A mother of three has been sent to prison for ending a pregnancy and Britain is in uproar. Radio stations are rolling out condone-or-condemn debates on the woman’s choice to end her pregnancy. Feminists on Twitter are contrasting the length of her sentence with the average time men serve for rape. But, amid the outrage, aren’t we missing something startlingly obvious?

This is a chilling reminder of the state’s power to police both women’s pregnancies and their right to be mothers, and a flexing of the cruelty that the state is willing to inflict on mothers – and consequently, the children who depend on their care.

The woman’s case is a bleak indictment of reproductive justice in Britain. Reproductive justice, coined by Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice in 1994, is “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities”.

This woman’s simultaneous rights to mother her children, and decide not to have more children, have been smashed to pieces by the state’s iron fist. When a court tears a mother from her children in order to reinforce a Victorian law introduced in 1861, before women’s suffrage and the NHS, the cruelty is plain to anyone.

While her case has brought renewed calls for the government to stop criminalising women for abortion, it should also call women’s criminalisation into question more generally. The judge’s choice to imprison a woman for ending a pregnancy is sickening. However, those shocked by the fact that she is being removed from her children to serve her prison sentence will be horrified to understand that courts do this to families on a weekly basis.

Some 95% of children whose mother goes to prison end up having to leave their home. While the majority of women in England enter prison for less than six months, for things like shoplifting, studies have shown the distress even short sentences causes to mothers and children.

Prison disrupts the bond between mother and child in maddening, devastating ways. One mother in a 2017 study described how heartbreaking it was that, when her four-year-old daughter came to visit, she wasn’t allowed to sit on her knee: “Even when I explained why, my daughter said: “But Mummy, I wouldn’t do anything naughty, I promise. Shall I go and ask?”

Another mother, writing about her experiences of pregnancy and early motherhood in prison, described how she had to stop her mum bringing her newborn son to visit because it was too traumatic to say goodbye each time. As a consequence, she missed his developmental milestones: “I missed his first tooth, and I missed when he started babbling and waving his hands around.” Years later, she is racked with guilt over the impact her incarceration has had on her child.

Our anger at what another woman is now facing must extend to the thousands of mothers who are sent to prison and separated from their children, some immediately – without a chance to say goodbye, or even pick them up from nursery – and some on a permanent basis if there is nobody to look after their child.

While there are sentencing guidelines that say judges should consider the impact of a parent’s prison sentence on their dependent children, and whether this is disproportionate to the offence, shockingly, this consideration is not mandatory.

A 2007 government review found that women in prison had been driven there by poverty, domestic abuse, mental illness and substance use – and that their relationships with men often played a part, with many women coerced into crime. The famous Corston Report articulated a case for government investment in community centres to support women who are at risk of being swept up into crime – and to consider their children too.

However, since then, successive Conservative governments have done the opposite: shrunk all social support and widened the carceral net to catch more people. Women’s criminalisation, in particular, is set to increase. The Ministry of Justice predicts that the number of women in prison will rise due to government plans to employ more police officers.

This woman should not have been prosecuted – let alone imprisoned – for the Victorian “offence” of “procuring an abortion”. But before we unravel the discussion on precisely which “offences” warrant prison – and lifelong disruption to a mother’s bond with her child – we should pause and ask: what benefit do prisons bring to society anyway?

As US prison abolitionist Angela Davis neatly summarises: “Prisons do not disappear social problems. They disappear human beings.”

Instead of being drawn into the dirty politics of deservingness, we should be clear-sighted about the cruelties of the carceral system. True liberation for all means overhauling the justice system in its entirety, not just removing the ‘respectable’ women from it.

We must remain courageous in our calls to push back against criminalisation, full stop. Like thousands in Britain, this woman was sent to prison and separated from her children for something that should never have put her there.