Eight days ago, 23-year-old Kenlissia Jones of Albany swallowed a tablet of Cytotec, a prescription abortion pill she obtained via the Internet. She was more than five months pregnant.
Her brother later told a reporter the family had no money for a trip to a clinic.
When the wracking pains hit, a friend put her in a car bound for the emergency room of Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital. Jones gave birth in the vehicle. The fetus arrived at the hospital alive, surviving for more than 30 minutes.
A social worker summoned the police. Who went before a magistrate and obtained a warrant for malice murder. Jones was arrested and tossed in jail. All authorities working that weekend shift assumed something illegal had happened.
Dougherty County District Attorney Greg Edwards inherited the case when he walked into his office on Monday – along with the calls from journalists from across the country.
Edwards and his staff hit the law books. On Wednesday , he ordered the murder charge dismissed and Jones released. (A misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous drug remains lodged against her.)
That morning, Edwards also issued one of the more extraordinary press releases ever to come out of a district attorney’s office: A two-page, single-spaced, heavily foot-noted thesis on Georgia law and women who end their pregnancies.
“[A]s the law currently stands in Georgia, criminal prosecution of a pregnant woman for her own actions against her unborn child does not seem permitted,” Edwards wrote. “Applicable criminal law and statutes provide explicit immunity from prosecution for a pregnant woman for any unlawful termination of her pregnancy.”
The treatise was partly self-protection. Abortion is as contentious a topic in south Georgia as anywhere else. And Edwards, a Democrat, is up for re-election in 2016.
But it was also an acknowledgement that even those tasked with enforcement of the law don’t always agree about what it says. “[Abortion] is just as divisive among those who interpret and write the law as it is in the rest of society,” Edwards said in a phone interview.
Edwards is president of the District Attorneys Association of Georgia. He declared himself fiercely neutral on the topic of abortion, but said he would likely consult his brother and sister prosecutors to see if any tweaks to state laws on feticide or abortion might be in order. “Clarity is good for prosecutors,” he said.
The case of Kenlissia Jones might have even broader political implications. With fights over religious liberty and gay marriage front and center, the Legislature hasn’t waded deeply into the topic of abortion these last two years.
Yet the issue remains at the heart of the social conservative movement, with different groups in different states pursuing different strategies – all with the same object of getting a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and giving justices the opportunity to overturn the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing a women’s right to abortion.
In Texas, anti-abortion forces have succeeded in pushing laws through their legislature to require clinics to meet the operating standards of full-blown surgery centers – forcing many, if not most, to close.
In Georgia, many anti-abortion activists are working a separate, “personhood” track – a proposed constitutional amendment that would give the unborn the full protection of the law. All abortions would become illegal.
Such legislation has failed in past years, though in 2012, GOP primary voters supported the concept in a non-binding vote. Supporters may try again in January. “We’re in discussion with legislators, but nothing has been finalized,” said Genevieve Wilson, co-executive director for Georgia Right to Life.
But this is where what happened in Albany last Saturday could become a double-edged sword.
In 2011, voters in Mississippi defeated a statewide “personhood” referendum. One of the arguments used against it was that pregnant women might be held criminally culpable – as Jones was last week, at least for three days.
It is an important question. Even in the days when abortions were illegal, the pregnant woman who sought the procedure was held harmless.
A 2013 study published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law — a work cited by women's rights groups — counted more than 200 instances in which actions were initiated against pregnant women since 2005. "Overwhelmingly," the study said, the cases were based "on the claim of separate rights for fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses."
If “personhood” were to become the law in Georgia, I asked Wilson, would women be held culpable in cases of illegal abortions? She said that GRTL had established no position on the issue.
“That would be up to the legislators passing a law. The amendment just puts in the constitution the fact, and legislators would have to decide what kind of laws would be introduced,” Wilson said.
She found the question somewhat frustrating. “What happened to Ms. Jones’ child happens over 3,000 times a day to children of various ages. The only difference is that this time the baby died in the hospital and there’s an arrest,” Wilson said. “Either way, a child is dead.”
It is a difficult discussion, but one that may be headed our way. Again.
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