This woman worked in a men’s maximum security prison whilst she was seven months pregnant.
Bella Aguilar, a former prison maintenance supervisor, found her pregnancy challenging and bad for her mental health whilst working in the prison.
In the latter stages of her pregnancy, she says that she tried to hide her bump as she started to gain a lot of attention and felt uncomfortable with the extra eyes on her.
Bella, from California, US, said: “It’s just not a very happy place to work at. I mean, we all know why – it’s a prison.
“So I felt like, sometimes when you’re pregnant, you can already feel a bit depressed because you’re not feeling like yourself.
“Once I was continuing to show bigger and bigger, we kind of tried to avoid inmate contact as much as possible, but it still sometimes had to happen.
“For about two days a week, I would see them [inmates] and I would go into a factory that had about 65 inmates in that factory.
“There’s plenty of times where we would have to walk the yard to get to those areas.”
Bella has been working in a prison since she was 20 years old, but during her second pregnancy, she found it hard to enjoy work.
While she says that the inmates never caused any negative experiences or disrespect for her, it still felt like an odd experience for Bella and she even tried to hide her pregnancy at some points to avoid the attention.
Even if the weather was warm, Bella would still sometimes opt for baggy clothes and jackets to hide her baby bump from the inmates.
However, once she could not hide it anymore she decided to stop any contact with them.
Bella continued working at the prison until she was eight months pregnant when she decided that she also wanted to change career and focus on her content-creating and beauty dream.
She said: “Working in a place like that, for me, personally was extremely depressing and hard on my mental health and now that I don’t work there, I can say I’m mentally so much happier.
“The only concerning part was that no one else was pregnant.
“So you’re gonna get more attention than normal just being a female but I never had any disrespect, any negative experiences with inmates towards me being pregnant at all.”
“It’s not something you see often. I’m very little, I’m five foot two, and I look very young.
“So just being a young little girl that’s pregnant inside of a men’s prison, it’s just going to bring some type of eyes to you, at least for a moment.”
Bella was the maintenance supervisor and the health and safety coordinator for the prison and she oversaw the maintenance and labour of all machinery.
“I wouldn’t say that I felt threatened at all.
“A lot of the time, the inmate culture in California is to be more protective of women. But, it’s just an odd feeling.
“We all know that being in a prison in general, there’s always a chance of danger.
“Regardless, it is filled with prisoners who have done horrible things.”