They're Arresting Us for Miscarriages Now

What the hell happened to the Overton Window?

This week, a Georgia woman was arrested for her miscarriage. I’ll let that sit with you a moment.

The 24-year-old—found bleeding and unconscious outside her apartment complex—was charged with ‘concealing a death’ and ‘abandoning a dead body’ after placing fetal remains in the trash.

Georgia has no law dictating how to dispose of miscarriage remains, but police arrested her anyway. Her mugshot is already splashed across the local crime pages. Did you know that one million American women miscarry every year? I hope the cops are ready to run out of film.

While this young woman sat behind bars, Georgia lawmakers considered a bill that would lock up even more women: The Prenatal Equal Protection Act (HB 441) would charge abortion patients as murderers—a crime punishable by life in prison or the death penalty.

You wouldn’t know it from looking at the headlines. From the Associated Press to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, HB 441 is being covered as a “total abortion ban” rather than a radical step toward punishing women.

Fertility doctors could also be jailed for life; under HB 441, discarding frozen embryos would be a criminal offense. Fertility specialist Dr. Karenne Fru asked lawmakers at a Thursday hearing, “Am I guilty of murder? That makes me a serial killer.”

This isn’t an issue of a single extremist state. The legislation in Georgia is one of eleven ‘equal protection’ bills that have been introduced across the country since the start of the year. All of them seek to punish women who have abortions. The rest of us, of course, remain suspect: An Idaho legislator explained to a reporter last month that his ‘equal protection’ bill would allow for the investigation of miscarriages.

We’re barely three years out from the end of Roe. Still think feminists are ‘hysterical’?

We warned that this would happen. For decades, feminists screamed from the rooftops that banning abortion would kill women and jail miscarriage patients. In response, we were accused of fear-mongering—called career overreactors desperate to paint all women as victims.

I don’t know if it was a knee-jerk distaste of feminism or straight-up denial, but too many Americans never believed we would get here. Now that we are here, too many Americans don’t seem to realize it. Maybe that’s because it barely warrants a mention in the country’s top publications.

You can blame it on the constant overwhelm of political news and overstretched newsrooms, but think about it this way: One in four American women will have an abortion. If nearly a dozen states were considering legislation to jail a quarter of all American men, do you think the front pages would be silent?

One in five women will have a miscarriage. If police started arresting men for something that happens to 20 percent of them, do you think anyone would stand for it?

We all know the answer.

I first wrote about the young woman arrested in Georgia three days ago. That’s an eternity in journalism, yet the story still hasn’t been picked up by a single major news outlet. I’d like to demand outrage, but at this point I’d settle for acknowledgement.

Is this just our new normal? Women being arrested if a cop doesn’t like how they miscarried, and lawmakers debating whether to put us to death before breaking for fucking lunch? Has everyone lost their minds?

I know there’s a lot going on, but surely the personhood of half the population rates a smattering of attention!

The ugly truth, of course, is that it’s never been our humanity that concerns them. After arresting and jailing the young woman in Georgia, Tifton police subjected her to one more indignity—they sent the remains of her miscarriage for an ‘autopsy’. Even after the results showed she’d lost the pregnancy naturally, the county prosecutor stood by the charges.

When asked by a local reporter how women are supposed to dispose of a miscarriage, District Attorney Patrick Warren would only say that once a fetus “has had an independent and separate existence from its mother,” what happens next is subject to criminal prosecution.

How many of us have had miscarriages that Mr. Warren would see us jailed for?

I first warned that the Overton Window was shattering when Republicans began floating restrictions on women’s right to travel. At the time, I noted that it had taken less than two years for conservatives to sprint from the end of Roe to publicly planning how to trap women in states where they’re not seen as full human beings.

“What horror,” I asked in 2023, “will America think is ordinary two years from today?”

The answer, it seems, starts in Tifton County, Georgia. If only it would end there.