A Kentucky woman is facing multiple criminal charges after she allegedly induced her own abortion using medication.
Kentucky state police arrested the woman, Melinda S Spencer, 35, on charges of fetal homicide in the first degree, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence, according to a local Kentucky news outlet. Spencer reportedly ordered medication online to end her pregnancy, then buried the remains of her pregnancy in her backyard.
It is not clear how far along Spencer’s pregnancy was at the time of her alleged abortion, although police described the fetus as “developed”, the Lexington Herald Leader reported.
Spencer was booked into a jail in Beattyville, Kentucky, on Thursday, jail records show. She remained at the jail as of Friday evening.
Kentucky bans doctors from performing abortions any time after conception. However, like the vast majority of states, Kentucky does not outlaw people from inducing – or “self-managing” – their own abortions. Medical experts also widely agree that it is safe to self-manage an abortion using pills in the first trimester of pregnancy.
Ordering abortion pills online has become increasingly common since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and unleashed a wave of state-level abortion bans in 2022. By the end of 2024, one in four abortions involved providers who consulted with patients online and then mailed them abortion pills. Tens of thousands of these abortions took place in states with abortion bans, according to data from the research group #WeCount.
Still, women have repeatedly faced criminal consequences for their pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages. In the two years after Roe fell, 412 people were prosecuted for pregnancy-related crimes, researchers at the reproductive justice group Pregnancy Justice found.
Sixteen of those prosecutions involved homicide charges, while seven involved what researchers called “conduct concerning improper conduct with regard to birth or death”. It is not clear how many cases may have been sparked by authorities’ suspicions that the defendant obtained an abortion, since just nine cases included charges related to undergoing, attempting or researching an abortion.
Abortion rights advocates see efforts to criminalize pregnancy outcomes as part of an overarching campaign to establish “fetal personhood”, a legal doctrine that endows embryos and fetuses with full legal rights and protections – including to the point that a fetus’s rights can compete with those of the woman carrying it.
“The idea that the fetus can be a person and a victim of a crime is being wielded in significant ways when there’s a pregnancy loss,” Wendy Bach, a University of Tennessee law professor, told the Guardian in 2024. “So rather than meeting a pregnancy loss with care, with support, with an acknowledgement for the often tragic life circumstances that that involves – we are meeting it with criminal suspicion, with criminal investigation and with prosecution.”
Police in Georgia arrested one woman after she was found bleeding and unconscious after a miscarriage. Another woman, in Ohio, was arrested after she miscarried into a toilet. Both cases were ultimately dropped.
Kentucky police reportedly got involved in Spencer’s case after Spencer talked about her pregnancy to clinic staffers. It is often healthcare workers who tip off the police in cases in which people are criminalized for pregnancy outcomes: out of 412 such cases uncovered by Pregnancy Justice, 264 involved information that had been disclosed in a medical setting.
An individual who answered the phone at the Kentucky state police headquarters said that, due to the recent holidays, no one was available to comment on Spencer’s case. A jail official said Spencer had been advised by her attorney not to speak to the media or law enforcement. Spencer’s attorney was not immediately available to speak.
