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A woman in Georgia was charged with murder last week after she attempted to have an abortion nearly three months ago.
Alexia Moore, 31, faces felony murder charges for her attempt to abort her fetus using the abortion medication Misoprostol. She also faces charges for possession and use of a controlled substance, as she reportedly used Oxycodone to deal with the pain she believed she would experience from the abortion.
In Georgia, abortion is illegal after six weeks under the state’s so-called “heartbeat” law. It’s unclear how Moore obtained the medication.
Moore was admitted to a hospital in late December after having taken the medications. Her pain was so severe that doctors birthed the fetus, which died hours afterward. Moore was not charged with any crime until last week, and is currently in jail without bond, awaiting a hearing set for Monday.
The murder charges Moore faces are an escalation of the lengths law enforcement and states are going to in order to punish people who exercise autonomy over their own bodies, reproductive rights and abortion journalist Jessica Valenti said in a brief video reporting on the story.
“The fact that they are charging this woman with murder is really relevant because they know they’re not supposed to do it,” Valenti said, noting that Georgia law isn’t supposed to go after individuals who have abortions but rather their providers. “Especially in this case, where they took the first police report on this in December, but they didn’t arrest or charge her until a week ago.”
The delay in charging Moore “means that this is well-considered,” Valenti added. “They had months to think about this, and to decide what to charge her with. And they decided to charge her with murder.”
Law enforcement was called to the hospital in December shortly after it was learned that Moore had attempted to have an abortion. The local sheriff’s department based her eventual arrest on statements from a staffer at the hospital as well as from a friend who drove her there. The arrest warrant also refers to documentation taken by the hospital.
It is believed that this is the first case, following the newer restrictions, in which a person in Georgia has been charged with murder after attempting to self-administer an abortion.
The arrest report does not indicate how many weeks pregnant Moore was, but a friend who she reportedly confided in said she was around 14 weeks pregnant. Fetal viability is generally recognized to be between 22-25 weeks of pregnancy, and the arrest warrant alleges that her pregnancy was closer to being in that timeframe.
Per the warrant, Moore faces charges for “unlawfully and with malice aforethought caus[ing] the death of Baby Girl Moore, a human being who was born alive and survived for one hour.”
Prior to the Supreme Court upending federal abortion protections in the summer of 2022, Moore likely could have received a safe abortion in the state, under the guidance of qualified practitioners, without facing any legal repercussions or harm to her health.
Moore’s mother notes that Moore, an Army veteran with a 6- and 9-year-old child, suffered from post-traumatic stress, relating to and going beyond her military service.
“It was trauma after trauma, it was situation after situation,” Edith Moore said.
A friend of Moore’s also expressed deep concern with the fact that she was being charged with murder.
“She is a great person. She is super bright. She has two amazing little boys that she’s raising to be young men,” that friend said. “It’s just, it’s mind-blowing that she got charged with that over something like this. This is just crazy.”
Abortion rights advocates are criticizing the decision to charge Moore with murder.
“No one should be criminalized for having an abortion,” said Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, adding that the charges are “unprecedented,” and that “no law in the state of Georgia permits such a charge.”
“When lawmakers ban abortion, this becomes an inevitable outcome,” Sussman continued. “Do they really want to send women to prison for abortions? This will cause untold harm to this woman and to the women of Georgia.”
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