The charges against a Georgia woman who was found bleeding and unconscious after a miscarriage were dropped on Friday.
The woman, 24-year-old Selena Maria Chandler-Scott, was arrested late last month after emergency responders were called in to treat her, according to a police press release.
A witness reported that Chandler-Scott had “placed the fetus in a bag and placed that bag in a dumpster outside”, police said. Police then arrested Chandler-Scott and charged her with one count of concealing the death of another person and with one count of throwing away or abandonment of a dead body.
The case sparked national outrage, as abortion rights supporters worried about the consequences of treating pregnancies like crime scenes. But on Friday Patrick Warren, the Tift county district attorney, announced that he had dropped the charges against Chandler-Scott.
“After thorough examination of the facts and the law, my office has determined that continuing prosecution is not legally sustainable and not in the interest of justice,” Warren said in a statement provided to the Guardian. “This case is heartbreaking and emotionally difficult for everyone involved, but our decision must be grounded in law, not emotion or speculation.
A medical examiner determined that the fetus was approximately 19 weeks, according to Warren’s statement. Found to be “non-viable at the time it was naturally miscarried”, the fetus showed no signs of breathing on its own or foul play.
The case against Chandler-Scott is believed to be the first of its kind in Georgia, according to Dana Sussman, the senior vice-president of Pregnancy Justice, a reproductive justice group that tracks the criminalization of pregnancy. After the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Georgia enacted an abortion ban that includes language suggesting that fetuses are people. The anti-abortion movement has long aimed to implement the doctrine of “fetal personhood”, which holds that embryos and fetuses should be treated like people, complete with full legal rights and protections.
Warren concluded, however, that the fetus was “not legally classified as having been born alive and lived independently under Georgia law”, according to his statement.
“While law enforcement acted in good faith and responded to a very difficult and emotional situation,” he said, “it’s now clear that no criminal law was violated.”
Sussman called dropping the charges against Chandler-Scott “the only logical decision here”.
“This doesn’t undo the trauma she faced of being arrested after a tragic medical emergency,” Sussman said in a statement. “There is no one-size-fits-all way to handle fetal remains in these situations – in fact, doctors often tell women to simply miscarry at home. No one is taught how to handle fetal remains, and police and prosecutors should not be weighing in on how women in this situation respond.”
These kinds of charges are relatively unusual, but not unheard of. Between 1973, when the US supreme court decided Roe, and 2022, there were more than 1,800 cases where people faced criminal consequences connected to pregnancy, according to research by Pregnancy Justice. Of the cases where researchers could ascertain the charges, 2% involved charges of tampering with a corpse or something similar.
In 2023, Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who experienced a miscarriage, was charged with abuse of a corpse. A grand jury ultimately declined to move forward with the case against Watts.
