A Georgia woman has become the first person to be charged with murder under the state’s restrictive law banning abortions after allegedly taking drugs to induce a miscarriage when she was five months pregnant.
The Peach State’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, which was passed in 2019, bans abortion after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected, which comes roughly around the six-week mark in pregnancy.
Alexia Moore, 31, a U.S. Army veteran from Kingsland, close to the Florida border, was rushed to a Southeast Georgia Health System hospital in Camden County on Dec. 30 last year while around five months pregnant and reporting extreme abdominal pain, according to The Current.
Doctors at the facility delivered a severely premature baby girl who lived for approximately an hour, after which a security guard at the hospital reported what had transpired in the emergency room to the police.
Officers arrived and concluded Moore had been pregnant for 22 to 24 weeks after medical staff recorded the infant as having a heartbeat and struggling to breathe.
In 2010, Georgia enacted a bill that outlawed abortion after 22 weeks.
“I know my infant is suffering, because I am the one who did the abortion,” the patient told the nursing staff, according to the investigators. “I want her to die.”
Then, on March 4, Kingsland Police charged Moore with attempted murder and possession of a controlled substance and dangerous drug – oxycodone and misoprostol, respectively – which they allege she took as part of the attempted illegal abortion.
Those charges were later upgraded to murder, The Washington Post reported.
Officers said they planned to use a friend’s testimony given at the scene as evidence, along with the patient’s health records and the blood work of both her and her deceased infant.
Moore, who already has children aged six and nine, is currently in jail awaiting arraignment.
Her mother, Edith Moore, a Christian pastor, said: “As a mother, and me talking as a grandma, she’s an excellent mother. I believe her children are her life. She has been a good provider for her children.”
Moore explained that her daughter was adopted and had been discharged from the military after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“She never could understand being adopted,” Moore said of Alexia. “I believe that was traumatic. I believe going into the military and winding up with PTSD… It was trauma after trauma, it was situation after situation.”
The circumstances of the arrested woman’s pregnancy are not currently known, nor is it known how she acquired the blue bottle of misoprostol, which listed no doctor’s name or pharmacy on its label, suggesting she may have bought it online.
Another friend of Moore’s, who spoke to The Current but did not wish to be identified, said: “I remember her calling me, freaking out. She was bawling her eyes out. She said she didn’t know what to do.
“‘If worse comes to worst,’ I said, ‘If you 100 percent go through with having the baby, and if you don’t want it, you can always give it to me, and you know, it’ll be taken care of.’”
They added: “She is a great person. She is super bright. She has two amazing little boys that she’s raising to be young men.
“It’s just, it’s mind-blowing that she got charged with that over something like this. This is just crazy.”
Camden County Sheriff Kevin Chaney said the hospital security guard who reported Moore’s case had acted appropriately.
“They’re law enforcement at the hospital, so they’re not just security officers,” he said. “They’re actually sworn peace officers in the state of Georgia. And plus your mandated reports and stuff like that. Along those lines, we share information constantly.”
Sheriff Chaney said officers are monitoring Moore’s health after her mother expressed concern over her mental well-being.
Dana Sussman, senior vice president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, said in a statement, “No one should be criminalized for having an abortion,” calling Moore’s case “an unprecedented murder charge for an alleged abortion.”
A 2024 study by Pregnancy Justice found that at least 210 women across the U.S. were charged with crimes related to their pregnancies in the 12 months after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that overturned Roe vs Wade and allowed states to enforce abortion bans.
That tally was more than the group found in any other 12-month period. Most of the cases involved allegations of substance use during pregnancy.
Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia defense attorney not involved in Moore’s case, said: “Murder is intentionally causing the death of a person… I’m not sure prosecutors are eager to be the first one to jump this hurdle.
“I think it’s a totally legally permissible case. I think they could do it. I’d be surprised if they go through with it.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
