Monday afternoon, workers at a treatment plant in Augusta, Georgia found something unusual traveling through the city’s wastewater. A mass of fetal remains had lodged in a piece of equipment, apparently flushed down a drain somewhere within city limits. City coroner Mark Bowen identified the remains as roughly 20 weeks into pregnancy, halfway through the second trimester. That also placed the remains right on the lip of Georgia’s abortion law, which outlaws abortions after 20 weeks.

Faced with unidentified remains, Bowen took an unusual step, sending the remains to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for a full autopsy and DNA testing. If successful, the effort could identify the mother and reveal new details about why her pregnancy failed, a novel use of DNA analysis that could have a significant impact on how police investigate abortion cases nationwide.

Despite the legal implications, Bowen insists he isn’t thinking of the search in criminal terms. “My intention is to put the mother and fetus together, and make sure the mother’s okay,” he told The Verge. “I just want to make sure she isn’t getting an infection or bleeding out, and then I would like to connect them back together so she can have her miscarried child or aborted child properly disposed of.” (A separate Georgia law places restrictions on the proper disposal of fetal remains, although the legal burden falls on clinics rather than patients.)

“My intention is to put the mother and fetus together”

Bowen also expects the autopsy to make a more decisive estimate of the age of the fetus, which will determine whether criminal charges could be brought against medical providers involved. “[The initial reading] was a guesstimate,” Bowen says. “It’s right on that line where it could or could not be. Did that baby take a breath and drown in the water? We don’t know.”

Familial DNA searches are a common, if controversial, practice in law enforcement, matching samples to suspects with relatives in the federal CODIS system, a genetic database maintained by the FBI. In a typical example, blood recovered from a crime scene might not directly match anyone in the law enforcement database, but could provide a partial match to the suspect’s father or daughter. It’s a powerful tool for law enforcement, although critics say it subjects relatives of convicted criminals to unwarranted and potentially unconstitutional scrutiny.

CODIS is also used to identify missing persons, but it’s usually deployed under very different circumstances. After filing a report, the family of a missing person can submit their own DNA or latent samples of the missing person to be tested against unidentified bodies. But the mother in the Augusta case is unlikely to have filed a missing person’s report for her own fetus, so it’s unclear how that technique could be deployed here.

“Usually when we have a familial search, we’re looking for someone who’s not in the database.”

The most plausible way to identify the remains would be to treat them as a crime scene sample, which might trigger a match if the mother and father are present in a law enforcement database. But that would be a more aggressive use of the DNA database, which is typically only used to find people immediately suspected of a crime. The Georgia law targets doctors, and in legal terms, both the mother and the fetus are treated as victims rather than perpetrators. “This strikes me as quite a novel way to deploy familial searching techniques,” said Natalie Ram, who teaches bioethics and law at the University of Baltimore. “Usually when we have a familial search, we’re looking for someone who’s not in the database.”

According to NYU Law professor Erin Murphy, the practice could have significant civil liberty implications. “It certainly creates a slippery slope,” Murphy told The Verge. “In essence, the fetus is a witness to the crime, as well as the victim. Does this mean they would defend using a database to find other witnesses?”

Because the remains were found in wastewater rather than disposed of through proper medical channels, they are unlikely to be the result of a medical abortion. They’re more likely the result of a miscarried pregnancy or a self-induced abortion. Self-induced abortions have been outlawed in seven states (although not Georgia), but remain relatively common in situations where conventional medical alternatives have been outlawed, sometimes forcing women to turn to underground networks of informal providers. Efforts to prosecute self-induced abortions often run the risk of prosecuting inadvertent miscarriages, particularly when prosecutors focus on fetal remains as evidence of the crime. A 2014 study claimed to find over 380 cases in which women faced criminal charges over miscarriages.

Genetic evidence has not played a central role in those prosecutions so far, but it has obvious value for investigators. Most miscarriage cases begin with fetal remains, and those remains have an immediate genetic connection to the mother. At the same time, there are few ways to dispose of fetal remains without exposing them to a police search, since police have broad authority to search through wastewater and other garbage streams without a warrant.

The most significant block may be the rules governing the federal CODIS database. Federal rules require that the uploaded sample must be believed to be from the perpetrator of a crime. The rules apply to samples taken from crime scenes as well as direct testing of suspects. In theory, Georgia officials could also run the sample against public databases, as in the Golden State Killer case, although it would require significant resources and wouldn’t produce a match unless one of the two parents was already present in the public system.

What’s more likely is that the coroner will restrict the search to Georgia’s state-level database, which operates under more lenient rules and has been collecting samples since 1991. As of December, the state database contained more than 347,000 DNA profiles, primarily taken from identified criminals.