About one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, and there are no legal standards or universal guidelines on how people should dispose of fetal remains. But instead of care and compassion, women and pregnant people routinely face invasive criminal investigations, highly publicized criminal trials, and even imprisonment or the threat of imprisonment for the outcomes of their pregnancies, or how they disposed of remains from a pregnancy.
The Tift County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request from Jezebel on why the young woman continues to face criminal charges for what the county coroner deemed a natural miscarriage. Nor has the sheriff’s office commented on whether it is standard procedure for individuals in the county to be arrested and jailed after miscarrying, or whether there are steps that people who miscarry must follow to dispose of remains from their pregnancy in order to avoid criminal charges. (This is your regular reminder to never, not ever, talk to the police about the outcomes of other people’s or your own pregnancies, and to take all precautions to protect your medical privacy.)
In January, an Ohio woman named Brittany Watts filed a lawsuit against a local hospital system and the city of Warren for their treatment of her after she miscarried 22 weeks into her pregnancy in 2023. Watts, too, faced felony charges for “abuse of a corpse.” Her nurse reported her to the cops after Watts was initially denied care for her nonviable, health-threatening pregnancy, and the hospital effectively forced her to go home and miscarry in her toilet.
Frighteningly, criminal charges stemming from how one does or doesn’t handle remains from a miscarriage are not as uncommon as you’d think. The organization Pregnancy Justice, which represents pregnant people who face criminal charges for the outcomes of their pregnancies, told Jezebel in 2023 that it has tracked and worked on numerous such cases over the years. In 2017, a teenager in Ohio was charged with aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter, child endangering, and gross abuse of a corpse for burying a stillborn fetus in her backyard. In 2018, a Wisconsin woman faced similar charges for how she disposed of stillborn twins. In 2019, a Virginia woman was convicted and briefly jailed for “concealing a dead body” after disposing of remains from a stillbirth.
People have faced criminal charges related to their pregnancy outcomes for decades, before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022: Between 2006 and 2020, about 1,300 people faced criminal charges for conduct associated with pregnancy. But Dobbs and state abortion bans, like Georgia’s, have significantly escalated the innate criminal suspicion attached to pregnancy and pregnancy loss. In the first year post-Dobbs alone, Pregnancy Justice recorded more than 200 people arrested over pregnancy-related criminal charges—the most in a single year period since the organization has been tracking this data.
Dana Sussman, executive vice president of Pregnancy Justice, previously told Jezebel that around 97% of criminal charges for pregnancy outcomes she’s tracked have been for “murder, manslaughter, feticide, child endangerment, abuse of a corpse,” even as none of these charges are even meant to criminalize pregnancy outcomes. “You don’t need an abortion ban to criminalize pregnancy,” she said.
