Criminal charges brought against a Georgia woman who experienced a miscarriage and allegedly disposed of the fetus in a dumpster were dismissed Friday — a dramatic development in a case that illuminated the complex legal gray area of prosecuting pregnancy loss.
Selena Chandler-Scott, 24, was charged last month with concealing the death of another person and abandoning a dead body after she had a miscarriage, officials said. The fetus was 19 weeks old and had not taken a breath outside the womb, the state medical examiner found.
The review “indicated no signs of life or independent respiration occurred, and no evidence of trauma or foul play was present,” District Attorney Patrick Warren of the Tifton Judicial Circuit said in a statement Friday, announcing the dropped charges.
Georgia law mandates that for someone to be found guilty of concealing a death or abandoning a body, the other person must have been “born and existed separate and independent of its mother,” Warren said, adding that “prosecution is not appropriate” in Chandler-Scott’s case. Georgia does not have laws mandating how a person should dispose of a naturally miscarried, nonviable fetus.
Attempts to reach Chandler-Scott were unsuccessful Friday, and it was not clear whether she had retained an attorney before the charges were dropped. Police in Chandler-Scott’s city of Tifton, Georgia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Tifton, the weeks since her case was made public have been tense. Some community members pressed officials to justify the charges, and others commended them for pursuing the case. Across the country, Chandler-Scott’s situation raised questions about how states can use laws that are not abortion-related to criminalize women after a pregnancy loss — and whether they should.
On Friday, Warren described the case as “disturbing and tragic.”
“I do not condone the way the remains were handled, and I understand that her actions were distressing to many,” he said in his statement. “But my duty is not to punish what feels wrong — it is to uphold the law with fairness and integrity.”
That charges were brought “at all is deeply problematic,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of the advocacy group SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.
“This criminalization of an obstetric emergency is a dire warning: those in power will stop at nothing to control our bodies,” she said in a statement Friday.
On March 20 around 6 a.m., emergency medical personnel responded to a call about a woman who was unconscious and bleeding at an apartment complex, police said in a news release. She had experienced a miscarriage and was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Police recovered the fetus from a dumpster, and the remains were sent for an autopsy.
At the time, police did not publicly identify the woman and no charges were filed. Officials said they would wait for autopsy results and finish interviews to “determine the appropriate course of action.”
The next day, police said they had arrested Chandler-Scott and were charging her with concealing the death of another person and throwing away or abandoning a dead body. When investigators interviewed Chandler-Scott, she told them “she did not know what else to do with the fetal remains,” prosecutors said.
As the investigation continued, Warren stressed that officials were considering the facts in light of Georgia’s laws.
“I want to make sure we take this off of the stage of national attention or what other people want us to do, and we slow down,” Warren told the Georgia-based TV station WALB on Monday. “We treat her as a human being.”
The Tift County 911 office alerted the county coroner to the case before it was transferred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which determined that the fetus was nonviable and had been naturally miscarried. The case did not ultimately fall under the coroner’s purview because the fetus had never taken a breath, Tift County deputy coroner Blair Veazey said Tuesday.
Interest in the concept of fetal personhood — in which a fetus is endowed with the same rights as a living person — has grown since the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion in 2022, said Jill Wieber Lens, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and the author of the book “Stillbirth & the Law.”
In 2023, criminalization of pregnancy outcomes came to the national stage with the case of Brittany Watts, a then-33-year-old Ohio woman who was charged with abuse of a corpse after miscarrying at home. When Watts’s pregnancy ended at 22 weeks, she placed the fetal remains in a bucket outside her home. She was later treated at a hospital, where a nurse reported her to police, leading to the felony charges. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict her.
“These prosecutions are probably more likely to happen in states when abortion is banned,” Lens said. “In ban states, I think you see more suspicion after a pregnancy loss.”
Abortion is illegal in Georgia after six weeks of pregnancy, when fetal cardiac electrical activity can first be detected and before many people know they are pregnant. The ban, which stems from a 2019 “heartbeat bill,” is being challenged in court.
Of 210 pregnancy-related prosecutions in the year after the Supreme Court eliminated federal protection for abortion, 22 involved pregnancy loss, according to a report from Pregnancy Justice, which advocates for the rights of pregnant people.
Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, said the statutes Chandler-Scott was charged under had never before been applied in the context of pregnancy loss or fetal remains.
“On many levels, this was alarming,” Sussman said.
Georgia state Sen. Sally Harrell (D) linked the case to the state’s six-week abortion ban Wednesday and called on her colleagues to overturn that law.
“This case demonstrates the idiocy of fetal personhood,” she said, adding, “It subjects women to either publication of their most private moments or the fearful hiding and shaming of their natural body processes.”