Advocates on both sides of the abortion debate said Tuesday that they are stunned prosecutors charged a Georgia woman with murder after she was accused of terminating her pregnancy by taking an abortion pill.
Kenlissia Jones, 23, of Albany was being held without bond at the Dougherty County jail on charges of murder and possession of a dangerous drug. District Attorney Greg Edwards said he will likely present the case to a grand jury.
Prosecuting Jones seems at odds with Georgia case law, said Lynn Paltrow, an attorney and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a legal group in New York. She noted state law explicitly prohibits prosecuting women for feticide involving their own pregnancies. Also, a Georgia appeals court ruled in 1998 that a teenager whose fetus was stillborn after she shot herself in the abdomen could not be prosecuted for performing an illegal abortion. Prosecutors ended up dropping that case.
"We don't believe there is any law in Georgia that allows for the arrest of a woman for the outcome of her pregnancy," said Paltrow, whose group is offering free legal aid to Jones.
Genevieve Wilson, a director of the anti-abortion group Georgia Right to Life, said this is the first time she has heard of a woman in Georgia facing a murder charge for ending her pregnancy. Also, Wilson agreed with Paltrow that feticide and abortion laws in the state have not been used to target women who end their own pregnancies.
"I am very surprised by the arrest," Wilson said. "And I'm thinking that perhaps whoever made the arrest may not have known what the laws really are."
Edwards did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment Tuesday. Albany police referred calls about the case back to the district attorney. The Associated Press asked for a copy of the police report on Jones' case and was told a request must be made in writing under Georgia's open-records act. The Albany city attorney did not immediately respond to AP's written request for the document.
Police arrested Jones on Saturday night after she delivered the fetus in a car while a neighbor was driving her to the hospital. The TV station reported authorities said Jones was about 5½ months pregnant when she took a Cytotec abortion pill she had purchased online.
While Jones sat in jail, the district attorney himself didn't sound too sure about prosecuting her. Edwards told the TV station he would likely send the case to a grand jury, saying there were "a lot of particular issues that we're going to need to evaluate."