Another Woman Arrested For Her Pregnancy Loss
A South Carolina woman has been charged for “desecration of human remains”
A South Carolina woman has been arrested for “desecration of human remains” after losing her pregnancy and placing fetal remains in the trash. The 31-year-old is facing up to ten years in prison for the felony charge.
For her pregnancy.
Abortion, Every Day is not naming1 the woman, but will identify her as ‘B.’
‘B’ was arrested on July 3rd in Florence County, a few weeks after police say she lost her pregnancy and put the fetal remains in a trash container outside of a hotel. She was later released on a $10,000 bond.
AED is waiting on records from the county sheriff’s office to learn more, but everything we know so far tracks with the horrific pattern of other recent pregnancy-related arrests.
It was just in March that a young Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage, charged with ‘concealing a death’ after placing fetal remains in the trash. Police found her unconscious outside of an apartment complex.
In May, we reported on a Texas woman who was arrested for ‘abuse of a corpse’ after miscarrying in a public restroom. She was jailed for over five months, during which time a local crisis pregnancy center took custody of her fetus, named it, and gave it a public funeral.
Brittany Watts in Ohio was also charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’. She miscarried at home, alone, after a religious hospital refused her timely treatment for a doomed and dangerous pregnancy. Watts went back to the hospital, hemorrhaging, only for a nurse to call 911 and accuse her of leaving a viable baby “in a bucket.”
All of these women—including ‘B’—are women of color. Three of the four are Black women. As is often the case, racism and misogyny skewed these women’s interactions with police, hospitals—even the media.
All had their mugshots splashed across local media outlets, for example, and their pregnancy losses turned into crime stories with salacious headlines. Reporting in Ohio claimed Watts had “clogged” her toilet trying to “flush” a newborn. Texas papers said the woman arrested there “spent hours” trying to flush her “baby girl” down the toilet.
Now, as ‘B’’s story has hit the news, local headlines declare that she used a “plastic bag to dump [her] stillborn baby.”
Imagine losing your pregnancy—going through that emotional and medical trauma—being arrested, and then reading those headlines.
The pattern doesn’t end there. In what has become one of the most common ways to criminalize pregnancy outcomes, all of these cases rely on charging women with crimes against corpses. It’s the natural result of fetal personhood laws and ideology: if a fetus or embryo is a person, then flushing or throwing away your miscarriage is ‘abuse’ or ‘desecration.’
Karen Thompson, legal director of Pregnancy Justice, says that what happened to ‘B’ “is a medical event, not a criminal one.”
“How is one expected to respond to a pregnancy loss when at every turn someone faces the risk of prosecution?” she asks.
But that, of course, is very much the point. At the same time women are being arrested for how they dispose of their pregnancy losses, the anti-abortion movement is working overtime to make even more of those arrests possible.
Just a few weeks ago, I warned that we were on the verge of a major criminalization push—and that ‘disposal laws’ would be at the center: Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are lobbying for state and federal legislation to require the burial or cremation of miscarriages and abortions. They claim that without such laws, fetuses will be “thrown in a dumpster”—echoing the noxious headlines used to slam women arrested for their pregnancy losses.
The truth? Conservatives are pissed off that so many women are still getting abortions in spite of state bans, and they’re eager to punish someone for it. They see ‘disposal laws’ as their chance to do just that. After all, local cops and prosecutors have already been emboldened: in the first year after Roe’s demise, more than 200 people were arrested on pregnancy-related charges.
Codifying the idea that there’s a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to dispose of a pregnancy loss gives cops even more power to keep making those arrests, and district attorneys more legal backing to push through prosecutions.
And as Thompson points out, the Trump administration’s recent Medicaid cuts have limited access to prenatal care—making ‘B’ “the bellwether of the coming flood of women who will face similar circumstances.”
AED will have more soon on ‘B’’s case, South Carolina’s laws, and how fetal personhood plays into all of it.
Until then, we have to ask ourselves: Is this really the country we want—a nation that jails women for not miscarrying ‘properly’? Every lawmaker who made these arrests possible owes us an answer. So does every anti-abortion activist claiming they don’t want to punish women.
These arrests—this torture—is no accident. It’s by design.
Read more about ‘disposal laws’ and Republicans’ criminalization push:
Whenever possible, we avoid publishing full names of people arrested on pregnancy-related charges. I’m not interested in adding to the public scrutiny they already face. We only name someone if they have come forward themselves, or if a case has received so much coverage that withholding their name would be pointless—or even harmful. (If their name is unavoidable in connection to the case, I’d rather ensure that accurate, compassionate reporting is what people find.)
For the love of god, what are you supposed to do with a miscarriage? Call 911? Call a funeral home?
“… all of these cases rely on charging women with crimes against corpses.”
The only case of a “crime against a corpse “ is the poor woman who was declared brain dead but whose corpse was kept on life support to grow a fetus inside her! It’s beyond grotesque, and if fetal personhood takes hold, I expect we’ll see more of this. 🤮