‘Turned My Whole Life Upside Down’: South Carolina Woman Charged with Murder After Giving Birth to Baby Prematurely On Toilet

A state grand jury in Orangeburg, South Carolina, has declined to indict a Black woman in South Carolina who faced murder charges after losing a baby during childbirth, in a case that has become a flashpoint in the national debate over restrictive state laws governing reproductive rights. Amari Marsh, now 23, was a junior at South Carolina State University when she went to an Orangeburg area hospital complaining of pain related to her second-trimester pregnancy. After several hours, she left the emergency room, and later that night, the fetus was ejected from her body into the toilet at her off-campus apartment on March 1, 2023, reported the Post and Courier in Charleston. At a hospital the next day, she was questioned by police, who did not indicate to Marsh that she was being criminally investigated, reported Kaiser Health News. But three months later, she was arrested and charged with murder/homicide by child abuse and spent 22 days in a local detention facility, where she was initially held without bond and faced 20 years to life in prison. Amari Marsh (Photo: Sam Wolfe for KFF Health News)) The felony charges stemmed from her failure to remove the baby from the toilet...