A 31-year-old Georgia woman was reportedly charged with murder after allegedly taking abortion pills. This is the first time someone has been charged under a Georgia abortion law which was passed in 2019.
Alexia Moore, a U.S. Army veteran, was pregnant and in extreme pain when she was taken to the emergency room at a hospital in Camden County in December, non-profit news outlet The Current reported.
Police said the baby was severely premature when doctors delivered her at Southeast Georgia Health System hospital. She later died.
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Moore was charged on March 4 with attempted murder and possession of a controlled substance. This was then upgraded to a murder charge.
A security guard at the hospital notified the Kingsland Police Department about the abortion.
The arrest report states that a friend who came to the hospital with Moore said she took misoprostol, an abortion pill, as well as pain medication, at home.
However, The Current notes that some of Moore’s friends contradict the police’s narrative, with one denying to the publication that she’d taken any abortion pills.
The arrest report says Kingsland Police found a blue medicine bottle labeled with Alexia Moore’s name and “Misoprostol” on it, though it did not include the physician or pharmacy’s name, nor any warning labels. This led the police investigator to conclude that the pills were bought online.
Under Georgia’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, which was also known as the “fetal heartbeat” bill, abortions are banned once a fetus’ cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually around the six-week mark. Police claimed in an arrest warrant that Moore’s pregnancy was “well beyond six weeks,” according to The Washington Post.
Alexia’s mother Edith Moore, a local pastor, said in an interview with The Current that her daughter is an “excellent mother” to her six-year-old and nine-year-old.
“I believe her children are her life. She has been a good provider for her children,” Edith Moore said.
In the first year since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, over 210 people across the United States “faced criminal charges for conduct associated with pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth,” advocacy group Pregnancy Justice found. A majority of these arrests, Pregnancy Justice said, happened in places that enshrined fetal personhood in their civil and criminal laws, including Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina.
Still, the number of women getting abortions has risen even after the Supreme Court Decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ended the constitutional right to abortion.
Researchers cite the growing use of abortion pills such as mifepristone and misoprostol, and the expansion of telemedicine, as reasons why. Abortions done through medication accounted for 63% of all abortions in 2023, up from 53% in 2020, the Guttmacher Institute said.
