Murder charge dropped against Georgia woman who induced abortion

A Georgia prosecutor says he has dismissed murder charges against Kenlissia Jones, 23, who was accused of inducing an abortion by taking pills.

Dougherty County District Attorney Greg Edwards said in a statement Wednesday that she has been released from jail but still faces a misdemeanor charge of dangerous drug possession.

"Georgia law presently does not permit prosecution of Ms. Jones for any alleged acts related to the end of her pregnancy," he said.

She was arrested Saturday in Albany after a county social services worker called police to a hospital, according to an Albany police report. The social worker told police that Jones said she had taken four Cytotec pills she purchased over the Internet "to induce labor" because she and her boyfriend had broken up.

Abortion-rights advocates and opponents alike were stunned by the murder charge. Georgia has prohibited the prosecution of women for feticide or for performing illegal abortions in cases involving their own pregnancies.

The social worker told police that Jones went into labor and delivered the fetus in a car on the way to the hospital. The fetus did not survive. The police report does not say how far along Jones was in her pregnancy. Local television station WALB-TV reported earlier that authorities said she was about 5 1/2 months pregnant.

Prosecuting Jones seemed at odds with Georgia case law, said Lynn Paltrow, an attorney and the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a legal group in New York. She noted that state law explicitly prohibits prosecuting women for feticide involving their own pregnancies. And a Georgia appeals court ruled in 1998 that a teenager whose fetus was stillborn after she shot herself in the abdomen could not be prosecuted for performing an illegal abortion. Prosecutors ended up dropping that case. 

Genevieve Wilson, a director of the anti-abortion group Georgia Right to Life, said this is the first time she has heard of a woman in Georgia facing a murder charge for ending her pregnancy. Wilson agreed with Paltrow that feticide and abortion laws in the state have not been used to charge women who end their own pregnancies.

"I am very surprised by the arrest," Wilson said. "And I'm thinking that perhaps whoever made the arrest may not have known what the laws really are."

Jones' grandmother, Mary Lee Jones, said she didn't know her granddaughter was pregnant. She said her granddaughter often seems troubled and likely needs professional counseling more than jail.

"I think now, in the position she's in, she needs to be evaluated," Mary Lee Jones said. "She's just not herself." 

The Associated Press