Amari Marsh’s life changed after she went into labor unexpectedly in her apartment during the second trimester of her pregnancy in March 2023.
Suggested Reading
The now-23-year-old South Carolina woman says she received a positive result from a home pregnancy test in November 2022, but didn’t visit a doctor because she continued having a period, according to KFF Health News. However things changed dramatically in February 2023 when Marsh took herself to the emergency room after experiencing excruciating pain that was worse than normal menstrual cramps. She went home after waiting several hours to receive treatment, only to come back in an ambulance when the pain got worse.
When she returned, the team treating Marsh told her she was pregnant. She said she left the hospital because she was scared and confused and the pain had gotten better. But some time during the middle of the night, she woke up to more pain and the feeling that she needed to go to the bathroom.
“And when I did, the child came,” she told KFF Health News. “I screamed because I was scared, because I didn’t know what was going on.”
Marsh delivered her baby in her toilet, but as 911 dispatchers told her to remove the baby, the shock left her frozen, according to the story she shared with KFF Health News. It’s unclear why Marsh didn’t take action in the moment, but unfortunately, medical personnel who arrived on the scene were unable to save the baby’s life.
The physical and emotional pain Marsh experienced after her loss was devastating enough. But things were about to get worse. Just three months after losing her daughter, Marsh spent over 20 days at the Orangeburg-Calhoun Regional Detention Center where she was held without bond. Police records show she was charged with murder/homicide by child abuse and facing a sentence of 20 years to life behind bars. Marsh was eventually released and placed on house arrest before she was cleared of all charges by a grand jury.
Although women in South Carolina were allowed to seek abortion care up to 22 weeks gestational age at the time, Marsh’s arrest warrant claims that by not removing the baby from the toilet when the 911 dispatchers told her to was “a proximate cause of her daughter’s death.”
In a post-Roe v. Wade world, women’s reproductive rights is one of the most important issues on the ballot in the 2024 election. While Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claims everyone wanted decisions about women’s health care left up to individual states, a large portion of the country is worried about the consequences of not having legal protections for a woman’s right to make decisions about her body.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization has left lots of complicated grey area in terms of the legal implications of seeking reproductive health care, especially as individual states piece together confusing laws that can have potentially devastating consequences.
A report released by the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice shows that since Roe V. Wade was overturned in 2022, more than 200 people in this country were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies – the highest number of cases in a single year. But the group fears the number could be even higher.
Marsh’s case is a “prime example of how pregnancy loss can become a criminal investigation very quickly,” Dana Sussman, Pregnancy Justice’s Senior Vice President told KFF Health News. “The Dobbs decision unleashed and empowered prosecutors to look at pregnant people as a suspect class and at pregnancy loss as a suspicious event.”
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.