ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN (The Daily Whatever Press) — There’s a short list of people who belong in a labor and delivery room: the doctor, the nurses, the woman giving birth, the doula, and whoever she wants holding her hand. Nowhere on that list is a male prison guard with a fucking camera strapped to his chest.
The Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) sent one anyway. Plus a backup.
According to a federal lawsuit filed by Flood Law, when Natalie Forrest went into labor at Trinity Health Ann Arbor on March 6, 2025, two MDOC officers stood in her delivery room, one of them a man. Both had body cameras on their chests, pointed at her bed. They stayed through her cervical exams, her labor, the birth of her son, and postpartum care. And by “stayed” I mean, they recorded the whole damn thing. Now, I know some families do this by choice, to document the whole beauty of birth thing. This isn’t that.
The suit says the cameras recorded her genitals, her buttocks, and her breasts throughout.
For security, I guess?
And here’s a detail that makes the whole invasion of privacy even more grotesque: 17 days before the birth, MDOC leadership got a written warning that recording undressed women violates Michigan’s felony voyeurism law. It was in writing, and it said “felony.” But the department didn’t change its camera policy until March 24, 18 days after the birth. That’s five weeks of sitting on a felony warning, with a woman in labor in the middle of it. My teenagers respond faster to a text about the damn dirty dishes in the sink.
The suit says MDOC didn’t even need the memo. Its own policy already required body cameras to go into sleep mode anywhere a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Two officers looked at a labor and delivery room and decided it didn’t qualify. As a mother of two, I have thoughts, and every one of them starts with “what. the. fucking. fuck.”
This wasn’t a one-off, either. In January 2025, MDOC started having officers at Women’s Huron Valley, Michigan’s only prison for women, wear activated body cams during strip searches. A $500 million lawsuit filed that May, by the same firm now representing Forrest, says roughly 500 women were recorded naked during searches, in the shower, and on the toilet. The suit says most of them are survivors of sexual violence, and it claims Michigan was the only state in the country with a policy like this.
In October 2025, a Washtenaw County judge tossed that case. Under Michigan’s prison litigation law, she ruled, the women couldn’t sue because they hadn’t suffered a physical injury. MDOC said it agreed with the ruling. Flood said he’d appeal.
So the state’s position is that being filmed naked by your jailer doesn’t hurt. I’d love to watch someone make that argument about a woman in labor.
Forrest’s story gets worse. Less than 48 hours after giving birth, she was sent back to prison and before she left, the suit says, an officer strip-searched her in the hospital room. Two days postpartum, and the State of Michigan needed one more look.
Then there’s the photo. After the birth, Forrest’s mother did the most normal thing a grandmother has ever done: she tried to take a picture of her new grandson. According to the suit, an officer walked in and warned her that a single photo could cost her daughter two more years in prison. No photo was taken.
Tally that up. MDOC’s cameras: two, rolling the whole time, aimed at a woman’s genitals. Grandma’s camera: zero, because one snapshot of a newborn was a two-year offense. The state’s recording was procedure, and the family’s was contraband.
Kodak spent the entire ’80s telling us the first baby picture was the most sacred thing a family could own. MDOC kept the Kodak moment for itself.
When Forrest later filed a grievance about the recording, MDOC rejected it as untimely. Untimely. This is the agency that needed five weeks and one live birth to act on a felony warning. The irony’s so thick you could strip-search it.
Forrest was serving time for a nonviolent drug offense, and she was paroled in December 2025. Those officers weren’t foiling a jailbreak. Nobody in active labor dilated to eight centimeters and doubled-over with contractions every 60 seconds is sprinting for the parking garage — and if she had, I’d love to meet the guard who could keep up.
The lawsuit names five officers, plus MDOC Director Heidi Washington, Deputy Director Jeremy Bush, and Huron Valley Warden Jeremy Howard. Heidi and the Jeremys sounds like a band that opened for the Replacements in 1986. It’s actually the chain of command that got the warning and kept the cameras rolling. MDOC didn’t immediately respond to the Detroit Free Press. Flood’s take is that no reasonable corrections system would allow this, and MDOC did.
So, Heidi, Jeremy, and other Jeremy: you had a written warning. You had your own privacy policy. You had a calendar. You had a woman experiencing the agony and wonder of the birth of her son. At every step, you chose the fucking camera.
GenX dads spent the ’90s getting yelled at for pointing camcorders at the wrong end of the delivery bed.
But at least those guys were invited.
{Huge thanks to Linda Kowalchek for bringing this horrendous story to my attention—this one definitely needs more eyeballs on it, and I appreciate you sending it my way! - DDB}
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