A Woman Spent 2 Nights In Jail After She Miscarried. Advocates Say It's Only The Beginning.

After a Georgia woman was arrested for allegedly throwing away fetal remains from her miscarriage, advocates and a state lawmaker are sounding the alarm that her case shows a bleak reality for American women. Tifton police accused a 24-year-old woman of concealing the death of another person and throwing away or abandonment of a dead body, and she spent two nights in jail before being released on bail. After reviewing the evidence, the local district attorney declined to prosecute, telling HuffPost he didn’t believe she should have been arrested in the first place.

But though her case is closed, with “fetal personhood” laws and abortion bans in effect in about half of U.S. states, advocates say more arrests related to pregnancy — whether in cases of miscarriage or abortion — lie ahead.



“This case impacts the young woman from Tifton, but it also impacts every single woman out there of reproductive age, who knows she can get pregnant, who knows she can miscarry,” Georgia state Sen. Sally Harrell told HuffPost. “It makes every woman of reproductive age afraid.

” During a Wednesday hearing, Harrell spoke to her fellow legislatorsand said the case in particular highlighted the “idiocy” of Georgia’s fetal personhood law, which states that after six weeks of gestational age, a fetus is a person. Harrell said she’s calling for a repeal of the law. Women who miscarry now have two options: to proclaim it publicly because otherwise, it could be considered concealment of death, Harrell said, or they can hide it, and live in shame and fear.

If women go to the hospital while they are miscarrying, doctors typically tell them to go home and finish miscarrying and flush any tissue down the toilet. “But under this law, and now this example that happened in Tifton, Georgia, that would be illegal and worthy of a felony,” Harrell told HuffPost. “That’s just crazy.

It makes women terrified of their own bodily processes.” The reality of the woman’s arrest is terrifying. Any woman who miscarries after six weeks could face criminal consequences, she added.

“It is insanity and just plain wrong,” Harrell said. According to police, on March 20, an ambulance responded to a call about an unconscious woman who was bleeding. Emergency responders determined that the woman had miscarried, and she was taken to Tift Regional Medical Center for treatment.

A witness allegedly told first responders that they saw the woman dispose of the fetus in a dumpster outside. The police were then called, and they recovered the fetus from the dumpster, and the woman was arrested. Blair Veazey, the Tift County deputy coroner, determined the woman experienced a natural miscarriage and that the fetus never took a breath, according to WALB .

The fetus was reportedly at 19 weeks of gestational age, which is a few weeks before fetuses are generally considered able to survive outside the womb. After reviewing the evidence, Tift County District Attorney Patrick Warren announced on Friday he was dismissing the case against the woman. “After thorough examination of the facts and the law, my office has determined that continuing prosecution is not legally sustainable and not in the interest of justice,” he said.

“This case is heartbreaking and emotionally difficult for everyone involved, but our decision must be grounded in law, not emotion or speculation.” Even with the dropped charges, the woman still spent two nights in jail. “Basically, they managed to punish her without cause,” Harrell wrote on Instagram .

Warren told HuffPost that he’d advised police not to take out the arrest warrants against her in the first place. “The investigators that took the charges do not work for me so I can only advise them on what the law says,” he said in an email. “I support my local law enforcement, but those we trust to decide who to arrest and charge should wield that power carefully and compassionately.

” Tifton police did not respond to questions from HuffPost on why they arrested the woman. But according to Dana Sussman of Pregnancy Justice, an organization that provides criminal defense for pregnant people, there’s an “assumption of criminality” when police find fetal remains, rather than a response “rooted in health care.” Police become involved for a variety of reasons, she added, including being dispatched at the same time as an ambulance, called by sanitation workers, or even because a pregnant person’s family member reported them.

Sussman and her organization were not directly involved in the woman’s case, but she said she believes it was the first of its kind in Georgia. It won’t be the last, she added. “I do believe that we are in an environment in which we will see more of these cases, because we have now criminalized not just abortion, but pregnancy and pregnancy loss,” Sussman said.

Sussman added she can’t imagine what it’s like to be jailed following a miscarriage, but she’s had clients who have described the experience. “They are still bleeding. Their body is still physically reacting to their loss.

They are not getting the care that they need, the emotional, the physical, the mental health care that they need to recover,” she said. “And it compounds the trauma that they’ve already faced.” She continued: “It is absolutely unconscionable that she would have been experiencing this medical emergency and then from the hospital, gone to jail, where she would not have gotten the care that she needed.

” Pregnancy Justice tracks these kinds of cases, and in the first year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, which made abortion illegal in half the country, the organization saw 22 cases of criminal charges for pregnancy loss, including miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal loss. During the same timeframe, they tracked 201 pregnancy-related prosecutions, which involved everything from allegations of pregnancy and substance use to pregnancy loss.

Only five of the 201 cases involved abortion. Sussman added there is no law that governs what people are supposed to do with fetal remains when they experience a miscarriage. “It is not the place for law enforcement to pass judgment on what is an appropriate response to a pregnancy loss, let alone assign criminality to the response to a pregnancy loss,” she said.

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