A 31-year-old Georgia woman has been charged with murder by police who say she took pills to induce an illegal abortion. If state prosecutors decide to move forward with the murder charge brought by local police against Alexia Moore, her case would be one of the first instances of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it enacted a 2019 law banning most abortions, the AP reports. The arrest warrant uses language that echoes the law, saying police determined Moore had been pregnant beyond six weeks "based on the medical staff's knowledge that the baby had a beating heart and was struggling to breathe."
"No one should be criminalized for having an abortion," Dana Sussman of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice said in a statement, calling Moore's case "an unprecedented murder charge for an alleged abortion." Court records say Moore arrived at a hospital Dec. 30 complaining of abdominal pain. She told medical workers that she had taken misoprostol, a drug used in medication abortions, and the opioid painkiller oxycodone, according to an arrest warrant obtained by police in Kingsland, about 100 miles south of Savannah. The fetus survived for about an hour after being delivered at the hospital, the warrant says. The police investigator obtaining the warrant wrote that Moore told the nursing staff: "I know my infant is suffering, because I am the one who did the abortion. I want her to die."
Georgia prohibits abortion after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected. That's generally at about six weeks' gestation—before many women know they're pregnant. Moore has been jailed in coastal Camden County since March 4 on charges of murder and illegal drug possession, according to online jail records. Camden County Coroner M. Wayne Peeples said Thursday that he didn't rule the death as a homicide, instead finding both the cause and manner of death were undetermined.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
