JESSICA KENT

Jessica Kent’s life was on the brink of falling apart completely. The 23-year-old was sitting in a jail cell hundreds of miles from home, awaiting a two-year prison sentence on drug-and gun-related charges.

- DEVON PRESTON

On top of that, she was starting to feel violently ill. To Kent, it must have felt like she was hitting rock bottom, but there was more to endure as she was about to receive a bittersweet revelation.

“The girls I was in county jail with were like, ‘She’s really, really sick,’” Kent says. “They thought I was just detoxing from drugs and I thought that too. They put in a sick call and the nurse gave me a pregnancy test that I one thousand percent don’t remember taking. Then the nurse said to me in a very cold, callous way, ‘Oh, that’s what’s wrong, you’re pregnant. You can go back to the unit.’”

Kent was in a state of shock when she learned the news, and that shock quickly led to denial. She’d been on birth control, and furthermore, she couldn’t fathom what being pregnant in prison would entail. Eventually, the truth began to sink in. “I cried a lot because I knew my daughter was probably going to be taken away from me,” Kent says. “I was in Arkansas but my whole family was in New York and I knew they couldn’t afford to travel, let alone come to fight an entire DHS case. I was trying to come to terms with the fact that she was going to go to foster care and I would have to fight this case when I got out because she’s my blood.”