that tuberculosis is about 100 times more prevalent in detention facilities than in the general community — a standing threat to any pregnant woman whose immune system is already under strain.

In 2024, the BJMP employed just 19 doctors, 60 paramedical technicians, and 36 pharmacists for more than 127,000 incarcerated people, according to a Prison Insider country profile. That works out to roughly one doctor for every 6,700 detainees.

What Prison Does to Pregnant Women

For pregnant women, all of this is compounded. The policy brief draws on both international research and interviews with women detained in Philippine facilities, and what it describes is a system structurally unable to handle pregnancy.

Overcrowded cells with poor ventilation and scarce health workers contribute to higher rates of low birth weight, preterm birth, and miscarriage among incarcerated mothers. Anxiety and depression among pregnant women in detention are significantly higher than among the broader female prison population.

At the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong, which houses around 3,100 women in a facility meant for 1,000, only one doctor and 13 nurses tend to the entire population — with no obstetricians, gynecologists, or midwives on staff. The facility shares a budget line with New Bilibid Prison, and analysts have noted that the men’s institution — housing roughly 10 times as many people — almost certainly absorbs the greater share of funding.

The food situation is equally grim. The government allocates just P70 per day for each detainee’s meals and P15 for medical needs — amounts that have remained unchanged since 2022 despite rising prices. That works out to about P23.33 per meal. Pregnant and breastfeeding women have higher nutritional needs, but the allocation does not account for this — and babies, who need diapers, clothing, and hygiene products, are not classified as detainees and receive no budget allocation at all.

The BJMP’s P15-per-day medical budget is especially inadequate for women, who need prenatal and postnatal care in addition to general health services, as PCIJ reported. Prenatal services, in many facilities, are simply absent.

As recently as 2022, the Commission on Human Rights found that not all prisons had medical services for pregnant women. Quezon City Jail, for one, was failing to offer monthly prenatal check-ups even though it had a standing agreement with a nearby hospital to do so, according to Prison Insider. A Philippine study cited in the UP policy brief found that all 18 women interviewed said available prenatal care failed to meet their needs — some received only a single prenatal visit during their entire pregnancy.

“I had a miscarriage. No idea I was a high-risk mother,” one detained woman was quoted as saying in the brief. Another said: “In my previous pregnancies outside, I received at least three prenatal visits, but here, I got only one prenatal care visit.”

Only 37 out of 84 women’s dormitories in the country are equipped with a breastfeeding room, indicating very limited access to maternal health services even after childbirth, according to the CHR.

The consequences extend beyond the mother and child. When mothers are imprisoned, other children in the family are often displaced, perpetuating what the brief calls “an intergenerational cycle of poverty and potential criminality.” From a financial standpoint, too, the government pays more: managing a pregnant detainee, including hospital escorts and medical security, costs significantly more than community-based monitoring.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Maria Filomena Singh, who chairs the court’s technical working group on decongestion and has made repeated visits to women’s jails, put it simply in a UN News interview: “These are mothers, these are daughters, these are wives and I relate to them. We cannot call ourselves a just and humane society if there are people living like this among us.”

Why Is This a Human Rights Violation?

The conditions described in the policy brief are not merely a public health failure. They represent specific, documented breaches of legal obligations the Philippines has freely assumed — both at home and on the world stage.

On the international level, the Philippines has ratified four treaties that bear directly on this issue. It signed on to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1986, which under Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, and under Article 10 requires that all persons deprived of liberty be treated with humanity and dignity. Detaining pregnant women in facilities without adequate prenatal care, nutrition, or sanitation — in some cases exposing them to tuberculosis and other communicable diseases — tests the outer limits of what those provisions allow.

The Philippines also acceded in 1986 to the Convention Against Torture (CAT), which requires the state to prevent cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in any place of detention — a standard the UN Committee Against Torture has explicitly applied to prison overcrowding and reproductive health in the Philippine context.

Under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), ratified in 1981, the state is obligated to ensure that women are not discriminated against in access to health care — an obligation being violated every time a pregnant detainee goes without prenatal check-ups that any woman outside prison walls could walk into a health center and receive.

And as a party since 1990 to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Philippines is bound to prioritize the best interests of the child — a standard plainly at odds with exposing newborns to the conditions documented in this brief.

The UN Bangkok Rules, which the Philippines adopted, go further still: they explicitly require that non-custodial sentences be the preferred option for pregnant women and women with dependent children wherever the nature of the offense allows it. That preference has no binding legal counterpart in Philippine statute.

Domestically, the Magna Carta of Women (Republic Act 9710) mandates the humane treatment of women in state custody, and the 1987 Philippine Constitution guarantees all persons deprived of liberty the right to be treated with dignity. These protections exist on paper. What the UP researchers document is the space between that paper and the reality inside the country’s jails and prisons.

Who Is Responsible?

The failures described in this brief are not caused by a single institution — they are the result of multiple arms of government not doing what the law already requires of them, or stopping short of what the law has yet to require.

Congress carries the most foundational responsibility. There is currently no Philippine law that compels courts to treat pregnancy as a sentencing consideration, and no statute that formally mandates non-custodial alternatives for pregnant defendants. Pending bills have addressed the issue only partially. Until legislators close this gap, every other reform remains discretionary.

The courts bear direct responsibility for the fates of individual pregnant women at each stage of their cases. Judges already have the legal authority to grant probation, parole, house arrest, and community service — tools that the Bangkok Rules say should be the default, not the exception, for this population. That they are used inconsistently, and without any binding instruction to prioritize them for pregnant defendants, reflects a gap in both judicial culture and judicial guidance.

The Department of Justice, which oversees both the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) and the prosecution service, is responsible for conditions inside national prisons and for the policy environment in which prosecutorial decisions are made. The fact that pregnant women are routinely detained for non-violent, drug-related, or property offenses — often as pretrial detainees awaiting resolution of their cases for years — reflects prosecutorial and administrative choices, not just legislative ones.

The Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, which manages city and municipal jails where many of the worst conditions exist, is required under its own operating manuals to provide medical examinations to every detainee upon admission — a standard that, by its own admission, is not consistently followed. It also operates under the December 2025 Joint Memorandum Circular on gender-responsive detention services, which it is now legally bound to implement.

Local government units are not off the hook either. Under the 1991 Local Government Code, health and social welfare services are devolved responsibilities. When pregnant women are held in local jails without access to prenatal care, the city or municipality where that jail sits shares the accountability.

The Philippine Commission on Women has a monitoring mandate over gender-responsive policies in government — including in detention. Its own data, via the Commission on Human Rights, has documented the deficiencies. That documentation has not yet produced the systemic change it warrants.

What Needs to Be Done?

The UP researchers lay out a three-part blueprint — and beyond it, a set of international accountability mechanisms that civil society and advocates can use to press the government to act.

First, institutionalize non-custodial alternatives. Congress should pass a law formally designating house arrest, electronic monitoring, deferred sentencing, and community service as the preferred options for pregnant women convicted of non-heinous crimes. This is not a novel idea — Brazil, Ukraine, Georgia, Ecuador, and China have all enacted versions of it. Until the Philippines does the same, the decision rests entirely on individual judges, with no obligation to reach the humane outcome. The Department of Justice should also actively advocate house arrest as a primary option, giving pregnant women access to local health centers, the ability to maintain family ties, and the chance to prepare for childbirth outside a cell.

Second, amend the Community Service Act. The implementing rules of Republic Act 11362 should be revised to explicitly identify pregnancy as a factor that tilts judicial discretion toward community service over imprisonment, even for offenses slightly above the minimum threshold for jail time. The law already gives courts this discretion. The fix is making pregnancy a reason they are expected to use it.

Third, upgrade conditions where incarceration is unavoidable. For women convicted of violent crimes where detention cannot be avoided, facilities must meet the standards already set by BJMP Memorandum Circular No. 122 and the BuCor Manual — including dedicated mother-and-baby units, adequate nutrition for pregnant and breastfeeding women, and qualified maternal health staff. The Bureau of Corrections Director General acknowledged this gap himself as recently as August 2024, when he called for the appointment of an OB-GYN at the Correctional Institution for Women — a facility that, as of that date, had none.

The Philippines, as the researchers write, already has the legal foundation to do what international standards require. What it lacks is the political will to make those protections binding rather than optional. (Rights Report Philippines)

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