Unmasking the Creeps, Ghouls, and Weirdos Attacking Abortion

10.30.25

It’s spooky season, so here’s a scary story for you:

In 2018, a Nevada woman named Patience Frazier had a stillbirth and buried the remains in her backyard—as many people who have stillbirths do. Unfortunately, Frazier’s babysitter reported her to a sheriff’s deputy named Jacqueline Mitcham—who knew Frazier personally, and considered her an unfit parent because she had previously struggled with homelessness. Frazier was arrested and imprisoned until advocates won her release in 2021.

Here’s where the horror story really begins: While Frazier was in jail, Mitcham somehow convinced a funeral home director to give her Frazier’s “unclaimed” fetal remains—all without her knowledge or consent. She even told a reporter that she considered the remains to be her “baby.”

To this day, Mitcham says she keeps the remains in a wooden box in front of her home. She told the funeral director, “I’m taking him…that’s my baby,” and that she sees herself as the only person who ever loved “him.”

If you’re a longtime reader of Abortion, Every Day, you’re very familiar with the legal theory of fetal personhood by now. It’s the anti-abortion movement’s endgame: state recognition of fetuses as people with full citizenship rights. It is terrifying. And as Frazier and Mitcham’s story shows us, it’s also incredibly weird.

We don’t call the anti-abortion movement weird nearly enough: their comments about sex are weird, their obsession with women’s bodies is weird, and treating embryos and fetuses like children is weird. The weirdest of all, though, are the people who want to punish women for how they dispose of their pregnancy losses.

Lately, the anti-abortion movement has been making a massive show out of stigmatizing the routine, normal ways that people might dispose of remains from a pregnancy loss: like flushing them down the toilet, throwing them away in a plastic bag, or burying them. Are any of those actions weirder than a sheriff’s deputy coercing a funeral home to give her someone else’s fetal remains, calling those remains her child, and keeping them in a wooden box in front of her home?

I’ll let you be the judge.

And what’s creepier: having a miscarriage and flushing the remains down the toilet, or police officers entering your home, tearing apart your bathroom, and going through your plumbing in search of those remains to jail you on felony abuse of a corpse charges?

That, of course, is the utterly infuriating story of Brittany Watts in Ohio—a Black woman who faced the threat of years in prison for her miscarriage. After being denied timely care for her doomed and dangerous pregnancy, Watts went home and lost her pregnancy there. When she returned to the hospital for help, a nurse called 911, falsely claiming that there was ‘a baby in a bucket’ in her home.

The charges against Watts were dropped after her story garnered enough national outrage. But not before she was traumatized and criminalized in the aftermath of a pregnancy loss—her face and the most intimate details of her life plastered across local news.

To this day, I remain stuck on the fact that police officers tore through her bathroom, turning it upside down in search for what they regarded as a ‘dead baby.’ This is utterly psychotic, and behavior like this is a pattern among anti-abortion extremists and law enforcement agents determined to see miscarriages as children—and women who have experienced pregnancy loss as murderers.

Earlier this year, a Texas woman was jailed for five months after she miscarried in a public bathroom. She was charged with abuse of a corpse, with her bond set at $100,000. While Mallori Patrice Strait was incarcerated, a local crisis pregnancy center took legal custody of her fetal remains, named the fetus, and gave it a public funeral. There’s nothing normal about any of this.

The desperate, deeply creepy lengths law enforcement will go to in granting fetuses personhood don’t end there.

The Baby Doe documentary chronicles the story of an Ohio mother and grandmother who was arrested in 2019, after local cops used DNA testing to tie her to “a baby that was left” in the woods 26 years ago. Gail Eastwood-Ritchey maintains that, at her young age, she hadn’t realized she was pregnant. She gave birth in the woods and fled. After finding the remains of the newborn, local police made a massive spectacle of the case—naming it Baby Doe and staging a funeral. Prosecutors painted Ritchey as a coldblooded monster, and she remains incarcerated to this day.

Cases like this raise massive questions about how DNA testing—even activities like 23andMe that are supposedly for fun—can and will be used against pregnant people.

As Pregnancy Justice’s Dana Sussman told me a few years ago, when an embryo is considered a ‘baby’, it normalizes “the idea that a pregnant person is not their own person anymore, that they’re subservient to the rights, individuality, and full personhood of a fetus,” Sussman said. This can lead to especially horrific outcomes for pregnant people:

“If their rights are secondary to the fetus, or at odds with the fetus, that lends to an environment in which violence—whether it’s state violence like imprisonment, or interpersonal violence—can be committed against pregnant people with far less accountability.”

We’re watching as this deeply immoral and unsettling behavior is codified: Across the country, Republicans are pushing laws to require aborted fetal or embryonic remains to be buried or cremated, which can cost the pregnant person thousands out-of-pocket—and enter their abortion into official state record, expanding the ever-growing reproductive police state. On the federal level, Republicans are even trying to pass a law that would outlaw flushing fetal remains.

But law enforcement has never let the lack of explicit legislation stop them from arresting women anyway: Pregnancy Justice reports that nearly 1,300 people faced pregnancy-related charges from 2006 to 2020. Now, abortion bans—which automatically shroud all pregnancies in potential criminal suspicion—have created ever-greater risk.

In the first year after Dobbs alone, more than 250 people were arrested over their pregnancy outcomes. In the first two years, Pregnancy Justice has tracked over 400 cases. These numbers are terrifying. Every criminal case involving pregnancy is.

But not only is it terrifying—it’s all deeply fucking weird. It is weird to be obsessed with someone else’s miscarriage remains. It is weird to see someone else’s stillborn fetal remains as your ‘child.’ This is not normal behavior!

As If/When/How’s Farah Diaz-Tello noted in response to Frazier and Mitcham’s nightmare of a story—by taking custody of Frazier’s fetal remains, Mitcham was effectively “doing the exact same thing that [Frazier] tried to do [with the remains], but [Frazier] should go to prison for it, and this police officer should get to keep this [the fetal remains] as a trophy.”

Wildly, nauseatingly unjust—absolutely. And also: Weird. Really fucking weird!

I’m only scratching the surface of how creepy these people are. Anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy, an extremist protester who’s been jailed and convicted for obstructing access to abortion clinics, stole five fetuses from a D.C.-based clinic and kept them in a freezer in her basement. (Only to be later pardoned by Donald Trump.)

Or, take former Missouri state Health Director Randall Williams, who in 2019 admitted to keeping a spreadsheet that tracked the menstrual cycles of Planned Parenthood patients. Or Vice President JD Vance, who has an utterly appalling trail of podcast appearances through the years in which he thoroughly discusses and obsesses over women’s fertility and birth rates.

This is who the anti-abortion movement is. These are not reasonable people. Yet, so many reasonable people just keep falling for their bullshit. Look at the public’s broad willingness to unquestioningly believe law enforcement’s narratives about Laken Snelling, the 21-year-old Kentucky woman facing charges over her pregnancy loss. She’s being demonized and smeared as a baby killer—by true crime TikTok influencers, local media, national tabloids, and hordes of social media users.

I highly doubt that these social media users see themselves as anti-abortion extremists—as the kind of people who’d have anything in common with a state official tabulating menstrual cycles on a spreadsheet, or a police officer who stole, named, and buried someone else’s fetal remains.

But that’s exactly the sort of person you are aligning yourself with when you fall for police propaganda about criminalized pregnant women.

So don’t fall for it.