Two sides of the Tomscoll story

THE courtroom fell silent last Tuesday as prison detainee Tamara Player Tomscoll tearfully related the heart rending tale of how she gave birth on the hard floor of Bomana jail.
The pretty mother, decked out in pink with hair neatly combed back, carried her 10 months old girl, Paula, complete with a white teddy bear.
The effect was, perhaps as designed, instant indignation and even anger at a system that seemed to have failed to provide basic human needs.
Who, but the most unfeeling person, would fail to condemn the inhuman treatment she alleged had been given her.
We mention “alleged” now, in hindsight, because a different story has emerged from the Correctional Services. She told the court: “I have given birth to my baby on the bare floor of my cell … there are no medical staff to treat us or my baby when it is sick.”
Last Friday, acting CS Commissioner Henry Wavik gave a different picture.
Wavik said when Tomscoll started feeling labour pains, she was actually transported to a private medical clinic, that she did not go into labour there but that the doctor gave her medication to induce the birth and, when that took too long, she was escorted back to the jail. There, she gave birth – on a bed, we have been told, and with a trained midwife and nurse in attendance.
Which of the two stories are we to believe?
We feel certain while we probe for further details on this case, that both stories are not entirely accurate, that there is a certain desire by the prisoner to gain the sympathy and support of the court and the people as there is a desire by the CS to defend its standards and reputation.
What we can say at this juncture is that Tamara Player Tomscoll gambled with much of her civil liberties when she accepted K127,000, it being the proceeds of the Madang bank robbery. She lost that bet when the law caught up with her.
That was her choice and she neither now deserves nor ought to attempt to obtain sympathy from the public. Whatever judgment the court passes comes with the territory, so to speak. You make your bed, you must lie in it.
That said, the Correctional Services Act 1995 and the accompanying regulations are quite clear on treatment and services for detainees.
Section 141 of the law states quite categorically that “a detainee has a right to reasonable medical care and treatment consistent with community standards and necessary for preservation of health”, including the right to “but, at the expense of the detainee, a private medical practitioner”.
The law also compels the commissioner to appoint a medical practitioner who should be available for health checks on detainees on a regular basis.
In relation to children born to detainees, Regulation No.97 provides for arrangements to be made, wherever practical, for the children of detainees to be born outside the correctional institution.
When the commissioner receives a request for the care of a child living in a jail, the commissioner is compelled to assess whether or not it is appropriate and healthy for a child to remain in the jail, to further assess whether a mother is able to provide for the welfare of the child, to prepare a report on each case and present it to the director of child welfare in the Community Development Department.
The commissioner is further compelled to review the case of a child annually and assess whether or not the continued placement of the child in jail is in the child’s best interest and not detrimental to the security of the correctional facility.
The law and guidelines appear “user” friendly.
There, then, should be no problem with providing for the child if the CS officers are doing what they are compelled to do by law.
The law recognises the innocence of the child and, indeed, provides for there to be no record of it having any association with this accident of birth for its future by requiring that the fact it was born in a jail be stricken from the birth certificate. It provides for the child’s welfare and, for that, of the mother.
But we must remember that there are thousands of “free” women’s children born in far worse conditions than on the hard, sheltered floor of a jail.
They have no medically trained attendants. Often, both mother and child die. There is no law or guideline that spells out word for word how to care for these mothers and children.
Looked at from that broader perspective in the unglamorous landscape of the health of our mothers and children, Tomscoll brought this on herself and her child.
Most of the “free” mothers do not.