Amari Marsh had just finished her junior year at South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, in May 2023 when she received a text message from a law enforcement officer.
“Sorry it has taken this long for paperwork to come back,” the officer wrote. “But I finally have the final report, and wanted to see if you and your boyfriend could meet me Wednesday afternoon for a follow-up?”
Ms. Marsh understood that the report was related to a pregnancy loss she’d experienced that March. During her second trimester, Ms. Marsh said, she unexpectedly gave birth in the middle of the night while on a toilet in her off-campus apartment. She remembered screaming and panicking and said the bathroom was covered in blood.
“I couldn’t breathe,” said Ms. Marsh, now 23.
The next day, when Ms. Marsh woke up in the hospital, she said, a law enforcement officer asked her questions. Then, a few weeks later, she received a call saying she could collect her daughter’s ashes.
At that point, she said, she didn’t know she was being criminally investigated. Yet 3 months after her loss, Ms. Marsh was charged with murder/homicide by child abuse, law enforcement records show. She spent 22 days at the Orangeburg-Calhoun Regional Detention Center, where she was initially held without bond, facing 20 years to life in prison.
In August, 13 months after she was released from jail to house arrest with an ankle monitor, Ms. Marsh was cleared by a grand jury. Her case will not proceed to trial.
Her story raises questions about the state of reproductive rights in this country, disparities in health care, and pregnancy criminalization, especially for Black women like Ms. Marsh. More than two years after the US Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which allowed states to outlaw abortion, the climate around these topics remains highly charged.
Ms. Marsh’s case also highlights what’s at stake in November. About 61% of voters want Congress to pass a federal law restoring a nationwide right to abortion, according to a recent poll by KFF, the health policy research, polling, and news organization that includes KFF Health News. These issues could shape who wins the White House and controls Congress, and will come to a head for voters in the 10 states where ballot initiatives about abortion will be decided.
This case shows how pregnancy loss is being criminalized around the country, said U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, a Democrat and graduate of South Carolina State University whose congressional district includes Orangeburg.
“This is not a slogan when we talk about this being an ‘election about the restoration of our freedoms,’” Mr. Clyburn said.
‘I Was Scared’
When Ms. Marsh took an at-home pregnancy test in November 2022, the positive result scared her. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to let my parents down,” she said. “I was in a state of shock.”
She didn’t seek prenatal care, she said, because she kept having her period. She thought the pregnancy test might have been wrong.
An incident report filed by the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office on the day she lost the pregnancy stated that in January 2023 Ms. March made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia to “take the Plan-C pill which would possibly cause an abortion to occur.” The report doesn’t specify whether she took — or even obtained — the drug.
During an interview at her parents’ house, Ms. March denied going to Planned Parenthood or taking medicine to induce abortion.
“I’ve never been in trouble. I’ve never been pulled over. I’ve never been arrested,” Ms. March said. “I never even got written up in school.”
She played clarinet as section leader in the marching band and once performed at Carnegie Hall. In college, she was majoring in biology and planned to become a doctor.
South Carolina state Rep. Seth Rose, a Democrat in Columbia and one of Ms. March’s attorneys, called it a “really tragic” case. “It’s our position that she lost a child through natural causes,” he said.
On Feb. 28, 2023, Ms. March said, she experienced abdominal pain that was “way worse” than regular menstrual cramps. She went to the emergency room, investigation records show, but left after several hours without being treated. Back at home, the pain grew worse. She returned to the hospital, this time by ambulance.
Hospital staffers crowded around her, and none of them explained what was happening to her. Bright lights shone in her face. “I was scared,” she said.
According to the sheriff’s department report, hospital staffers told Ms. March that she was pregnant and that a fetal heartbeat could be detected. Freaked out and confused, she chose to leave the hospital a second time, she said, and her pain had subsided.
In the middle of the night, she said, the pain started again. She woke up, feeling an intense urge to use the bathroom. “And when I did, the child came,” she said. “I screamed because I was scared, because I didn’t know what was going on.”
Her boyfriend at the time called 911. The emergency dispatcher “kept telling me to take the baby out” of the toilet, she recalled. “I couldn’t because I couldn’t even keep myself together.”
First medical responders detected signs of life and tried to perform lifesaving measures as they headed to Regional Medical Center in Orangeburg, the incident report said. But at the hospital, Ms. March learned that her infant, a girl, had not survived.
“I kept asking to see the baby,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me.”
The following day, a sheriff’s deputy told Ms. March in her hospital room that the incident was under investigation but said that Ms. March “was currently not in any trouble,” according to the report. Ms. March responded that “she did not feel as though she did anything wrong.”
More than 10 weeks later, nothing about the text messages she received from an officer in mid-May implied that the follow-up meeting about the final report was urgent.
“Oh it doesn’t have to be Wednesday, it can be next week or another week,” the officer wrote in an exchange that Ms. March shared with KFF Health News. “I just have to meet with y’all in person before I can close the case out. I am so sorry.”
“No problem I understand,” Ms. March wrote back.
She didn’t tell her parents or consider hiring a lawyer. “I didn’t think I needed one,” she said.
Ms. March arranged to meet the officer on June 2, 2023. During that meeting, she was arrested. Her boyfriend was not charged.
Her father, Herman Marsh, the band director at a local public school in Orangeburg, thought it was a bad joke until reality set in. “I told my wife, I said, ‘we need to get an attorney now.’ ”