General
In late March, police in southern Georgia arrested a 24-year-old woman who had a miscarriage after a witness reported seeing her place the fetal remains in a dumpster.
The coroner in Tift County determined it was a 19-week fetus from a naturally occurring miscarriage, but some legal experts consider the arrest a bellwether for the criminal suspicion that surrounds pregnancy loss in many states in post-Roe America.
The Marshall Project previously examined how the way a person handles a pregnancy loss — and where it occurs — can mean the difference between a private medical issue and a criminal charge.
Nationally, federal data shows that about 20% of pregnancies end in a loss, but only a small number are investigated as crimes. In several states, a positive drug test after a pregnancy loss can result in criminal charges for the mother, and even prison time.
Prosecutions related to pregnancy appear to have increased since the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, according to Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for the legal rights of pregnant people. In the first year after the Dobbs decision — from June 2022 to June 2023 — there were at least 210 pregnancy-related prosecutions, researchers for the group found.
Here are some states where miscarriages and stillbirths have been investigated by the criminal legal system in recent years:
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- California
- Georgia
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- South Carolina
Alabama
Alabama has a broad “chemical endangerment of a child” law allowing prosecutors to charge someone for drug use during any part of a pregnancy, whether the mother delivers a stillborn fetus or a healthy newborn.
Our 2022 investigation with AL.com found that more than 20 women had been prosecuted after a miscarriage or stillbirth in Alabama. Some of the harshest sentences resulted in cases where a fetus was stillborn and the woman went to trial.
The Pregnancy Justice report examining nationwide prosecutions related to conduct associated with pregnancy, pregnancy loss or birth in the first year after the Dobbs ruling found that nearly half of the cases came from Alabama.
Arkansas
Arkansas is among several states that still make it a crime to “conceal” a birth or stillbirth. Such laws date back to the 17th century, and were intended to shame and accuse women of crimes if they were pregnant and unmarried.
In 2015, Annie Bynum walked into a hospital with a plastic bag containing the remains of her stillborn fetus and ended up going to jail — and eventually prison. She was accused under the concealment law.
A jury originally convicted and sentenced Bynum to six years in prison. Later, an appeals court ruled that the jury shouldn’t have been allowed to hear evidence that Bynum ingested medications to induce labor before the stillbirth or had previously had abortions — because the charge was that she had concealed the pregnancy, not tried to end it. While pregnant, Bynum had planned to quietly let a friend adopt the baby, and she eventually pleaded guilty to a legal violation for the attempted adoption.
California
In 2022, the state passed a law banning investigations and prosecutions of pregnancy loss.
But prior to that law, at least two California women had already served time in jail and prison for stillbirths that prosecutors had alleged were related to drug use.
Adora Perez had served nearly four years of an 11-year sentence before a judge ruled her plea agreement — to a charge of voluntary manslaughter of a fetus — was unlawful, and overturned her conviction in 2022.
That only happened after the case of then-26-year-old Chelsea Becker garnered international outrage. Becker was charged with “murder of a human fetus” in 2019, but the case was dismissed in 2021 and led to Perez’s case getting a second look. Anger about the prosecutions of both women led to the change in state law, to avoid punishing “people who suffer the loss of their pregnancy.”
Georgia
At least one woman who had a miscarriage has been arrested under a state law that makes it a crime to conceal a dead body, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
On March 20, police in Tifton, Georgia, issued a press release announcing that a dead fetus had been found in a dumpster at an apartment complex, after an ambulance was called for a woman who was found bleeding and unconscious. The next day, the Tifton Police Department announced it had arrested the woman who miscarried that fetus, accusing her of one count of concealing the death of another person and one count of abandonment of a dead body.
It’s unclear whether prosecutors in Tifton will pursue the criminal charges despite the coroner’s ruling that the miscarriage was naturally occurring.
Ohio
Ohio’s abuse of a corpse law allows a fairly broad interpretation, if applied to fetal remains: “No person, except as authorized by law, shall treat a human corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable community sensibilities.”
In 2023 in Warren, Ohio, Brittany Watts was arrested and charged with abuse of a corpse after experiencing a miscarriage at home in her toilet. She had been to a hospital prior to her miscarriage but left when she felt she was getting inadequate treatment, according to news reports. When she went back to the hospital after her miscarriage, a nurse called police and reported that Watts had given birth at home and did not want the baby — an assertion Watts’ lawyer denied. A grand jury declined to move forward with the criminal case in 2024.
Earlier this year, Watts filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging medical professionals conspired with a police officer to fabricate criminal charges against her.
Oklahoma
Criminal charges related to drug use while pregnant — in cases of pregnancy loss or infants born healthy — have become increasingly common in recent years in Oklahoma.
Kathryn Green gave birth to a stillborn baby in Enid, Oklahoma, in 2017. She was struggling with meth addiction at the time and scared. She cleaned her stillborn son’s body, wrapped him in a blanket and put him in a box. Police later found the remains in the trash and arrested her. Prosecutors initially charged her with second-degree murder, alleging that the stillbirth happened because of “meth toxicity.” But medical tests later showed otherwise: Green’s stillborn son had an infection that had caused his death, records show.
In 2022, Green decided to enter an Alford plea — a guilty plea in which the defendant maintains innocence. At her sentencing hearing, a judge said he wasn’t convinced that prosecutors had proven Green willfully and knowingly harmed her baby by using methamphetamine while pregnant, but he was bothered by her “lack of maternal instinct.”
South Carolina
South Carolina was the first state to prosecute a woman for a stillbirth allegedly due to drug use. In 2001, Regina McKnight was sentenced to 12 years in prison for giving birth to a stillborn baby who tested positive for cocaine. McKnight served eight years before the state Supreme Court overturned her conviction, in part because her trial lawyer didn’t present witnesses to challenge prosecutors’ claim that her drug use definitively caused the stillbirth.
The state charged at least 200 women between 2006 and 2021 with unlawful neglect of a child or homicide by child abuse for alleged perinatal drug use.
In March 2023, a college student in Orangeburg, South Carolina, named Amari Marsh went from miscarrying a fetus in her bathroom to being investigated for a homicide. She told investigators she didn’t realize she was pregnant until she went to an ER with severe pain. She left the hospital and miscarried later in a toilet at home (which medical experts say is common). Her boyfriend at the time called 911. Police became suspicious that she may have sought to end the pregnancy or not called 911 fast enough, records show. She was jailed and accused of homicide by child abuse — before the fetus was autopsied.
An autopsy showed later that the fetus died of natural causes due to an infection that Marsh was unaware of, her lawyer said. In South Carolina, police can arrest someone on a criminal complaint without approval from local prosecutors (called solicitors). After a grand jury reviewed all of the evidence in the case, the charges against Marsh were dismissed.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
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