For Chelsea Becker, a fourth pregnancy at 25 years old was complicated from the start, challenged by her homelessness and an addiction to methamphetamine.
It ended in a stillbirth, a murder charge, and more than 16 months behind bars in California.
“I was not prepared for that,” said Becker, describing a “very traumatic, nightmarish experience” after she was arrested in 2019 and accused of murdering her unborn son at 38 weeks of pregnancy.
“At the end of the day, I’m the one that lives with the loss,” she said of the baby she’d named Zachariah. “And that can only motivate me to do better.”
Becker, who was released from Kings County Jail last year after the case was dismissed due to a lack of evidence, is speaking out about her prosecution for the first time to ABC News, as advocates across the country warn that criminal charges for women who miscarry or lose a pregnancy are set to become more common after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Thousands of American women every year experience pregnancy loss, according to government data. Experts say most miscarriages or stillbirths are unintentional and of unknown cause; but criminal investigations of pregnant women have been on the rise in some states, advocates say.
“These are not charges that we see every single day, but we know that they are increasing,” said Dana Sussman, acting executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), which supported Becker in her legal case.
“We expect more of these cases in a post-Roe world,” Sussman said of the high court’s decision ending constitutional protection of a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy. “We think that prosecutors will feel more emboldened than they have been to police pregnancy.”
According to NAPW, there have been over 1,700 pregnancy-related arrests or prosecutions in the United States since 1973. The vast majority of those cases occurred in the last 15 years, with the vast majority occurring in states in the South and Central Plains.
Becker’s case, which took place in California’s conservative Central Valley, provides insight into the contentious prosecutions, their potential impact on women, and the motivations of local district attorneys who pursue them.
“The word ‘fetus’ is in our murder statute with the exception for abortion, but it had to be a therapeutic abortion under a doctor’s care,” said Kings County District Attorney Keith Fagundes, who approved the decision to charge Becker with murder in late 2019.
Murder is defined as the “unlawful killing of a human being, or a foetus, with malice aforethought,” or premeditated intent, with exceptions only for lawful abortions or when “the act was solicited, aided, abetted, or consented to by the mother of the foetus.”
Fagundes is the only California district attorney in the last 30 years to file Section 187 charges for a stillbirth, and he did so twice.
“If these women were to inject their 1-day-old baby with a needle with these drugs, everybody would be up in arms,” he said. “Not one judge has said this is legally deficient. I’m not reading the law wrong.”
Fagundes prosecuted Adora Perez, who is also from Becker’s hometown and was addicted to meth during her pregnancy, in 2018. She pleaded guilty to foetal manslaughter and served four years in prison before her 11-year sentence was overturned.
“The goal was to get them clean,” Fagundes said of the Perez and Becker cases. “We can’t bring these dead babies back. We can’t undo the harm they did to the other children that they’ve given birth to under drugs. But we can try to stop their conduct from moving forward.”
The Kings County medical examiner said toxic levels of illicit drugs caused the death of the fetuses in both cases; but Becker’s legal team argues that three unrelated infections were to blame and that there’s no scientific evidence meth ends pregnancies.
“Addiction is a medical condition,” said Dr. Mishka Terplan, a member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ working group on pregnancy and addiction medicine. “Using drugs in pregnancy is rarely associated with a pregnancy loss, much less causally associated with that loss. Yet it’s those falsehoods upon which some of these legal decisions rest.”
In response to widespread public outrage over Becker and Perez, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a non-binding legal alert to all 58 state prosecutors in January, advising them to refrain from charging women with murder for a miscarriage or stillbirth because the legislature never intended it.
State lawmakers recently amended Section 187 to clarify this, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the changes into law.
“I just kind of ignored that I had a [drug] problem, and I felt like I was in control,” Becker said of her addiction. “In retrospect, I realise I was clearly out of control.”
“But at what point does a woman have a right to say, like, ‘Hey, this happened to me and this may have been an act that I contributed to, but this does not mean I intended for my child to die’?”
The pregnancy loss prosecutions are a tapestry of American tragedy.
Brittney Poolaw, 22, of Oklahoma, is serving a four-year state prison sentence for manslaughter after miscarrying her child at around 15-17 weeks and admitting to methamphetamine abuse while pregnant. The medical examiner did not assign a cause of foetal death, but prosecutors and a jury agreed on her drug use.
Christine Taylor of Iowa was 22 years old when she was charged with attempted feticide in 2010 after falling down her home’s stairs after a heated argument with her husband. First responders stated that they had reason to believe she did not want her child. The child was saved, and the charges were eventually dropped.
Jennifer Jorgensen was eight months pregnant when she crashed into another vehicle in New York in 2008, killing two people and injuring her own foetus. The baby died six days later after she had an emergency caesarean section. Jurors found her guilty of second-degree manslaughter in her baby’s death after prosecutors claimed she was driving under the influence of a prescription drug and alcohol while not wearing her seatbelt.
However, an appeals court overturned her prison sentence, ruling that state lawmakers never intended to hold a pregnant woman accountable for unintentionally harmful behavior.
“There are prosecutors who’ve told me that they see by their criminal intervention in those pregnancies, from their point of view, they are saving babies,” said Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood.”
“Sadly, the canaries in the coal mine have basically been Black and brown women who’ve suffered,” Goodwin said.
Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach during a fight in an Alabama store parking lot in 2018. Following her miscarriage, a grand jury of her peers charged her, not the woman who fired the gunshot, with manslaughter for allegedly putting her fetus in danger.
After an outpouring of national outrage, the local prosecutor reversed course and withdrew the charges.
“People who are at their very lowest point, especially women who have lost their children, feel that they’re maybe at the point of no return. But, you know, I’ve been there and I returned,” said Becker, who is now sober, holding a steady job, and studying to obtain a degree in public health.
Advocates for pregnant women say the proliferation of so-called fetal personhood legislation in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision has heightened their concern about prosecutions, an effort that would grant an unborn child the same legal rights as a living person.
According to NAPW, at least 11 states already have broad personhood language in their existing laws that could be interpreted to include fetuses.
“Those laws can transform entire criminal codes and civil codes to apply in the context of pregnancy,” said Sussman, the group’s acting executive director. “Medical providers in states that are prosecuting pregnancy have been outspoken and said they don’t want their patients prosecuted. It makes their jobs to serve their patients much harder.”
For his part, the district attorney who charged Becker and Perez in California is unconcerned.
“We have [medical personnel] investigate child abuse. We have them investigate spousal abuse. We have them investigate mental health circumstances. They already have a responsibility as citizens in our communities,” he said.
While Fagundes considers the Becker and Perez prosecutions to be success stories from his tenure as DA, Kings County voters chose not to re-elect him in June, instead electing his primary challenger, Sarah Hacker, who will become the first woman to hold the position when she is sworn in next year.
“To have a DA abuse his power and overcharge a case illegally for the sake of forcing women into custody is disgusting,” Hacker said. “The voters, in general, disagree with the way that their current administration is prosecuting cases.”
Becker’s supporters see the election results as a minor victory in their campaign to improve the treatment of pregnant women who lose their unborn children.
“I think that it’s crucial to provide women with a sense of empowerment, and that begins with getting clean and having those resources available to them,” Becker said. “It doesn’t necessarily happen on the level of prosecution.”
