In March, a Black Georgia woman who allegedly took abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy, was charged with murder, a legal move that advocates have been sounding the alarm about since Georgia enacted one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.
Alexia Moore, 31, was charged with malice murder as well as possession of a controlled substance and dangerous drug by Kingsland police. The charges stem from Moore’s Dec. 30 hospital visit where her fetus was delivered, estimated by police to be at a gestational age of 22 to 24 weeks old and then died an hour after delivery, according to the Current.
An arrest warrant details that Moore told medical workers that she had taken misoprostol, a drug used in medication abortions, and the opioid painkiller oxycodone, according to the Associated Press.
While Moore’s case may be one of the first in Georgia of a woman being charged with violating the state’s six-week abortion ban law, advocates, medical providers, and legal experts say an uptick in cases criminalizing pregnant people is on the rise as reproductive rights roll back in the United States.
Black and low-income residents face a disproportionate impact.
“I think what Miss Moore’s case is showing us is the tip of the spear of what is really going down,” said Karen Thompson, the litigation director of Pregnancy Justice.
“Pregnancy criminalization basically overrides any rights that a pregnant woman has,” Thompson said. “It’s just becoming louder and more pervasive in the last year.”
Legal debate on abortion and murder in Georgia
Moore, a mother of two and U.S. Army veteran, was arrested March 6 and released later that month after posting bail. State Superior Court Judge Steven Blackerby set her bond for the murder charge at just $1, signaling skepticism about the case’s viability.
“I think that charge is extremely problematic. …That is going to be a hard charge to convict upon,” Blackerby said during Moore’s hearing last month, according to The New York Times.
Brunswick District Attorney Keith Higgins also expressed wariness at the hearing as he said that his office “didn’t advise” the police on arresting Moore on a murder charge.
Moore’s biological mother, Rosalyn Jones, was at the hearing last month and reportedly questioned her daughter’s charges.
“Have you ever heard of someone having a murder charge with $1 bail?” Jones said. “From looking at the evidence, I’m not the judge or the jury. All I can see is God has given her favor, that’s all I know.”
While Georgia’s LIFE Act criminalizes medical providers who abort a pregnancy past six weeks, Thompson argues that there are Georgia laws that would protect pregnant people from homicide charges for self administered abortions.
“Every single [statute] that involves harm to children carves out pregnant women from that sanction. I think that legally, there was no grounds for it, and I think that’s exactly what the judge agrees with and I even think the DA knows it,” Thompson said.
A 1998 Georgia Court of Appeals ruling also gave legal protection to women in Georgia who terminate their own pregnancies.
Thompson noted that Georgia lawmakers have introduced bills attempting to classify abortion as homicide, an effort that suggests current law does not support such charges.
“If having abortions was somehow supposed to be a homicide by default, they wouldn’t be introducing bills to make it so,” she said.
Nourbese Flint, president of All Above All, a reproductive justice organization based in Washington, D.C., said that it’s not just lawmakers in Georgia trying to pass such bills.
“There were at least nine states that had introduced some type of policy, or some type of legislation that would make people who had an abortion charged with homicide,” Flint said. “Although most of them died in terms of the bills that we know, this is exactly how they have started with any other anti-abortion piece of legislation, is that they keep introducing it and then it gets a little farther the next time, until it gets passed.”
A rise in pregnancy criminalization
A 2023 report from Pregnancy Justice documented nearly 1,400 cases of pregnancy criminalization between 2006 and 2022.
And in the first year after Roe v. Wade was overturned four years ago, at least 210 pregnant people faced criminal charges tied to pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, or birth, the highest number recorded by the nonprofit group in a single year.
Their research also found that nearly 4 in 5 cases occurred in Southern states and that poor, pregnant people — Black and white — were overrepresented in their findings.
Advocates said that for Black people in particular, this criminalization is compounded by other disparities such as higher risks during pregnancy and childbirth and more barriers to accessing care.
Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country. In 2021, there were more than twice as many pregnancy-related deaths among Black women as white women in the state, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Health care providers have played a major role in these criminalizations as 1 in 3 cases in Pregnancy Justice’s report were instigated by a medical provider.
Although medical privacy protections exist, they allow disclosures if a provider suspects a crime. Thompson said that in a legal landscape shaped by abortion bans and laws that establish rights for fetuses, that threshold can become subjective.
“When you marry fetal personhood with a medical provider who believes that a crime has occurred, what happens is there’s no privacy. Your HIPAA protections completely dissolve,” Thompson said.
Georgia’s LIFE Act considers a fetus with “detectable human heartbeat” a “natural person.” Thompson said fetal personhood laws have cropped up across the country, which has given prosecutors more ways to criminalize pregnant individuals.
In Moore’s case, a hospital security guard reportedly called police after medical staff said that she took abortion medication and the fetus was older than six weeks.
“It is really disappointing when … people are met with suspicion and are turned over to state agents when they should be receiving care,” said Kwajelyn Jackson, executive director of the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation, an Atlanta women’s clinic.
“There’s no legal requirement to snitch on your patients,” she added. “Our accountability is to the patients that we serve.”
Suki O, an ultrasound technician and abortion care provider in Atlanta, said that when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, she was at first “extremely afraid” of facing possible prosecution, but over time, with education around the law, that fear is gone. She said she hopes more providers will continue to educate themselves on the law to know their rights and make sure patients are getting the care that they need.
“I know several people who are afraid of being prosecuted and then I know some that are just like ‘I’m going to save this person’s life,’” she said.
What comes next
As Moore’s case moves forward, it remains unclear whether prosecutors will pursue the murder charge. Regardless of the legal outcome, advocates say the broader implications of this case are already being felt.
“It’s really about making people terrified, and that’s exactly what I think is happening in some ways, right? Because when you see someone’s mug shot, when you hear all of these stories … it makes people feel nervous,” Thompson said.
Jackson, with the Feminist Center, emphasized that support networks exist, as organizations across Georgia and the Southeast continue to provide resources, advocacy and care for those navigating pregnancy-related decisions.
“I just want people to know that they’re not alone in this. They don’t have to figure it out by themselves. I want them to have a safe community of people that they love and trust, but I also want them to know that there are organizations and individuals and institutions that are on their side,” Jackson said.
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