This is from Raw Story today, about a young woman from Orangeburg, SC, who was worried she might be pregnant during her third year at SC State Univ, but dismissed a positive home pregnancy test when she continued having her period. Then on February 28, 2023, she began experiencing abdominal pain that was “way worse” than her regular menstrual cramps and went to the ER to get it checked out, but left after several hours without being seen when the pain abated somewhat. Unfortunately, once back home the pain grew even worse and she had to return to the hospital, this time via ambulance.
It was only at this point that hospital staff informed her that she was actually pregnant, and that a fetal heartbeat had been detected. Completely freaked out and confused, she elected to return home a second time when the pain once again abated — only to awaken in the middle of the night with an urgent need to use the bathroom, and unexpectedly giving birth to a severely premature infant daughter in a cascade of blood while on the toilet.
Panicked and screaming because she had no idea what was happening, her boyfriend called 911; and while the dispatcher kept trying to tell her to take the baby out of the toilet, she was unable to comply because she was so distraught and panicked over all the blood. When the first responders arrived, they found signs of life and attempted lifesaving measures, but the infant did not survive the trip back to the hospital.
The next day while still in the hospital, she was informed by a sheriff’s deputy that there would be an investigation of the “incident,” but that she wasn’t considered to be in any trouble — to which she responded that “she did not feel as though she did anything wrong.”
Here’s where everything started going off the rails. Though SC still had no ban in place on abortions prior to the Roe standard of “fetal viability” (i.e. a gestational age of 22 weeks) when she had miscarried, that spring the Republican-controlled SC legislature passed a ban that prevents medical providers from performing abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected (with the usual exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother). Interestingly, the new law did not allow for any criminal penalties to be applied to women who seek or obtain such an abortion — only to those providers who actually perform the procedure.
Nonetheless, 3 months after the unfortunate loss of her severely premature infant daughter, Amari Marsh was arrested on a charge of murder/homicide by child abuse for failing to rescue that infant from the toilet she had been unexpectedly born in. Most disturbingly perhaps, the prosecutor who brought the charges against Marsh is actually a Democrat elected to SC’s 1st Judicial Circuit, and kept her in jail for 22 days without bond facing 20-to-life in prison — before eventually remanding her to house arrest, where she languished for over a year until a grand jury finally refused to indict her on any charge.
Needless to say, this is not only a searing indictment of our whole legal system (does anyone really think race played no role here?), but also a horrifying harbinger of how misguided and/or zealous prosecutors can seek to criminalize “normal” miscarriages in a post-Dobbs legal environment — and you thought the Menstrual Police of Project 2025 were bad enough?
