Georgia police arrested a Black woman for murder last week after she reportedly told hospital staff that she took misoprostol to end her pregnancy. However, in a strikingly similar 2015 case, officials determined that state law doesn’t allow prosecutions of people who end their own pregnancies. An expert told Autonomy News that’s still true—even after a 6-week abortion ban took effect in 2022.
While a local news outlet that covered the arrest did include a comment to this effect from a reproductive justice organization, they still ran the woman’s mugshot, which is a distinct form of harm even if charges are later dropped. (Autonomy News does not print names or identifying information of people facing criminal charges for their pregnancy outcomes.) The outlet ran two more stories within 24 hours on the apparent wrongful charge.
According to a police incident report obtained by Autonomy News, the woman went to the emergency room at a Southeast Georgia Health System hospital in Camden County, near the border with Florida, in late December 2025 after experiencing severe pain.
Kingsland Police Sergeant J.H. Dixon wrote that he went to the hospital after staff reported a “suspicious circumstance” involving a pregnant patient. Dixon said a security guard, who appears to be a former Camden County deputy sheriff, told him that a patient had a premature delivery in the ER and the fetus did not survive. The security guard said she was informed that the patient had taken misoprostol, reportedly in an attempt to end her pregnancy, and wanted to leave against medical advice. The guard also said the patient’s friend was in the ER lobby and had the misoprostol. Dixon said he spoke to the friend, who allegedly handed him the pill bottle and said the woman had taken the medication the night before.
The police report makes multiple factual errors about these claims, like referring to misoprostol as a “narcotic” and saying that the woman took pills that were 200 milligrams, when evidence logs we obtained show they were 200 micrograms each. Misoprostol tablets are only available in 100 and 200 microgram dosages, but if the police report were to be believed, the woman took a nonexistent pill 1,000 times more potent. Unfortunately, crime reporters often treat police statements as fact, and local news repeated this incorrect measurement. (The typical medication abortion regimen involves misoprostol and another drug called mifepristone, but misoprostol is safe and effective for use on its own.)
There’s no mention of estimated gestational age in the report, but Dixon refers to the fetus as an “infant” that was “premature.” Police arrested the woman about two months after her ER visit, on March 4.
The woman also faces a misdemeanor charge of possession of dangerous drugs because the Georgia legislature has placed misoprostol on a list of “dangerous” medications, alongside hundreds of others, including mifepristone. She was also charged with possession of a schedule II controlled substance. The police report mentions that she took Oxycodone with the misoprostol, but it’s not clear whether that was the source of this charge, or whether the medication was prescribed to her.
The maternal mortality rate in Georgia is one of the 10 highest in the U.S., joining many other former Confederate states, and rates of maternal death among Black women are consistently three times higher than for white women. Both the witness and the “reporting person” who participated in this investigation of a Black woman are identified in the case report as white women.
Georgia’s abortion ban doesn’t have an explicit exemption preventing criminal charges against pregnant people like bans in many other states do. (Not that that has stopped those states from filing wrongful charges: Texas cops arrested a Latina woman for murder in 2022 before dropping the charge days later, and Kentucky prosecutors wrongly charged a woman with fetal homicide earlier this year.) But state officials have previously determined that Georgia law doesn’t permit prosecuting people for self-managed abortion or pregnancy loss.
In 2015, an Albany, Georgia, woman was charged with malice murder after she gave birth in a car on the way to a hospital; the fetus didn’t survive. That woman, who is also Black, reportedly told hospital staff that she had ordered misoprostol to “induce labor.” A county social services worker called the police. She was also charged with possession of a dangerous drug for having misoprostol.
Dougherty County district attorney Greg Edwards dropped the murder charge before ever presenting the case to a grand jury for indictment. Edwards said in a statement that his office concluded after “thorough legal research” that Georgia law doesn’t permit prosecution of women “for any alleged acts relating to the end of her pregnancy.” He added that state lawmakers would have to pass a law definitively allowing such charges.
Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at the reproductive justice organization If/When/How, said the 2015 murder charge was correctly dropped, and that Georgia law on this matter remains the same—even after the abortion ban took effect.
“The law does not make it a crime to take misoprostol, and the law hasn't changed. It is still not a crime to take misoprostol. Law enforcement was wrong then, and law enforcement is wrong now,” Diaz-Tello told Autonomy News. “No one should ever face arrest or jail time for how their pregnancy ends. This woman should be met with compassion, but instead she is in jail, separated from her family, and her life is being treated as the latest headline.”
It appears it’s too much to ask for police not to file wrongful charges, but a district attorney previously dismissed a case almost exactly like this one. State law requires them to do it again.
It’s woefully common for healthcare workers and friends to report pregnant people to law enforcement for suspected abortions. If/When/How found that, among 54 cases of adults investigated between 2000 and 2020 for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else do so, 39 percent were reported to law enforcement by health care providers and 6 percent by social workers. That means a staggering 45 percent of cases originated from the healthcare system. More than a quarter—26 percent—were reported to police by people entrusted with private information, like friends, family, or intimate partners. This latest case involves the nexus of both.
Due to a loophole in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it’s not a violation for care providers to report patients to the police if they believe the patient has committed a crime. However, while healthcare workers are mandatory reporters of certain crimes, they are not required to report suspected self-managed abortion, because self-managed abortion is almost never a crime—nor is premature delivery. Only one state, Nevada, explicitly criminalizes self-managed abortion, and only after 24 weeks.
However, this doesn’t seem to stop police from arresting people. Once they’re involved, police and prosecutors typically weaponize other, lesser-known laws against pregnant people, like abuse of a corpse, concealing a birth, and tampering with evidence. But in this case, they charged a woman with murder, a decision that’s likely to change her life forever.
People who need assistance self-managing a miscarriage or abortion can call the Miscarriage + Abortion Hotline at (833) 246-2632 for confidential medical support, or the Repro Legal Helpline at (844) 868-2812 for confidential legal information and advice.
This story was edited and fact-checked by Garnet Henderson.
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