Georgia woman initially charged with two felonies for fetus in dumpster
Update: Since we created the video and transcript below, Tift County District Attorney Patrick Warren has doppped charges against Chandler-Scott, stating “Prosecution is not legally sustainable and not in the interest of justice.” The DA’s office had advised law enforcement to wait until full medical findings were complete before moving forward. It’s unclear why law enforcement decided to charge Chandler-Scott before the investigation was complete. Warren stated Chandler-Scott didn’t violate any criminal law, explaining “there is no specific Georgia statute or case law that addresses an individual’s choice to dispose of a naturally miscarried, non-viable fetus, as it is generally deemed a medical condition and prosecution is not warranted.”
[This article is a transcript of “Georgia woman charged for fetus in dumpster” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
(Video also available on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.)
Horrible story out of Georgia, “Georgia Woman Who Suffered Miscarriage Charged After Fetus Found in Dumpster.” Selena Maria Chandler-Scott, 24-years-old, was found unconscious and bleeding after she had miscarried her 19-week child earlier that day. She placed the body of her child in a bag and put it in the dumpster, and so later on, the Tifton police arrested her and charged her with two felonies: one count of concealing the death of another person and one count of throwing away or abandoning a dead body. The coroner did an autopsy and found that the baby never took a breath and determined that the mom just had a natural miscarriage.
I cannot imagine the trauma of miscarrying your 19-week child by yourself and having it go wrongly enough that you end up unconscious from bleeding, you have to go to the hospital, and then you get arrested and charged with felonies for how you handled the body. I’ve seen a lot of people give opinions on whether they thought that throwing the body in the dumpster was a respectful or appropriate thing to do, and I have more thoughts on that in a second, but even if you think that it was a cruel or terrible thing to do, I still think it’s hard to get from that to, therefore, we should charge someone with felonies and arrest them.
I continue to be appalled at how little society understands miscarriage, and I mean that both in the sense of interpersonal relationships–how little people understand the emotional or psychological or physical effects of miscarriage–and also in terms of formal institutions and how little we have appropriate protocols for helping people who are going through it, which is kind of crazy given how incredibly common miscarriage is and how women have been experiencing miscarriage since humans existed.
Some of the people complaining that it was disrespectful for her to put her child’s body in the dumpster are suggesting she should have taken the remains to the hospital instead. The hospital would treat them as medical waste and incinerate them, and there is a good argument that that’s probably safer from a public health standpoint, but I think it’s hard to argue that’s somehow more respectful.
Maybe she could have taken the remains to a funeral home. I learned when I miscarried in California that a lot of funeral homes will not deal with miscarried remains at all. We had to call several before we found one who could work with us, and even then we couldn’t have just taken the remains to the funeral home, we still had to have them released to the funeral home from a medical facility.
There are medical facilities that will not do that, they won’t honor the parents wishes of how to handle the remains. This is a common problem talked about in pregnancy loss groups.
[Read more – No, Pennsylvania is not fining women for miscarriages.]
The hospital that I was working with didn’t refuse to honor our wishes, but I had to educate them on how to deal with the remains in a way that they could still be legally released to the funeral home, and how to release them to the funeral home in any kind of timely manner, which, again, I will say is kind of crazy because this was a hospital in an urban environment in California. How many times a week do you think they interface with women who are dealing with miscarriage? And yet they just had no idea how to accommodate someone who wanted the remains released to a funeral home. Do you think I’m the first person in California to want to have my miscarried remains released to a funeral home? I’m not.
[Read more – When miscarriage is an emotional crisis, medical professionals can help.]
With the dramatic rise of the use of abortion pills and at-home abortions and whatever, it’s become clear in the last couple years how few people understand how often women miscarry their remains into toilets. They talk about “toilet bowl abortions” as if the only time anyone would ever end up having the embryonic or fetal remains in the toilet is from a purposeful at home abortion, and they don’t realize the grotesque and stigmatizing ways they’re describing this apply to countless women who have miscarried also. I’ve seen pro-lifers opine about how inappropriate and degrading it is to flush the remains of your miscarried children down the toilet, clearly having no idea that probably at least some of the people they’re mouthing off to have gone through that.
It’s common in pregnancy loss groups for people to feel really traumatized and horrified when they don’t realize what they’re about to go through, partly because society doesn’t talk about miscarriage in general, and so we have the added bonus of, in addition to losing your children, having no preparation for what it’s going to be like, and then they end up miscarrying into a toilet not realizing they don’t know what to do with the remains. Some women try to fish it out and then maybe, I don’t know, bury them in the backyard. Some women panic and flush and then really wish they never had. The point is that it’s confusing, it’s traumatic, and society does not educate or prepare people to handle it when they’re in the situation or to support others they know who go through it.
And there’s an analogy here even to a 19-week miscarriage. If we lived in a society where there were established, respectful protocols, where everyone knew what they needed to do or who they needed to call if they went through something like this, I would be more sympathetic to the arguments that she was so disrespectful or cruel to throw her baby’s body in the dumpster. But we don’t live in a society like that, so I’m not.
At Secular Pro-Life, we are passionately against abortion. The overwhelming majority of abortions are performed on otherwise healthy embryos and fetuses carried by healthy women when there is no dire medical situation present at all. These are unnecessary deaths. These are unjustified deaths.
But there is zero reason why you can’t hold the position I just described, where you’re against abortion, and at the same time be against charging women with felonies depending on how they handle the remains of their naturally miscarried children. This was an uncompassionate, thoughtless, ignorant use of the law, and it should not have happened.
Post-recording addendum: In response to the above video, SPL followers shared their own stories of miscarriage, with common themes of shock, confusion, and a society ill-equipped to really help. We’re humbled and honored that you shared these experiences with us. We share these stories here in the hopes other will read, learn, and help us build a more compassionate culture.
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