Letourneau Won’t Be Allowed To Be Prison Mom Officials Say Baby Will Be Placed With Family Or Be Put Into Custody Of State

Despite her wishes, Mary Kay Letourneau won’t be allowed to bring a baby back to prison after the child is born, a state Corrections Department official said Monday.

After confirming her latest pregnancy, the lawyer for the former teacher who pleaded guilty last year to raping a student told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Letourneau wants to care for the baby behind bars for a while.

“It’d be good for her frame of mind to have the baby with her for something like six months,” attorney David Gehrke said.

“She is looking forward to breast-feeding,” he added.

Letourneau, 36, called friends from prison over the weekend and told them the 14-year-old boy is the father, but the pregnancy was unplanned, the P-I reported. If true, this would be the second child the two have conceived together.

But a Corrections spokeswoman said caring for a newborn at the prison won’t be possible.

“We do not have accommodations for babies. This prison houses an adult population,” Patricia Wachtel, spokeswoman for the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy, said Monday. “Nobody has ever brought their baby back.”

Under prison policies, Wachtel said, Letourneau will have the opportunity to make arrangements for a family member to care for the child while she serves out her 7-1/2-year prison sentence - possibly longer depending on the outcome of a criminal probe of her conduct during a month of freedom earlier this year.

If she cannot find anyone to take the child, or a court determines her family is unfit, the state would place the infant in a foster home.

The baby girl she bore last May is being reared by the boy’s mother.

Gehrke said there’s little doubt the boy is the father in the latest pregnancy.

“… She was caught with him, and she announced her ongoing love for him on national TV several weeks ago,” he told The Seattle Times on Monday.

Gehrke said tests done last week at the prison showed she was about six weeks pregnant. That would indicate conception occurred roughly a week before Letourneau was arrested Feb. 3 in a car with the boy, a former student in her grade school classes.

Seattle police said the pregnancy news is just one more bit of information for their investigation. Whether Letourneau will face a new charge for contact with the victim in her child rape case will be up to King County prosecutors. Prosecutor’s spokesman Dan Donohoe said Monday it’s too early to speculate about possible additional charges.

The boy was 13 at the time of the offenses for which Letourneau is serving time.

Meanwhile, the boy’s lawyer, Robert S. Huff, indicated the boy still does not view himself as a victim.

“I don’t think it does anyone any good to think of him as somewhat … somehow damaged or (in) some kind of bad situation. I mean, the law says what the law says. He’s got to think positively, I think, and get on with his life in the best way he can,” Huff told KOMO-TV on Monday.

He said the boy’s family is “saddened” by Letourneau’s situation.

Contrary to published reports, Wachtel said the prison has no plans to build a “birthing unit,” although there has been talk of developing a program to teach parenting skills.