Alexia Moore and the attempted murder charge
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“Georgia woman charged with murder after police say she took pills to induce an abortion.” On December 30th, 2025, Alexia Moore went to the hospital complaining of abdominal pain. She told medical workers that she had taken misoprostol and oxycodone.
This is the death investigation incident report. I know it’s hard to see, but in it, the police officer talks about how he had a blue pill bottle and it had a generic label on it and it said misoprostol 200 milligrams. The fill date was November 20th, 2025, with instructions on how to take the meds. It appeared that it was an item that could have been purchased off the internet. It didn’t have a physician’s name, pharmacy name, warning labels, anything like that.
It jumped out to me that it was apparently prescribed November 20th, and then apparently Alexia Moore didn’t take the misoprostol until December 29th. When people mail abortion pills, they don’t have to verify the gestational age of the woman who is pregnant. They don’t have to verify that she’s taking the pills when she said she was going to or when they said that she should. They don’t even have to verify that she takes the pills versus giving them to someone else. They don’t have to verify anything. Mailing abortion pills this way is totally reckless.
She gave birth to a baby girl who was later estimated to be somewhere between 22 and 24 weeks gestation. The girl struggled to breathe for about an hour and then died. The coroner detected oxycodone in the baby girl’s blood, but he didn’t have a test for misoprostol, and he ruled the cause and manner of death undetermined.
The media is reporting that Moore is charged with murder, and I get why they think that because if you go to the booking page, it says “murder” right there. But you have to know that you scroll horizontally, and when you do, you’ll see that it’s actually attempted murder. She’s also being charged with possession of dangerous drugs and attempted possession of a schedule II controlled substance.
Charges for murder versus attempted murder might sound like basically the same thing, but the evidentiary standards are going to be different. Either way, it remains to be seen if a prosecutor decides to go forward with the case, and if so, if a grand jury will decide to indict.
I’ve seen some groups argue that this has nothing to do with Georgia’s LIFE Act, which is their pro-life law, and instead it’s about how Moore took oxycodone, which caused respiratory distress for her baby. And that could be the case, but it doesn’t appear to me that that’s the whole story based on publicly available information so far. The arrest warrant at one point talked about how the child was beyond six weeks gestation, which would be an odd thing to specify unless you’re referencing Georgia’s LIFE Act.
At the same time, the reality is that the officers and attorneys involved in these cases don’t always themselves fully understand how the laws are meant to work, and we have seen this in a couple of incidents. In this situation, the warrant said that under Georgia law, the victim became a person at the moment of live birth. But actually, Georgia law considers personhood beginning with embryonic heartbeat. Last December in Kentucky, Melinda Spencer was charged with fetal homicide after taking abortion pills, and then later the prosecutors dropped the charges when they “discovered” that Kentucky law doesn’t allow for those charges. But Kentucky law is explicit in its exemption of women who get abortions from criminal penalties. Georgia law is not. There is case law suggesting there’s an exemption, but it’s not explicitly written into the text of the LIFE Act.
All that to say, we’ll have to wait and see what’s going to happen.
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