Women in West Virginia could face criminal charges if they miscarry, a county prosecutor told a local news outlet last week, urging women who miscarry to contact law enforcement.
“The kind of criminal jeopardy you face is going to depend on a lot of factors,” the Raleigh county prosecuting attorney Tom Truman told the outlet WVNS 59News in comments reported on Friday.
“What was your intent? What did you do? How late were you in your pregnancy? Were you trying to hide something, were you just so emotionally distraught you couldn’t do anything else?”
He added: “If you were relieved, and you had been telling people, ‘I’d rather get ran over by a bus than have this baby,’ that may play into law enforcement’s thinking, too.”
Truman said he was personally opposed to prosecuting women who miscarry, but other law enforcement officials in West Virginia had said they would be willing to do so under laws that dictate the disposal of human remains. Although West Virginia bans virtually all abortions, its ban – like other abortion bans in the US – does not penalize abortion patients but instead people who provide the procedure.
To protect themselves, Truman suggested that women call law enforcement after they have a miscarriage.
“Call your doctor. Call law enforcement, or 911, and just say, ‘I miscarried. I want you to know,’” Truman said.
The wave of state-level abortion bans that followed the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade sparked fears among women and abortion supporters that people who miscarry could face charges over their handling of fetal remains. As abortions and miscarriages – which are known in medical parlance as “spontaneous abortions” – can look deeply similar to medical professionals, abortion bans can incentivize police to treat pregnancy losses like crime scenes.
In 2023, a woman in Ohio was charged with felony abuse of a corpse after she miscarried into a toilet. A grand jury ultimately decided not to indict. Earlier this year, after a Georgia woman suffered a miscarriage and was found bleeding in a parking lot, police charged her with concealing the death of another person and throwing away or abandoning a dead body. Those charges were dropped.
“There is no one-size-fits-all way to handle fetal remains in these situations – in fact, doctors often tell women to simply miscarry at home,” Dana Sussman, senior vice-president of the reproductive-rights organization Pregnancy Justice, said in a statement issued after news of the Georgia case broke.
“No one is taught how to handle fetal remains, and police and prosecutors should not be weighing in on how women in this situation respond.”
