Kenlissia Jones, 23, of Albany was being held at the Dougherty County jail on charges of malice murder and possession of a dangerous drug. District Attorney Greg Edwards said yesterday afternoon that he is reviewing the case, but "as of right now she's still charged."
Jones was arrested Saturday after a county social services worker called police to a hospital, according to an Albany police report. A hospital social worker told police that Jones said she had taken four pills she purchased over the Internet "to induce labor" because she and her boyfriend had broken up.
WALB-TV reported earlier that authorities said Jones was about 5 and a half months pregnant.
Prosecuting Jones seems at odds with Georgia case law, said Lynn Paltrow, an attorney and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a legal group in New York.
She noted state law explicitly prohibits prosecuting women for feticide involving their own pregnancies. And a Georgia appeals court ruled in 1998 that a teenager whose fetus was stillborn after she shot herself in the abdomen could not be prosecuted for performing an illegal abortion. Prosecutors ended up dropping that case.
Genevieve Wilson, a director of the anti-abortion group Georgia Right to Life, said this is the first time she has heard of a woman in Georgia facing a murder charge for ending her pregnancy. And Wilson agreed with Paltrow that feticide and abortion laws in the state have not been used to target women who end their own pregnancies.
"I am very surprised by the arrest," Wilson said. "And I'm thinking that perhaps whoever made the arrest may not have known what the laws really are.