Breaking: Another Kentucky Woman Arrested for Miscarriage

She's sobbing in her mugshot

This is not the kind of breaking news we like to bring you, but it’s important: more than a year after seeking medical help for a miscarriage, a young couple in Booneville have been arrested. This is the third pregnancy-related arrest in Kentucky in recent months—that we know about.

Deann and Charles Bennett¹ were charged with reckless homicide. Deann was also charged with tampering with physical evidence, abuse of a corpse, and concealing the birth of an infant—crimes that will sound very familiar to readers following the string of pregnancy-related arrests around the country since the end of Roe. The reckless homicide charge alone comes with up to five years in prison.

Right now, all of the available information is coming from cops and law enforcement—so take it all with a grain of salt. Again and again, Abortion, Every Day has found police lying about these arrests, or misrepresenting what really happened. Too often, local media will parrot those ‘facts’ uncritically and destroy people’s lives in the process.

Already, Deann and Charles’ mugshots have been splashed across Kentucky crime pages. Deann is seen sobbing in hers.

According to Kentucky State Police, the couple went to the hospital after Deann miscarried—and reported that the remains were still at their home. Someone called 911 on them, and police confronted the pair while they were still at the hospital in the midst of a medical trauma.

This follows the same pattern we’ve seen in nearly every pregnancy-related arrest: a healthcare provider tasked with helping a patient calls law enforcement, police question someone still tethered to a hospital bed, and the patient—often from a marginalized community—is arrested.

In this case, police claim they uncovered an “unresponsive infant” outside the Bennett home, and the Lexington Herald-Leader reports that “the Owsley County coroner said the baby died at the scene.” Police did not specify a gestational age, but something worth remembering: when Kentucky police arrested Laken Snelling for her pregnancy loss, they claimed they found an “infant.” Later, the county coroner told AED, “A lot of times we'll use the broad term of infant, we could be referring to a fetus.”

Similarly, when a South Carolina woman was arrested and accused of throwing a “stillborn baby” in the trash, AED uncovered she had actually miscarried 18 weeks into her pregnancy.

Here’s what’s becoming increasingly clear: there’s no ‘correct’ way to dispose of pregnancy remains that will protect us from criminal investigation—not while abortion bans and fetal personhood laws exist. As Pregnancy Justice Senior Policy Counsel Kulsoom Ijaz tells us:

“History shows us that people have been criminalized for miscarrying at home on a toilet, burying remains, placing remains in a bag and then a trash receptacle, and even after taking remains to a hospital. What are postpartum people to do when their every action can be twisted against them?"

Since the end of Roe, there have been over 400 pregnancy-related arrests that we know about; and a new Pregnancy Justice report shows that nearly half of U.S. states have laws that make these prosecutions possible.

It was just last month that another Kentucky woman was arrested for her pregnancy loss: Miranda Spencer was charged with fetal homicide, abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence, and concealing the death of an infant. (The homicide charge was dropped after prosecutors conceded Kentucky’s abortion ban prohibits patients from being criminalized.)

Angela Cooper, communications director at ACLU of Kentucky, tells us anti-abortion lawmakers and activists—not content with just banning abortion—would “fill our jails and courtrooms with grieving Kentuckians based on their pregnancy outcomes.” She also points out that infant death, sepsis, and maternal mortality have risen since the state passed its abortion ban—and that those numbers will only continue to go up if people forgo medical help for fear of arrest.

The Bennetts’ arraignment is scheduled for March, and we’ll share more information on their story soon. In the meantime, Abortion, Every Day has been collecting stories about how people dispose of their pregnancy losses. We want to help people speak out, and to destigmatize not just miscarriage and abortion—but what comes after.

If you feel moved to share your story, please do so here.

1. Abortion, Every Day has a policy of not naming those arrested on pregnancy-related charges unless someone has come forward themselves, or the media coverage is so vast that not naming them would be pointless or do more harm.