When Miscarrying Leads to Imprisonment: El Salvador’s Past, Georgia’s Present

Georgia's treatment of abortion much like what we've seen in South America.

By Kwajelyn Jackson and Paula Ávila-Guillén

In El Salvador, miscarriages are treated like murder scenes. Women wake up in hospital beds in handcuffs — bleeding, grieving, and under arrest. Now, Georgia is following the same playbook.

The uptick in laws introduced to treat abortion as murder, a push to give legal rights to fetuses, is the latest in attacks on pregnant people and healthcare providers. In 2025 so far, lawmakers have introduced bills in at least 10 states, including Georgia and Texas, that aim to charge pregnant women with homicide if they seek out or receive an abortion. Laws like these not only erode our bodily autonomy, but they also criminalize miscarriages and obstetric emergencies.

This isn’t hyperbole. In Georgia, 24-year-old Selena Maria Chandler Scott was found by police unconscious and bleeding after a miscarriage. Instead of receiving care, she was arrested and charged with “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body.” She needed care and instead got handcuffed. And just last month in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the arrests of three individuals, including a midwife, for violating the state’s restrictive abortion ban. The arrests of Maria Rojas, and two employees of her network of clinics near Houston, represented the first criminal charges against individuals since Texas enacted its near-total abortion ban in 2021.

Data shows that abortion bans and highly restrictive laws don’t reduce the need for abortions, they instead turn pregnancy into a site of suspicion and surveillance. The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision led to total abortion bans in 14 states and early abortion bans in several other states. Millions of people lost access to the procedure, with the majority living in the South. The fallout of these bans is that pregnancy outcomes can now be surveilled and criminalized. Women, particularly Black, Brown, young, and low-income, risk going straight from the hospital to prison.

We have witnessed the criminalization of miscarriage first-hand in Latin America, in countries like El Salvador where women are sentenced to decades in prison under one of the world's most extreme abortion bans. Many of them suffered obstetric emergencies — miscarriages and stillbirths — only to wake up handcuffed to hospital beds, accused of murder, and sentenced to 30 or 40 years behind bars.

This kind of cruelty doesn’t stay contained to one country — it metastasizes. Now we’re hearing more stories like the ones in El Salvador here in the U.S. Georgia and Texas are not outliers. This is what happens when legal systems treat pregnancy outcomes as suspicious and when extremist ideology writes the laws.

Anti-abortion legislators in Georgia attempted to fast-track House Bill 441, the “Prenatal Equal Protection Act” that would allow pregnant people to be prosecuted for murder. The bill failed to make it out of committee, but it demonstrates how anti-abortion politicians and leaders are using all their power to push an agenda that criminalizes pregnancy outcomes and chips away at our rights.

Georgia has one of the strictest abortion bans and one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country. Black women are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy complications compared to white women, largely due to the absence of Medicaid expansion, a shortage of OBGYNs, and a racist healthcare system. Independent abortion providers, including the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation (Feminist Center), are overwhelmed by legal chaos, out-of-state patient demand, and resource constraints. Most patients are Black and low-income, uninsured, already facing systemic barriers to care, and often receive racist mistreatment from providers they should be able to trust. Black people already face heightened state surveillance and incarceration. Over half the prison population in Georgia is Black, in contrast to the roughly 31% of Black residents who make up the state’s overall adult population. Pregnancy in Georgia is already dangerous for Black people. Now it also comes with the threat of criminalization — and loss of freedom.

In El Salvador, more than 180 women, overwhelmingly poor, isolated, and from rural communities, have been prosecuted for obstetric emergencies. Many were sentenced to decades in prison after experiencing miscarriages or stillbirths. A coalition of international human rights organizations, including Women’s Equality Center, have supported the release of over 65 women who were sentenced to up to 40 years in prison under homicide charges. These women shared stories of waking up shackled after childbirth, many times still bleeding and the court documents prove that their miscarriages were treated like murder scenes. These women mourned the loss of their pregnancies and their freedom.

Criminalizing pregnancy outcomes shifts the burden of proof – the pregnant person must now prove that they didn’t do anything wrong. Supporters of Georgia’s HB 441 claim it wouldn’t apply to miscarriages. Ms. Scott’s arrest shows how easily vague laws and anti-abortion rhetoric are weaponized. If her arrest wasn’t the goal, legislators should have demanded her immediate release. Instead, she was behind bars for over a week for how she disposed of her miscarriage.

Making pregnancy loss a crime is what these abortion bans and personhood laws do in the US and worldwide. They create a class of people whose suffering is punished — not supported. Reproductive freedom means the right to grieve without handcuffs, and the right to heal without fear.

El Salvador shows us what happens when reproductive health is criminalized to its extreme. Georgia proves we are already on that path in the U.S. This is what happens when we allow politics to override humanity. One of us has had a miscarriage, and it was one of the most vulnerable experiences. It’s unimaginable to think of being forced to speak to police while bleeding, grieving, and in pain. But that’s the reality that Georgia, Texas, and other states across the US are moving toward.

No one should lose their freedom because their pregnancy ended too soon. Surviving a miscarriage, surviving the grief and the pain felt insurmountable — but surviving that under threat is inhumane. If we allow this to continue, we are sentencing people in Georgia and in the United States not just to prison, but to suffering.

Now is not the time for silence. We must demand a future where care replaces punishment, and where grief is met with compassion — not jail time.

The question isn’t whether this will happen again — it’s whether we’ll continue to look away.

Kwajelyn Jackson is executive director of Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation. Paula Avila-Guillen is a human rights lawyer, activist, and executive director of the Women’s Equality Center