North Carolina Teen Was Arrested for Allegedly Self-Managing an Abortion

Abortion opponents have long claimed that abortion bans aren’t meant to target pregnant people, but rather the providers who perform the abortions. Time and again, that has proven to be a lie. This time, the target is a teenager.

Just this month, an 18-year-old young woman in Durham, North Carolina, was arrested and charged with a litany of crimes for allegedly self-managing an abortion at 31 weeks “in an attempt to terminate her pregnancy early,” her arrest warrant states. We are not naming her here.

According to law enforcement, after she allegedly took medication abortion at 31 weeks, she sat down on the toilet and gave birth. Someone called 911 — it isn’t clear who — and emergency services arrived at the home. From there, her nightmare continued to escalate.

The News & Observer reports that the young woman has been charged with “assault inflicting serious bodily injury on an unborn child, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury.”

These are serious felonies with years, even decades, of possible prison time accompanying them. This young woman, who only just turned 18 in June, is facing long-term incarceration for allegedly purchasing and using medication abortion — mifepristone and misoprostol, two medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration — to terminate her own pregnancy.

But it’s not clear what the crime actually is. Because the information about this case is from law enforcement, it is understandably suspect. We don’t know if she took medication abortion — the Durham police say that they were told by her partner that she did. There’s no way to prove that she took medication abortion at all,no test that will make clear that she took abortion pills. And even if she did, that isn’t illegal.

“Fundamentally, self-managing an abortion is not a crime,” Dana Sussman, senior vice president at Pregnancy Justice, told Truthout. “North Carolina has rejected fetal personhood, which means that you cannot convert laws around children or other people to apply to embryos and fetuses … there is no basis in North Carolina law for these charges.”

The young woman’s 19-year-old partner is charged with negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury. They are both facing prison time because they were young, pregnant, scared, and lived in a state where her body was subject to an unjust 12-week abortion ban that would have been unconstitutional just four years ago. And there isn’t even a legal basis for the charges in the state.

In the first two years after Roe was overturned, Pregnancy Justice counted 412 pregnant people who have been charged with pregnancy-related crimes, despite abortion opponents’ insistence that they never intended, nor wanted, to see abortion patients prosecuted. “The foundation of [that criminalization] is the use of laws that were never intended to apply to pregnancy,” explained Sussman. The criminalization of pregnancy often relies on reinterpreting existing criminal statutes, including child abuse or drug endangerment, to penalize pregnant people for their pregnancy outcomes, even though these laws were originally written for entirely different purposes. In the case of the North Carolina teenager, “There is very clear language in the statutes that talks about harm to an ‘unborn child’; that is very specific about harm by an external actor to someone who is pregnant. That is not about a pregnant woman or pregnant person doing anything to their own body,” Sussman said.

This is in Durham, one of the bluest counties in the state of North Carolina. Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry publicly vowed in 2022 not to prosecute abortion cases in her district. Deberry’s office did not respond to several requests from Truthout for comment. In a statement to The News & Observer, she said, “What I can say is that I have been on the record over and over again saying I believe a woman has the right to choose and has the right to make decisions about her own body, and we will review the evidence in this case in that light,” she added.

The charges against this teenager should obviously be dropped, but the damage to her life, the trauma of experiencing this kind of state policing in a moment when she needed support the most, can’t be undone. This is the legacy of abortion bans: They punish pregnant people, ensnaring them in the criminal legal system and traumatizing them for the simple fact that they became pregnant and didn’t wish to continue to be pregnant. Dobbs has created a generation of criminalized individuals, and even if those charges are dropped and those convictions overturned, people who can become pregnant know the stakes if they want an abortion. The possible chilling effect of these kinds of arrests can become life and death. If you are having a complication or miscarrying and you live in a banned state, these arrests remind you that you could be imprisoned for asking for help. This is how pregnant people end up dead — not from taking medication abortion or going to an abortion clinic, but from being too scared to access care when they need it.

This isn’t an accident; it’s by design. In recent years, more abortion opponents have embraced criminalizing pregnant people, as if their years of insistence to the contrary were a mere fever dream. This was calculated, an attempt to present a more respectable facade to the public while always knowing where this would lead. Dobbs isn’t about state’s rights and it isn’t about individual choice — it was always meant to be a trap, a net of criminalization for any pregnant person who dared to decide for themselves what they wanted for their own bodies.

And now, it’s ensnared this young woman. There’s no crime here, and the charges should be dropped. But to truly undo this mess, to create a world in which these kinds of charges can never be brought, we’re going to have to stop giving credence to the anti-abortion lie and start naming what abortion bans were always meant to be: a punishment.