Miscarriage is a Crime Again

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In 1650, a young, single English servant named Anne Greene miscarried into the privy and did not tell anyone. We know her story because she was arrested for infanticide, convicted despite exonerating testimony from medical expert witnesses, and hanged – but did not die. Her survival was regarded as a miracle, and she was pardoned.

In 2024, a single Black woman named Brittany Watts miscarried into her toilet at home in Ohio. We know her story because a nurse at the hospital where she received follow-up care called the police, who arrested Watts for “abuse of a corpse,” and it made national news.

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, police in abortion-ban states have been emboldened to arrest women for reproductive mishaps. Women who lose pregnancies, even before viability, are targeted in ways that strongly resemble early modern infanticide investigations. And all indications are that these police practices will continue to spread.

In early modern England, harsh laws hemmed in women’s childbearing and punished women for conceiving out of wedlock, in turn incentivizing infanticide. Private owners seized and “enclosed” common grazing and foraging land in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, turning longtime peasant farmers into struggling vagrants. This disrupted family formation and led to many more out of wedlock births. The Poor Law of 1576 addressed this social disorder by putting the responsibility on the women who bore “bastard” children. They were publicly shamed and required to name the father of the child, who was supposed to provide income – often a futile effort. Pregnant and abandoned, or in fear of losing positions as household servants, many single women were tempted to escape an almost impossible situation by getting rid of the child.^[1]

However, infanticide was difficult to prove if a woman gave birth unattended, since stillbirth was always a plausible explanation. A 1624 law thus cracked down further by decreeing that unmarried women who had unattended stillbirths and concealed the baby’s body would be punished by death, just as if they had given birth to a living child and killed it. For the next century, English courts would frequently convict women who were prosecuted under this law, and before the 1730s, courts in Puritan New England often followed suit. Women who lost pregnancies to stillbirth in unattended births were in as much jeopardy as those who deliberately aborted or committed infanticide.^[2]

Women who were suspects under this law were single, often poor, and otherwise vulnerable. Anne Greene, for example, was a servant “seduced” (perhaps raped) by the son of her employer. The law in 1650, when she was convicted, addressed the births of “living” children, meaning that they were born viable. But Greene was a young, single servant who had hidden her pregnancy. As a result, the jury discounted the testimony of a doctor who had examined the fetus and declared it a pre-viable seventeen-week gestation, convicting Greene of infanticide.

Today, single parenthood is no longer legally stigmatized, and abortion remains legal in much of the country. Even in most states with abortion bans, those laws do not address self-managed abortion, and the disposal of pre-viability fetuses miscarried outside of hospitals is unregulated. And yet, we are seeing women arrested under laws criminalizing “abuse of a corpse” and “abandonment of a dead body” – laws that were written to address grave robbing and homicide, not pregnancy loss. Legal advocates for pregnant women have identified occasional use of these charges in cases of stillbirth over the past half century, but since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, conservative states have increasingly weaponized them to prosecute women who miscarry or have stillbirths at home.

Women arrested under these statutes appear to be targeted because they do not conform to the conservative ideal of married, middle-class white women with ready access to health care, and who are eager to monitor their highly planned pregnancies. Police, prosecutors, and conservative media outlets accuse them of not wanting their developing children. Police focus on the details of their stories that suggest they may have purposefully ended their pregnancies, overlooking details that might indicate otherwise and ignoring the very fact that self-managed abortion before viability is not currently criminalized under abortion bans. Police and prosecutors are using “abuse of a corpse” laws as a back door to punish women for suspected self-managed abortions, and further, for simply failing to meet middle-class ideals of motherhood during pregnancy loss.

Brittany Watts was arrested and charged with “abuse of a corpse” in October of 2023 after she miscarried her almost twenty-two-week pregnancy at home, and came to the hospital hemorrhaging. The prosecutor focused on the fact that she left the fetus in the toilet where she miscarried, and that she did not want to see the baby. He ignored the fact that she had already visited the hospital twice, been diagnosed with an unviable pregnancy, and waited many excruciating hours while hospital staff debated behind the scenes whether they could treat her, given Ohio’s strict ban on doctors providing abortions after twenty-two weeks’ gestation. Watts described how much it hurt her that the prosecutor insisted that her not wanting to see the baby meant that the baby was unwanted. Legal scholars further observed that Watts was probably regarded with extra suspicion because she is Black.

More recently, in March 2025, a woman in Georgia was arrested on the charges of “abandonment of a dead body” and “concealment of the death of another” after miscarrying and then disposing of the fetus. Coroner Blair Veazy told reporters that it was a nineteen-week fetus, the product of a natural miscarriage, and it had never taken a breath. “You know it’s just an unfortunate, sad situation,” Veazy opined in a media interview. And yet the local press reported the incident as a sordid crime story focused on a “deceased baby that was found in a dumpster.” Echoing a press release from the police department, it described Selena Chandler-Scott as “the mother” who “had earlier placed the fetus in a bag and placed that bag in a dumpster outside.” The press release and reporting urged readers to call the police with any tips regarding the case.

Even activist-reporter Jessica Valenti read the press release through the trope of the abandoned woman with a concealed pregnancy loss. Extrapolating from the press release’s statement that EMS had “responded to a call at Brookfield Mews Apartments regarding an unconscious female who was bleeding,” Valenti reported that Chandler-Scott “was found unconscious and bleeding outside of her apartment complex.” The more likely scenario, though, is that the person who called 911 was a relative or roommate of Chandler-Scott’s, and the same person who the press release described as a “witness” who “reported that the mother had earlier placed the fetus in a bag and placed that bag in a dumpster outside.” Chandler-Scott handled her miscarriage at home, but she was unlikely to have been alone.

District Attorney Patrick Warren acknowledged that “There is no specific Georgia statute or case law that addresses an individual’s choice to dispose of a naturally miscarried, non-viable fetus as it is generally deemed a medical condition and prosecution is not warranted.” And yet, he said, “Georgia courts have held that once a baby is ‘born alive and has had an independent and separate existence from its mother’ then what happens to the child (injury or death) can be subject to criminal prosecution.” Warren made clear that he wanted to press charges if he could find a way to argue that the facts and law supported prosecution, and he did not drop charges right away despite the coroner’s evaluation. As in Anne Greene’s trial in 1650, the fact that the fetus was clearly unviable did not make Chandler-Scott blameless in the eyes of those who suspected she had not wanted to be pregnant in the first place.

Georgia is not the only state going after women who miscarry at home. Prosecutors in West Virginia are now widely considering routinely charging women who miscarry unattended and then dispose of the fetus with “abuse of a corpse.” Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman opined that women could be charged beginning as early as nine weeks’ gestation, and he counseled that women who miscarry should call their doctor and the police to report it. “The kind of criminal jeopardy you face is going to depend on a lot of factors,” he explained. “What was your intent? What did you do? How late were you in your pregnancy? Were you trying to hide something, were you just so emotionally distraught you couldn’t do anything else?… If you were relieved, and you had been telling people, ‘I’d rather get ran over by a bus than have this baby,’ that may play into law enforcement’s thinking, too.”

“Abuse of a corpse” charges, here, are clearly a pretext for prosecuting women for self-managed abortions not addressed by abortion bans, as well as punishing women who are suspected of being “bad mothers” who do not want their babies. As in 1650, women who are socially suspect in some way – those who manage miscarriages at home, those who are single, those who are otherwise marginalized – are the women most likely to be punished when their pregnancies end prematurely, whether willed or not. Not only that, as Watts’ story and the case of the woman in Georgia suggest, police, prosecutors, and even medical staff and journalists often highlight deviations from idealized motherhood and filter out signals of respectability when examining these cases. While some people who miscarry are more likely to be targeted than others, no pregnant person is safe.

Notes

1. Peter Charles Hoffer, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1803 (New York: New York University Press, 1981). ↑
2. Ibid. ↑

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Featured image courtesy RDNE Stock Project.