A 31-year-old Georgia woman has been charged with murder after police said she took drugs to have an illegal abortion.
If state prosecutors decide to move forward with murder charges brought against Alexia Moore by local police, her case would be one of the first against a woman charged with terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a law banning most abortions in 2019.
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The arrest warrant charging Moore with murder used language that echoed the law, saying police determined Moore was more than six weeks pregnant “based on medical personnel who learned the baby had a beating heart and was having trouble breathing.”
“No one should be criminalized for having an abortion,” Dana Sussman, senior vice president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, said in a statement, calling Moore’s case an “unprecedented murder charge for an alleged abortion.”
Court records show Moore arrived at the hospital on Dec. 30 complaining of abdominal pain. She told medical staff she took misoprostol, a drug used for medical abortion, 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 delivery at the hospital, the warrant said. The police investigator who obtained the search warrant wrote that Moore told paramedics: “I knew my baby was suffering because I was the one who performed the abortion. I wanted her dead.”
Georgia bans abortion after detecting fetal heart activity. This is usually around six weeks into pregnancy – before many women know they are 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.
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