On March 20, 2025, emergency responders in Tifton, Georgia, found a 24-year-old woman unconscious and bleeding heavily in her apartment. The next day, she would be arrested after having a miscarriage.
After medics stabilized her and transported her to the hospital, a witness claimed to see her place a bag in a dumpster. Police charged her with two felonies: concealing the death of another person and abandonment of a dead body.
Let that settle in.
This young woman experiences a medical emergency, losing a pregnancy at 19 weeks. Within hours, she’s in handcuffs.
Two weeks later, the coroner confirmed it was a natural miscarriage. Prosecutors dropped the charges, explaining the fetus had not been born alive and therefore no laws had been broken. But by that point, the damage had already been done. Her trauma had been transformed into a legal spectacle. Her grief had become a criminal case file.
More States Criminalize Pregnancy
Cases like this are becoming disturbingly common as states increase the criminalization of pregnancy. According to Pregnancy Justice, at least 210 people were charged in the year following the Dobbs decision.
In many of these cases, the outcome was not an illegal abortion. It was a miscarriage or a stillbirth. In others, the only “evidence” of wrongdoing was poverty, drug use, or the simple fact of giving birth outside a hospital.
Miscarriage arrest is a legal reality for more people than you think. For Black women, poor women, and women with addictions or mental illness, it is becoming alarmingly more common.
Why the System Was Designed to Fail
When I see stories like this unfold, I see a system working exactly as it was designed: to punish certain people for their pregnancies.
Earlier this spring, I spoke to clinicians at the University of Washington in Seattle about what I’ve come to call “systemic neglect.”
The presentation came from years of watching how the criminal legal system inserts itself into my patients’ lives. The ones who can least afford legal trouble are the most likely to be criminalized. And the less control they have over their pregnancy outcomes, the more blame they carry when something goes wrong.
This goes beyond the scope of the historical abortion debate. People are losing their pregnancies and then being forced to prove they didn’t cause it. Police are pulling fetal remains out of trash bins as if they’re building a homicide case, and prosecutors want to reframe miscarriages as felonies. Meanwhile, doctors are told to call Child Protective Services when their patient comes in bleeding, instead of offering care.
At that Seattle lecture, I showed a slide with the phrase: “The criminalization of pregnancy is the erosion of bodily autonomy.”
I meant every word. What happened to that woman in Georgia wasn’t some small-town mistake. It was a logical outcome of what happens when the law becomes more invested in fetal rights than human dignity.
Make no mistake: the criminalization of pregnancy doesn’t keep anyone safe. It doesn’t prevent harm. It turns grief into guilt and care into control.
And in that gap between what medicine should be and what the law demands, we lose people.
It’s Not Just Happening in Georgia
There is no criminal charge formally called a “miscarriage arrest.” These cases hide inside vague laws meant for something else: abuse of a corpse, improper disposal of remains, manslaughter, or child endangerment.
Let’s be clear: pregnancy loss is common. According to the Mayo Clinic, 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, most in the first trimester. The actual number may be even higher, since many people miscarry before realizing they were pregnant.
However, that biological reality has become a crime in today’s legal climate.
- In Ohio, Brittany Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse in 2023 after miscarrying at home.
- In Arkansas, a woman was convicted under a 17th-century “concealment” law for bringing her stillborn fetus to the hospital in a bag.
- In California, two women spent years in prison for stillbirths before public outrage forced the state to ban such prosecutions.
- In Alabama, women have been charged with chemical endangerment for testing positive for drugs during pregnancy, even when the fetus was stillborn or healthy.
The miscarriage itself is not illegal. But the circumstances, the location, or the person’s medical history can become criminalized.
In states hostile to abortion, this trend is intensifying. Where you are, what you look like, whether you’ve used substances, and whether you’re poor are all factors that seem to matter more than the facts of your case.
The system doesn’t require intent or evidence. It only takes a body in distress, and a court already primed to assume the worst.
Why This Is About Political Power
To understand miscarriage arrests, you have to stop thinking like a prosecutor and start thinking like a historian.
The laws being used to arrest people after miscarriages were written centuries ago to shame unmarried women or punish “concealment” of birth. They were built to control the behavior of poor women, especially women of color.
In my Seattle presentation, I called this reproductive oppression— the use of laws, institutions, and medical gatekeeping to regulate who gets to have children, who doesn’t, and under what conditions. When the law steps in after a miscarriage and calls it abandonment or homicide, it’s reasserting this kind of control.
Black women are more likely to be criminalized for pregnancy outcomes than white women, even when the facts are similar. Indigenous people, trans and nonbinary people, and people in rural or low-income areas face the same disproportionate risk. The result is a surveillance regime around pregnancy that punishes certain bodies for existing in the wrong context.
The Georgia arrest and all the others happened because the legal framework invites it. Too many people in power are invested in protecting fetuses more than the people carrying them.
The Cruelty Is the Point
If you’ve ever wondered how someone could get arrested for a miscarriage, the answer is in the silence these incidents produce.
These laws create a climate of distrust where patients second-guess whether to go to the hospital, and providers second-guess whether they’re safe to help.
When people believe that seeking care after a pregnancy loss might land them in jail, many won’t go at all. They’ll bleed at home, stay silent, and hope it passes. People learn not to talk about their grief and conceal pain rather than risk scrutiny.
And doctors? We aren’t immune either.
Every time a patient shows up in distress, I have to wonder: Will this get reported? If a hospital’s legal team steps in, will my notes be used in court? If a miscarriage is labeled suspicious, am I the next phone call to law enforcement?
This is not what medicine should look like. Clinical care should not feel like criminal risk management. But the more these cases surface, the more silence sets in.
No One Should Be Arrested for a Medical Event
Reproductive justice provides a framework that pulls us back to what matters. It says every person has the right to have or not have children and to raise their children in safe, supportive communities.
That framework asks: After a miscarriage, did this patient feel safe enough to get care? Were they treated with dignity? Did they have access to support, not suspicion?
When we criminalize pregnancy outcomes, we violate all three pillars of that framework. We punish people for losses they can’t prevent. We force them into silence. And we rob entire communities — predominantly Black, Indigenous, and low-income — of the trust they need to seek care at all.
I’ve heard people say, “Well, if the charges were dropped, no harm done.” But harm was done. Harm is being done. A person handcuffed after a miscarriage is part of a system where your body can be treated like evidence.
That’s how a surveillance state works. No one should have to grieve with a lawyer by their side.
What Needs to Change—And How You Can Help
We need laws that protect people from prosecution for pregnancy loss. We need to eliminate mandatory reporting requirements that turn providers into informants. We need to stop using laws written to shame women centuries ago as tools of modern surveillance.
We also need collective courage.
Support local clinics that provide reproductive healthcare in hostile states. Fund abortion access, yes, but also fund prenatal care, mental health services, and housing support. Challenge prosecutors who treat a miscarriage like a crime scene, and speak up—especially if your voice isn’t the one usually targeted.
If you’re watching this unfold from the outside, thinking it can’t happen to you or the people you love, let me say this plainly:
It already is.
And the only way to stop it is to name it, fight it, and refuse to look away.
