What to Know When a Pregnancy Arrest Goes Viral
Everything you need to know about the Georgia abortion case
Earlier this month, Abortion, Every Day told you about a Georgia woman who was charged with murder after allegedly taking abortion pills to end her pregnancy. This week, Alexia Moore’s case blew up—it’s now being covered by major mainstream publications, and I expect that national attention will only snowball further.
That’s why I wanted to publish this explainer. As the case moves forward, social media misinformation will run rampant, anti-abortion activists will weaponize Moore’s medical and legal trauma, and well-meaning media outlets will miss the bigger picture.
Because AED has been the only publication regularly tracking and analyzing these post-Dobbs arrests, we’re in a unique position to intervene. We know what the policing patterns look like, how the case fits into broader political assaults on women, and what kind of legal and cultural attacks the anti-abortion movement will deploy.
Regular AED readers are also in a unique position to help: chances are, you’re more knowledgeable than most about these kinds of arrests. Like us, you can recognize patterns, identify misleading messaging, and see through conservative BS.
We’ve watched these arrests happen again and again, but right now—with so much attention on this case—we all have an opportunity to push back.
You’ll find a breakdown of the case below, including the undisputed facts, police lies to watch out for, common media missteps, and how it all connects to the bigger political landscape.
Everything here should make it easier for you to fight back, even in small everyday ways:
Countering misinformation on social media
Writing a letter to the editor of your local paper
Contacting your representative
If this case is going to be a part of the national conversation, let’s make sure it’s discussed accurately and with empathy.
On that note: there’s a reason I’m not asking folks to contact the district attorney (yet) and are only including certain calls to action. I don’t want to do anything that could further harm Moore or interfere in her attorney’s legal strategy. So unless Georgia activists and legal groups call on us to do something specific, I’m keeping those action items narrow.
AED will keep reporting on the case in the daily reports, but I’ll also continually update this page (so feel free to bookmark).
Click to skip ahead: Why Was A Woman in Georgia Arrested for Her Abortion?, Pregnancy Policing Patterns, Police Are Not Neutral, When Hospitals Turn Patients In, Media Missteps to Watch Out For, The Punishment Is the Point
Why Was A Woman in Georgia Arrested for Her Abortion?
Moore, a 31-year-old U.S. Army veteran and mother of two children, has been described by friends and family as “a great person,” “super bright,” and “an excellent mother.”
The Georgia Recorder reports that Moore’s mother says her daughter was discharged from the Army with disability benefits after developing PTSD, and that her 6- and 9-year-old children don’t understand why their mom was jailed.
Earlier this month, Moore was arrested on murder and drug charges in connection to her December pregnancy loss. Police claim she took abortion medication and “unlawfully and with malice aforethought caused the death of Baby Girl Moore.”
Georgia does not allow for the prosecution of abortion patients, but police are trying to get around that prohibition by claiming “the victim became a person at the moment of live birth.” A police affidavit also noted that Moore was beyond 6 weeks of pregnancy—a clear nod to Georgia’s 6-week abortion ban.
The good news is that the court doesn’t appear to be buying it. This week, Judge Steven G. Blackerby called the murder charge “extremely problematic,” and set Moore’s bail at $1.
Before she was released, Moore also had to pay a $1,000 bond for each drug charge. The “drugs”? Abortion pills and a painkiller.
According to The New York Times, the prosecutor on the case is already trying to distance himself:
“Keith Higgins, the district attorney overseeing the case, said that his office ‘didn’t advise’ the police on arresting Ms. Moore on the murder charge and that he was not steeped enough in the full details of the case to discuss it more extensively.”
It’s not unusual for cases like this to be dropped after attracting attention from the press. In fact, it was less than a year ago that public outrage forced Georgia prosecutors to drop charges in another pregnancy-related arrest: a young woman charged with ‘concealing a death’ after placing her miscarriage remains in the trash.
That said, even if Higgins drops the charges, it won’t undo the damage to Moore and her family. It won’t scrub her mugshot from crime sites, or clear her name from internet searches. It won’t erase the memory from her two young children.
Pregnancy Policing Patterns
AED has been tracking pregnancy policing patterns since the end of Roe, and the case against Moore checks nearly all of the familiar boxes:
✅ Patient is Black or from a marginalized community
✅ Reported by a hospital or healthcare provider
✅ Interrogated while still in medical distress
✅ Police use inflammatory or false language about the pregnancy
❌ Charged with “abuse of a corpse” or “failure to report a death”
✅ Name and mugshot plastered across crime pages
✅ Media uncritically repeats the police narrative
There’s only one break in that pattern here: women are usually charged with crimes related to the disposal of pregnancy remains, like abuse of a corpse. Murder charges are uncommon—or at least, they were. There’s been an uptick in pregnancy-related murder charges over the last few months; in fact, AED is following cases right now in Kentucky and South Carolina.
For more about the hundreds of pregnancy-related arrests since the end of Roe, read Pregnancy Justice’s report, “Pregnancy as a Crime: An Interim Update on the First Two Years After Dobbs.”
Police Are Not Neutral
Most press coverage of Moore’s case has relied exclusively on police accounts like arrest warrants, police affidavits, and court records. But cops and prosecutors are not objective parties—they are officers of the state. And the documents they create are not neutral accounts of what happened; they’re crafted specifically to aid in prosecutions.
More often than not, these cases aren’t about facts, science, or the reality of pregnancy loss—they’re about punishment. That’s exacerbated by racism, misogyny, classism, and ignorance about women’s bodies and pregnancy. And when police and prosecutors have broad discretion to decide when to charge someone for their pregnancy, personal politics and biases often come into play.
Sometimes it’s explicit: when Kentucky prosecutor Miranda King charged a woman with “fetal homicide” for allegedly taking abortion pills, for example, she said she “sought this job with the intention of being a pro-life prosecutor.”
Not everyone says the quiet part out loud, though. When AED first reported on Moore’s case, we noted that one of the investigators has an active Facebook page brimming with ‘pro-life’ Bible verses, militant pro-Trump posts, and other disturbing far-right content. We have no way to know if those beliefs impacted his work, but it’s not hard to imagine it played a role.
When Hospitals Turn Patients In
Cops shouldn’t be involved in pregnancy loss at all, but there’s a growing ER-to-prison pipeline that’s become particularly dangerous since the end of Roe. And in case after case, we’ve seen healthcare providers or hospital staff turn patients in over “suspicious” pregnancies.
As If/When/How has reported, when people are turned into police for self-managing an abortion, nearly 40% are reported by healthcare providers. Sometimes, those providers lie. Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman arrested for flushing her miscarriage, is suing the nurses who treated her—accusing them of conspiring with police and fabricating evidence against her.
Again, remember that the ER-to-prison pipeline is real: some hospitals even have police stations in their emergency rooms. In Moore’s case, the 31-year-old mom went to the Southeast Georgia Health System Camden Campus for help. It was there that a healthcare provider tipped off a hospital security guard—who also happened to be a retired Camden County sheriff’s deputy.
Camden County Sheriff Kevin Chaney told the Georgia Recorder that the hospital has “a cooperative relationship” with county law enforcement. “We share information constantly,” Chaney said.
Like police, those providers and staff also come with their own conscious or unconscious biases. Misogyny, classism, and racism exist in hospital rooms and courtrooms alike.
As SisterSong executive director Monica Simpson told The Grio, “We have watched Black women forced into virtual courtrooms while actively in labor, compelled to argue for the right to make decisions about their own bodies in the middle of childbirth.”
“We have watched healthcare facilities that should be sanctuaries of healing become sites of surveillance and punishment. This is not healthcare. This is a war on pregnant people, and Black women are on the front lines.”
Media Missteps to Watch Out For
🚨 Using biased terms like infant, newborn, premature
Echoing police language as fact might be the number one media mistake in pregnancy-related cases—down to using a particular word. Using terms like infant can paint a biased and inaccurate picture. In a South Carolina case, for example, local media declared that a woman was arrested for using a “plastic bag to dump stillborn baby.” AED later discovered she had suffered an 18-week miscarriage.
And in the Laken Snelling case, the media broadly reported that the Kentucky college student was found with a “dead infant” in her closet. But when Kylie questioned the coroner, he told her, “a lot of times we’ll use the broad term of infant, we could be referring to a fetus.”
Reporters should be using medically and scientifically accurate language.
🚨 Including incendiary ‘quotes’ relayed by cops or healthcare providers
The press will sometimes attribute quotes to a person who has been arrested for their pregnancy outcome that comes directly from police. Take the Nebraska teen who was arrested for self-managing her abortion: hundreds of news outlets reported that she sent a Facebook message saying she “couldn’t wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body.” But that quote came from a police officer—it didn’t appear in her FB messages at all.
In Moore’s case, the Associated Press has reported that “the police investigator obtaining the warrant wrote that Moore told the nursing staff: ‘I know my infant is suffering, because I am the one who did the abortion. I want her to die.’”
But what a cop says a nurse said a woman said should not be an attributable quote.
In these cases, every word matters—especially the ones we say came from the person who’s been arrested.
🚨 The only information comes from police reports or court records
Often, the only information available in a pregnancy-related arrest will come from law enforcement. It’s not a problem on its own to report that information—if a publication makes clear that police and prosecutors are not neutral sources.
It’s not enough to write that “police say” a woman did something illegal. Readers need to know the broader political context: that these arrests are happening more and more since the end of Roe, that they’re often a legal overreach, that police and nurses have been accused of lying in past cases, etc.
All it takes to accurately report on these cases is to include a full picture for readers.
The Punishment Is the Point
Moore’s arrest comes at a time when calls to legally punish abortion patients are on the rise. That’s not a coincidence.
Over the last year, over a dozen states have introduced ‘equal protection’ bills that would charge abortion patients as murderers—in many of those states, that could include the death penalty. What was once unthinkable is now suddenly up for debate.
As AED has long reported, the so-called abortion ‘abolitionists’ behind this legislative trend are gaining power by the day. They’re introducing more bills, attaching more cosponsors to those bills, and even running their own candidates. In fact, legislators in multiple states count themselves as part of the ‘abolitionist’ movement.
We’re not just talking about a handful of state lawmakers. One of Tennessee’s gubernatorial candidates has called for punishing abortion patients as murderers. In Texas, ‘equal protection’ is part of the Republican party platform.
Let’s put that in perspective: one in four American women will have an abortion in her lifetime. The men associated with this movement—state reps, cops, preachers, and other leaders—want a quarter of the female population executed.
Once dismissed as radical outliers, these men are now part of the mainstream conversation on abortion. Literally: last year, Kentucky’s largest and most circulated newspaper ran a column by an abolitionist—as if executing women were just another policy debate. And last week, States Newsroom reported that well-known anti-abortion leader Abby Johnson is launching a “Make Abortion Murder Again” campaign. That’s right, MAMA.
Johnson spoke about her initiative at the annual summit for Students for Life, saying, “I don’t think we’re going to hug and kiss our way out of this baby murder.” This is one of the nation’s most powerful anti-abortion lobbying groups platforming someone who would see patients jailed or executed.
“It’s not going to go away,” law professor Mary Ziegler told the Associated Press last year. “The trajectory keeps shifting and the abolitionists have more influence,” Ziegler said.
Abortion, Every Day is the only publication consistently tracking and analyzing post-Dobbs arrests—and right now, that work couldn’t be more urgent. We rely on readers to keep going:
I’ll have more on this case in the coming days. Whether prosecutors drop the charges or move forward, here’s what I hope reporters and politicians will remember: a real woman has had her life turned upside down. Moore was taken from her children, jailed, and had her name and mugshot splashed across crime pages. It’s a nightmare.
And it can’t keep happening.
It is telling, in my view, how many of these prosecutions are conducted in former slave states. Even 160 years after the official end of slavery, the racism and state violence persist. They are among the worst place to grow up: poorest health, shortest lifespan, worst education, most degraded physical environment, something they share with other red states. Gives you a sense of what slavery must have been like.
Just reading this phrase, “pregnancy-related arrest” makes me ill. Where is the recounting of the “impregnating-related arrests”?