South Carolina Miscarriage Patient Turned in to Child Protective Services
Then she was arrested for 'desecration' of a corpse
A few weeks ago, Abortion, Every Day told you about a South Carolina woman arrested for “desecration of human remains” after losing her pregnancy and placing fetal remains in the trash. The 31-year-old, who we identified only as “B,” faces up to ten years in prison for the felony charge.
AED came across this story the way we do most pregnancy criminalization cases: The local media had splashed B’s mugshot and name across crime pages, claiming she used a “plastic bag to dump stillborn baby.”
It’s a tactic we’ve seen again and again in a familiar, horrific pattern: A vulnerable woman of color in the midst of a medical trauma is charged with a crime like ‘abuse of a corpse’ or ‘abandoning a dead body,’ her name dragged through the mud as a callous murderer.
As Karen Thompson, legal director of Pregnancy Justice, told us when we first broke the story, what happened to B “is a medical event, not a criminal one.”
One of the first things AED did when we found B’s story was contact the Florence County Sheriff’s Office to get as much publicly available information as possible. They were not particularly forthcoming—at one point after our request, B’s arrest record was even scrubbed from the county website. (It has since returned.)
Today, after weeks of follow-up by reporter Kylie Cheung, the sheriff’s office finally sent AED the incident report from B’s case. Somehow it’s even worse than we first reported.
The “stillborn baby” that local media claimed B “dumped” was actually an 18-week miscarriage. While any ‘desecration’ arrest for pregnancy loss is absurd, there is no universe in which an 18-week fetus is considered viable.
And B’s arrest? It happened after she went to the hospital for medical care—and someone there called child protective services.
That’s right, apparently in South Carolina, a miscarriage is cause for a child abuse investigation. As If/When/How attorney Farah Diaz-Tello told AED, “Once law enforcement decides they want to punish somebody, they're going to try to find a way to do it.”
Unfortunately, it’s not a surprise that B appears to have been turned in by one of the medical professionals tasked with helping her. The hospital-to-jail pipeline is real: Organizations like Pregnancy Justice and If/When/How have published reports showing that when someone is targeted for their pregnancy outcome, it’s most often health care providers who turn them in. I will never forget that the nurse who rubbed Brittany Watts’ back in sympathy after her pregnancy loss later called 911 to claim she left a ‘baby’ in a ‘bucket’.
Criminal charges stemming from miscarriage remains aren’t uncommon, either. In addition to Watts, who was charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’ for flushing her miscarriage, we reported this year on a Texas woman who spent five months in jail after miscarrying in a public restroom, and a young Georgia woman who was charged with ‘concealing a death’ after placing fetal remains in the trash.
The cases even precede Dobbs: In 2017, a teenager in Ohio was charged with aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter, child endangering, and gross abuse of a corpse for disposing of a stillborn fetus in her backyard. A Wisconsin woman faced similar charges in 2018 for how she disposed of stillborn twins. And a Virginia woman was convicted and briefly jailed in 2019 for ‘concealing a dead body’ after disposing of remains from a stillbirth.
All of which is to say—this isn’t new. But the arrests are now happening more often. In the first year after Dobbs alone, Pregnancy Justice recorded more than 200 people arrested over pregnancy-related criminal charges.
Thankfully, the Palmetto State Abortion Fund has raised enough money to bail B out of jail. The group is still fundraising for her legal defense and living expenses—you can help by donating here.
In the meantime, the Florence County Sheriff’s Office did a little flexing today when sending us the incident report—advising AED that “pursuant to S.C. Code ANN 30-2-50 the use of public records for commercial solicitation is prohibited and is punishable by a fine of up to $500.00 or one year in jail, or both.”
It’s unclear if this ‘reminder’ is a reference to the fundraising effort for B, the fact that AED has paying subscribers—or if it’s just the language the office uses when responding to records requests. But we found it notable that similar language was newly posted to the bookings search webpage of the sheriff’s office just a few days after AED first reported on B’s story.
What is clear is that local law enforcement doesn’t want national heat. They don’t want a national spotlight on their cruelty. But that’s why we need to keep shining it.
When pregnancy criminalization stories go viral, the public pressure often forces prosecutors to drop the charges. That’s what happened a few months ago after we shared the story of the Georgia woman arrested for her miscarriage.
Anti-abortion lawmakers, prosecutors, and cops think that no one will care about—or notice—these stories. Oftentimes, they’re right: we rarely hear about these cases in mainstream press. The national outrage is instead driven by independent media and individual content creators.
Really, it’s you all—sharing the news, raising the alarm, and ensuring that despite the political news overwhelm, attacks on the most vulnerable among us don’t go unanswered.
Read more of Abortion, Every Day’s reporting on pregnancy criminalization below:
Visit Pregnancy Justice to learn more about criminalization or to get help. For free legal help as a patient or health practitioner, call If/When/How’s free Repro Helpline: 844-868-2812. If you’re self-managing an abortion and need medical advice, contact the Miscarriage & Abortion Hotline: 833-246-2632
Again, I’m not a lawyer, but the nature of public records is that they are public, as in public property, paid for with taxpayer dollars. Freedom of the press aside, it has got to be unconstitutional to punish anyone for using public records any way they like. Even if this regulation passes legal muster, I’d like to see them try to argue that publishing a newsletter that is available for free but that some people choose to support with subscriptions, or raising money for legal expenses is “commercial solicitation.”
Thank you for calling out that sheriff's attempt to scare you and AED into silence, Jessica — as if they could.