ATLANTA — A Georgia woman is no longer facing a murder charge for using an abortion pill to end the life of her unborn child late in her pregnancy.

However, the case highlights a problem: Women are able to obtain abortion drugs off the Internet without a prescription. And the case also demonstrated the contradictory state of contemporary U.S. law when it comes to protection of unborn lives.

Kenlissia Jones, 23, had taken the abortion pill Cytotec, which requires a prescription, when she went into labor and delivered her unborn child at five and a half months gestation in the back of a car. According to local reports, Jones’ child lived only 30 minutes and was pronounced dead at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Ga., on Saturday.

Dougherty County District Attorney Greg Edwards had originally planned to charge Jones with malice murder, but he dropped the charge on Wednesday. In a statement, Edwards said upon further review his staff determined that “Georgia law presently does not permit prosecution of Ms. Jones for any alleged acts related to the end of her pregnancy.”

Jones, however, still faces a misdemeanor charge for unlawful possession of a dangerous substance.

Edwards indicated in his statement that he has not ruled out going after the Canadian-based Internet provider that sold the abortion pill to Jones, but that was as far as the law permitted him to go.

“Although third parties could be criminally prosecuted for their actions relating to an illegal abortion, as the law currently stands in Georgia, the criminal prosecution of a pregnant woman for her own actions against her unborn child does not seem permitted.”

 

Heartbreaking Tragedy

“This has been a heartbreaking tragedy,” Genevieve Wilson, co-executive director of Georgia Right to Life, told the Register.

“Abortion is not the quick fix,” she said. “It is obvious that Ms. Jones and her family are suffering now because of what she did.”

Wilson agreed with the DA’s decision not to prosecute Jones on a murder charge. She said Jones was also a victim of a legal regime that states abortion is “acceptable and okay.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, Jones’ brother, Ricco Riggins, said he believed that his sister may not have understood the gravity of what she was doing.

“At the end of the day, she is mentally unstable. It doesn’t make it right to take a life, too, but still,” he said.

Riggins told the Post that he and his wife would never choose abortion, adding that he believed that his sister was ignorant of the law’s restrictions, destitute and sought a cheap means of abortion, so as to “not burden anyone else or burden herself” with a newborn.

“I hate it all the way around, but that’s the truth of the matter,” he said.

Wilson said that pregnancy-resource centers potentially could have connected Jones with either private organizations, relevant government services or a combination of community-based resources to help her care for her child.

“Part of the problem is that, unfortunately, the women in need can’t seem to find the centers,” she said. “We need to find a way to connect the women who need this help to the pregnancy-resource centers.”

But charging Jones with illegal drug possession is the wrong move and “somewhat hypocritical,” explained Wilson.

“We’re very shocked,” she said. “There are all sorts of websites out there offering prescription medications, and you’ll find that there are lots of governmental agencies that do the same thing.”

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a public interest firm that supports legal access to abortion, agreed there are negative social ramifications to consider regarding prosecuting women in such circumstances.

“If a woman fears that by seeking help for any aspect of pregnancy — continuing to term, experiencing a miscarriage or stillbirth or having an abortion — she can go to jail, there is no good reason for her to seek help,” Paltrow said. “That, ultimately, is bad for babies.”
 

Abortion-Pill Concerns

The ability to obtain abortion drugs from the Internet without physician oversight or a prescription is a concern to some medical professionals.

“It is easy to obtain drugs that can cause abortions over the Internet,” said Donna Harrison, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “It’s a terrible public-health concern, because any chemical abortion gets riskier and riskier the further she is along in pregnancy.”

Cytotec is the brand name for misoprostol, the drug that expels an unborn child in the RU-486 chemical-abortion regimen.

However, obtaining Cytotec in the U.S. legally requires a prescription, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations state that misoprostol’s abortion use is limited to the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

“One of the most important things the doctor does is figure out how far along she is,” said Harrison, explaining that some companies providing abortion drugs are using doctors who have never seen the patient to sign off on the order. She said women may have irregular periods, and at least 50% of women are not accurate in judging how far along they are based on their last menstrual periods.

“Without anybody supervising these women or screening them, they are at tremendous risk for major hemorrhage — from dying by bleeding to death, especially if they are later [along] than they think they are,” she said.

“The added tragedy is that, at five and a half months, the baby might have survived if the baby had been delivered at a place where the baby could have received care,” Harrison said. “At five and a half months, that’s a baby who could have survived.”

According to FDA consumer warnings, there are many rogue sites that may look professional but are illegal operations selling unapproved drugs that may have wrong or dangerous ingredients.

“Claiming to be a Canadian pharmacy is one of the hallmarks of Internet sites that sell illegal prescription drugs, which, in many cases, are not made in Canada at all, but in a number of other countries,” FDA spokesman Jeff Ventura told the Register. 

Ventura explained the agency cracks down on these companies on a case-by-case basis in light of the FDA's limited resources and the assessed danger to public health.

“Even if an online Canadian pharmacy is legitimate, in general, U.S. citizens cannot legally import prescription drugs from other countries,” he said. 

 

Conflicting Legal Messages

Generally, women in the United States who obtain abortions illegally do not face prosecution. However, some states have prosecuted women under fetal-harm laws for drug abuse.

Georgia has a law banning abortion past the 20th week of pregnancy, which has been temporarily blocked by a state judge. Post-first trimester abortions are required to be performed in hospitals or a licensed ambulatory surgical or abortion facility.

While Georgia’s fetal-homicide law mandates a life sentence for deliberately killing an unborn child, the law also explicitly excludes prosecuting “any woman with respect to her child.”

“Abortion creates a large number of contradictions in the law,” said Casey Mattox, senior counsel with the public interest firm Alliance Defending Freedom. He said the state has a “strong interest” in protecting an unborn child’s life, especially one that at five and a half months was on the point of viability and could feel pain. However, “Roe v. Wade introduces all of these contradictory elements in the law, where we have to treat abortion differently than we would any other medical procedure.”

Mattox pointed out that, in some states, a woman can be liable for misusing drugs that harm a child she intends to keep, but then not be liable if she intended to end her pregnancy. This, he said, sends the message that “negligence is worse than intent.” He added that states ordinarily have enormous power to prosecute prescription-drug abuse that they cannot exercise “in the abortion context.”

“Certainly if this woman did not have the mental capacity to make those decisions by herself, she deserves all sympathy for whatever mental condition she was suffering from,” Mattox said. “But there are all these distortions in the law created by these abortion decisions that don’t even allow you to get to that point.”

 Peter Jesserer Smith is the Register’s Washington correspondent.