Georgia woman charged with murder after police say she took abortion pills to end pregnancy
A 31-year-old Georgia woman has been charged with murder by police who say she took pills to induce an abortion in violation of a state law that bans it after the earliest weeks of pregnancy.
If state prosecutors decide to move forward with the murder charge brought by local police against Alexia Moore, her case would be one of the first instances of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions.
The arrest warrant charging Moore with murder uses language that echoes the law, saying police determined Moore had been pregnant beyond six weeks "based on the medical staff's knowledge that the baby had a beating heart and was struggling to breathe."
"No one should be criminalized for having an abortion," Dana Sussman, senior vice president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice said in a statement, calling Moore's case "an unprecedented murder charge for an alleged abortion."
Court records say Moore arrived at a hospital Dec. 30 complaining of abdominal pain. She told medical workers that she had taken misoprostol, a drug used in medication abortions, and the opioid painkiller oxycodone, according to an arrest warrant obtained by police in Kingsland, about 100 miles south of Savannah.
The fetus survived for about an hour after being delivered at the hospital, the warrant says. The police investigator obtaining the warrant wrote that Moore told the nursing staff: "I know my infant is suffering, because I am the one who did the abortion. I want her to die."
Georgia bans abortion after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected. That's generally at about six weeks' gestation — before many women know they're pregnant.
Moore has been jailed in coastal Camden County since March 4 on charges of murder and illegal drug possession, according to online jail records.
A 2024 study by the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice found that at least 210 women across the U.S. were charged with crimes related to their pregnancies in the 12 months after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to enforce abortion bans.
That tally was more than the group found in any other 12 month period. Most of the cases involved allegations of substance use during pregnancy.
Moore's mother said she had no immediate comment when reached by phone Thursday. A spokesperson for the Georgia Public Defender Council confirmed one of its attorneys is representing Moore but made no further comment.
Court records show Moore's attorney has filed legal motions seeking a bond and a speedy trial. A court hearing was scheduled for Monday.
Ultimately, the decision on whether to prosecute Moore for murder will be left to District Attorney Keith Higgins of the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, who would first have to obtain an indictment from a grand jury. Higgins did not immediately return phone and email messages.
The warrant said medical records estimated Moore had been pregnant for 22 to 24 weeks, placing her fetus at the threshold of viability. It refers to Moore's fetus as "a human being who was born alive and survived for one hour. Under Georgia law, the victim became a person at the moment of live birth."
Georgia's abortion law states that an embryo is legally a person once cardiac activity can be detected. Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia defense attorney who is not involved in Moore's case, said that means authorities could seek murder charges against a woman who intentionally terminates her pregnancy after there's cardiac activity.
"Murder is intentionally causing the death of a person," he said, adding that he and others warned before the law passed that a mother could be charged in a case like this.
"I'm not sure prosecutors are eager to be the first one to jump this hurdle," Fleishman said. "I think it's a totally legally permissible case. I think they could do it. I'd be surprised if they go through with it."
Georgia's so-called "heartbeat law" is among the restrictive abortion statutes that have been put in place in many conservative-leaning states since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Elizabeth Edmonds, executive director of the anti-abortion Georgia Life Alliance, said any claim that the charges stem from the 2019 abortion law is "misrepresenting the facts and trying to again make it a fear-mongering thing that Georgia is prosecuting women on pregnancy outcomes."
Edmonds said she believed the murder charge was appropriate in part because Moore is accused of illegally obtaining and taking oxycodone before her fetus died.
The warrant says a toxicology screening detected oxycodone in the fetus' blood, but police were told the test would not be able to detect misoprostol. It says Moore told police she obtained the abortion pills online and got the opioid from a relative.
Camden County Coroner M. Wayne Peeples said Thursday that he was called to Southeast Georgia Health System's hospital to take custody of the remains. He said the Georgia Bureau of Investigation declined to perform an autopsy, noting the fetus was delivered in a hospital.
The coroner said he didn't rule the death as a homicide, instead finding both the cause and manner of death were undetermined.
Moore also faces charges for possessing oxycodone, a controlled drug that wasn't prescribed to her, as well as possession of a dangerous drug for the abortion-inducing misoprostol.
The drugs misoprostol and mifepristone together are approved for terminating pregnancies during the first 10 weeks of gestation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Misoprostol can also be used alone if mifepristone is not available. It's also used off-label for abortion in the second trimester.
The Supreme Court in 2024 rejected a challenge targeting the availability of mifepristone. Opponents had filed a lawsuit in Texas claiming the FDA shouldn't have approved the drug back in 2000. In 2024, Louisiana classified mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances. Similar legislation has been introduced in some other states and in Congress, but has not been adopted elsewhere.