On March 20, in response to a 911 call in Tipton, Georgia, emergency medical services found a 24-year-old woman unconscious and bleeding in her apartment. They determined she had suffered a miscarriage and transported her to a hospital for treatment.
The next day, after a witness said the woman had placed the fetal remains in a bag and placed the bag in a dumpster, Tipton police announced she had been arrested, taken into custody by the local sheriff, and charged with concealing the death of another person and abandonment of a dead body.
After the coroner determined she had suffered a “natural miscarriage,” prosecutors dismissed the charges two weeks later, explaining in a press release that the charges did not apply because the 19-week fetus had not been born alive.
Georgia lawmakers are among those citing the case as a example of an alarming trend—a growing number of women facing criminal prosecutions related to pregnancy loss.
“Every woman of reproductive age in Georgia who miscarries beyond the six-week marker of Georgia’s law can now be criminalized for a miscarriage,” Georgia state Sen. Sally Harrell argued during a hearing last week.
“This is terrifying for women of reproductive age in Georgia,” she said.
About 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, usually in the first trimester, according to the Mayo Clinic. For all pregnancies, including those where the person may not know about the pregnancy, estimates are that 30% to 50% end in miscarriage.
That’s a lot of people at risk of criminal prosecution for mishandling a pregnancy loss.
As Ms. Harrell noted, a person suffering a miscarriage at eight weeks could be subjected to the same charges as the woman in Tipton even though the fetus was only “the size of a bean.”
Provisions like Georgia’s have proliferated since the Supreme Court in Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, experts told NBC News. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 27 bills giving legal rights to fetuses had been introduced in the first three months of this year alone.
In the first year after Dobbs, according to a 2024 report from Pregnancy Justice, at least 210 pregnant people faced criminal charges for conduct associated with pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth—the highest number in a single year since researchers began tracking prosecutions. Nearly half of these prosecutions were in Alabama, researchers found.
Women of color, lower-income women, and women struggling with substance use are especially vulnerable, experts told NBC News.
The Marshall Project reports that states where miscarriages and stillbirths have been investigated as crimes in recent years include Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.
In 2015, Annie Bynum took the remains of her stillborn fetus to the hospital and was arrested under a 17th-century Arkansas law making it a crime to “conceal” a birth or stillbirth. A jury convicted and sentenced her to six years in prison. Three years later, her conviction was reversed on appeal, according to the Marshall Project.
In California, the Marshall Project reports, outrage about the prosecution of 26-year-old Chelsea Becker for “murder of a human fetus” after her pregnancy ended in a stillbirth led to the reversal of Adora Perez’s conviction on similar charges after she spent nearly four years in prison. The cases spurred lawmakers to ban such prosecutions in 2022 to avoid punishing “people who suffer the loss of their pregnancy.”
And in 2023, Brittany Watts was arrested and charged with abuse of a corpse in Ohio after she suffered a miscarriage at home in her toilet, according to the Marshall Project. The charges were later dropped.
In January, Ms. Watts filed a lawsuit against the city and hospital where she went for treatment following her miscarriage, NBC News reports. She told NBC News she feared that other women would be arrested after suffering a miscarriage.
“As the old saying goes,” she said, “‘History repeats itself.’”