Alabama jail staff didn’t help when she went into labor — other inmates did, lawsuit says - NBC News

Three days after Tiffany McElroy was taken to an Alabama jail just north of the Florida state line, she felt her water break.

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Her baby was coming several weeks early, and McElroy, 26, would later learn she was experiencing a pregnancy complication that could deteriorate into sepsis. She told a guard that her water had broken, expecting her to call an ambulance or take her to a hospital.

Instead, according to a federal lawsuit filed in the Middle District of Alabama, another guard who checked on her that morning in May 2024 accused her of urinating on herself and told her to go back to her cell. Over the next 24 hours, the complaint alleges, McElroy was at the mercy of jail staff members who failed to call 911 as other inmates beat their cell windows and tables, begging for help.

Health professionals, according to the lawsuit, provided McElroy with only a diaper and Tylenol as pain racked her body and she feared for her baby.

“Just — it was such a strong sense of fear,” McElroy, now 28, said in an interview with NBC News. “It just overtook me, like I was completely out of it.”

A fellow inmate ultimately helped McElroy as she pushed out a baby girl who wasn’t breathing, according to the lawsuit. Two women in her pod, the complaint says, worked to resuscitate the newborn, sucking mucus from her mouth and rubbing her until she began to cry.

The filing alleges that what happened that day was the result of multiple failures in the Houston County Jail, including a system in which budget-wary local officials prioritized cost savings over ensuring adequate care for inmates. Twenty defendants — including guards on duty while McElroy was in labor, a nurse, a physician’s assistant and the county sheriff, who runs the jail — are named in the complaint and accused of violating her constitutional rights.

“Ms. McElroy was basically being tortured over the course of hours, and that should really make all of the hairs stand up on everybody’s necks, regardless of what people think about people who are incarcerated,” Karen Thompson, the legal director for Pregnancy Justice, which is representing McElroy in the suit alongside the Southern Poverty Law Center, told NBC News. “I think we can all agree this is not the way to treat a pregnant person, and this most certainly is not the way to treat someone in labor and delivery.”

The Houston County Sheriff’s Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Kathy Youngblood, a former deputy at the jail and one of the defendants in the lawsuit, called the incident “barbaric” in an interview with NBC News.

“I tried to help her, but I was told I was going to be fired if I did help her, so I could not assist,” Youngblood said.

Brandon Shoupe, the Houston County Commission chairman, declined to comment, citing the pending legal matter.

The lawsuit paints a picture of dangerous gaps in pregnancy and postpartum care that advocates say loom over those incarcerated in Alabama, which leads the nation in pregnancy criminalization cases. Last year, officials in Etowah County, north of Houston County, settled a lawsuit also brought by Pregnancy Justice on behalf of a woman who gave birth alone in a jail shower.

McElroy was arrested after she was accused of endangering her unborn child through substance use, a felony. Court records show she later pleaded guilty. She said she was released from custody last year.

Alabama’s chemical endangerment law was initially meant to target offenders exposing children to dangerous chemicals in meth cook houses, but the state’s Supreme Court has interpreted the law to also apply to pregnant women who use drugs, a practice opposed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

From 2022 to 2024, at least 192 people in Alabama were charged with pregnancy-related crimes, according to a report from Pregnancy Justice. Such arrests, according to Pregnancy Justice, are tied to the concept of fetal personhood, which extends legal rights to fetuses and embryos.