South Carolina Miscarriage Patient Turned in to Child Protective Services
Our reporter was vaguely threatened with jail after looking into the patient’s subsequent arrest
Jessica Valenti and Kylie Cheung
Jul 25, 2025

A few weeks ago, Abortion, Every Day told you about a South Carolina woman arrested for “desecration of human remains” after losing her pregnancy and placing fetal remains in the trash. The 31-year-old, who we identified only as “B,” faces up to ten years in prison for the felony charge.

AED came across this story the way we do most pregnancy criminalization cases: The local media had splashed B’s mugshot and name across crime pages, claiming she used a “plastic bag to dump stillborn baby.”

It’s a tactic we’ve seen again and again in a familiar, horrific pattern: A vulnerable woman of color in the midst of a medical trauma is charged with a crime like ‘abuse of a corpse’ or ‘abandoning a dead body,’ her name dragged through the mud as a callous murderer.

As Karen Thompson, legal director of Pregnancy Justice, told us when we first broke the story, what happened to B “is a medical event, not a criminal one.”

One of the first things AED did when we found B’s story was contact the Florence County Sheriff’s Office to get as much publicly available information as possible. They were not particularly forthcoming—at one point after our request, B’s arrest record was even scrubbed from the county website. (It has since returned.)

Today, after weeks of follow-up by reporter Kylie Cheung, the sheriff’s office finally sent AED the incident report from B’s case. Somehow it’s even worse than we first reported.

The “stillborn baby” that local media claimed B “dumped” was actually an 18-week miscarriage. While any ‘desecration’ arrest for pregnancy loss is absurd, there is no universe in which an 18-week fetus is considered viable.

And B’s arrest? It happened after she went to the hospital for medical care—and someone there called child protective services.

That’s right, apparently in South Carolina, a miscarriage is cause for a child abuse investigation. As If/When/How attorney Farah Diaz-Tello told AED, “Once law enforcement decides they want to punish somebody, they’re going to try to find a way to do it.”

Unfortunately, it’s not a surprise that B appears to have been turned in by one of the medical professionals tasked with helping her. The hospital-to-jail pipeline is real: Organizations like Pregnancy Justice and If/When/How have published reports showing that when someone is targeted for their pregnancy outcome, it’s most often health care providers who turn them in. I will never forget that the nurse who rubbed Brittany Watts’ back in sympathy after her pregnancy loss later called 911 to claim she left a ‘baby’ in a ‘bucket’.

Criminal charges stemming from miscarriage remains aren’t uncommon, either. In addition to Watts, who was charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’ for flushing her miscarriage, we reported this year on a Texas woman who spent five months in jail after miscarrying in a public restroom, and a young Georgia woman who was charged with ‘concealing a death’ after placing fetal remains in the trash.

So, even when they know that they are wrong, they continue to try and find ways to punish women for what should be HEALTHCARE ISSUES.