Pregnant mother seeks SA prison release

A pregnant mother jailed for drug trafficking will be unable to properly bond with her children if she remains behind bars, her lawyer says.

Sorayah Louise Constant has applied to the full bench of South Australia's Court of Criminal Appeal in a bid to have her sentence overturned.

Constant, 31, was sentenced in April to at least 18 months in jail for breaching a previous bond and for six counts of importing a precursor drug.

Her imprisonment means she will be forced to relinquish her newborn daughter, due in October, as little as 24 hours after giving birth.

She will also be limited to about two hours' contact a week with her 20-month-old daughter throughout her prison term.

Both children will live with their father.

Defence lawyer Heather Stokes on Wednesday said there were exceptional circumstances in Constant's case which meant she should have received a more lenient sentence.

She also took aim at the state government for failing to allow mothers to keep young children with them behind bars, saying such facilities were available in every other state except for Tasmania.

"The bottom line is we would not be having this argument if she'd been sentenced in any other (mainland) state," Ms Stokes said.

"This woman has been rehabilitated. Where does that fit into the scheme of things?"

Ms Stokes said she feared Constant would not have the opportunity to properly bond with her children, who risked suffering a dysfunctional upbringing and themselves winding up before the courts.

But commonwealth prosecutor Anne Barnett said the sentencing judge had taken Constant's personal circumstances into consideration and fixed an appropriately lenient non-parole period.

Constant's imprisonment was an "unavoidable consequence" of her serious offending, Ms Barnett added.

The appeal comes weeks after another judge rejected an earlier challenge against the sentence.

Justices Kevin Nicholson, David Lovell and Martin Hinton will hand down their decision on July 29.