Anna Yocca faces life sentence in move that could prompt constitutional challenge as general homicide laws were not designed to be applied to fetuses

A 31-year-old woman in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, has become the latest person to fall foul of the creeping criminalization of pregnancy after she was charged and jailed for attempted first-degree murder following a failed self-induced abortion.



Anna Yocca faces the possibility of a life sentence after she was indicted by a grand jury in Rutherford County for attempting to kill her unborn child.

Yocca was 24 weeks pregnant in September when she allegedly attempted to induce a miscarriage using a coat hanger. According to local news reports based on accounts from the arresting police officers, she lay in a bath before piercing herself with the hanger but became alarmed by the amount of blood she was losing and called her boyfriend, who rushed her to hospital.

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There she gave birth to a boy weighing just 1.5lbs. The child was kept alive, but doctors are reported to have said that he incurred injuries as a result of the abortion attempt which, on top of his medical problems as a result of being so premature, means that he will require continued medical treatment.

Yocca was arrested on 11 December and charged with attempted first-degree murder. She is being held on a bond of $200,000 in the Rutherford County adult detention center and is scheduled to appear in court for the first time on 21 December. It is not known whether she has yet been assigned a public defense lawyer.

Experts in pregnancy law denounced the charges as a retrograde move that would complicate the already fraught experiences of women having premature births. “Women should not have to fear prosecution as a result of the outcome of their pregnancy whether they have healthy births, miscarriages or abortions,” said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

She added: “Involving police in pregnancy drives women into hiding. It does not encourage compassionate and confidential healthcare.”

Little is known about the personal circumstances that led Yocca to allegedly make the decision to try to terminate her own pregnancy. She lived about a half hour’s drive away from Nashville, where the nearest health center offering abortions is located.

What is clear is that Tennessee has some of the most restrictive abortion regulations in the country. In July, the state legislature passed a new rule requiring women seeking a termination to visit a clinic at least twice, with a 48-hour waiting period in between.

The average cost of an abortion in the state has been calculated to be $475-$680.

Tennessee has also joined 37 other states in adopting so-called “fetal homicide” laws, whereby fetuses are offered the same legal protections from violent attack as individuals after birth. In the case of Tennessee, it has gone even further and is one of 23 states that define the moment at which the fetus acquires legal rights as the point of conception.

So far there is no sign of Yocca being prosecuted under the state’s fetal assault law. Rather, she has been charged under general attempted homicide laws, which were never designed to be applied to fetuses and could open the state up to constitutional challenge.

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Yocca’s prosecution puts her at the center of some fraught legal questions that will now be fought over by lawyers. Women are constitutionally entitled to an abortion in the US under the 1973 supreme court ruling Roe v Wade.

However, the ruling only extends constitutional protections to pregnant women until the point of viability of their fetus. Precisely when that point is reached in the gestation of an unborn child has not been defined in law – the US supreme court has left it largely to medical judgment on a case-by-case basis.

At 24 weeks Yocca was at the cusp of what is generally understood to be viability, at between 24 and 26 weeks. Tennessee prohibits abortions after 12 weeks, though that strict limit is overruled by Roe v Wade.

The other legal grey area is the question of whether Yocca can be prosecuted for attempting to carry out a non-medical self-induced abortion. Roe v Wade specifically deals with the legal issues arising from third-party abortions conducted by physicians, and does not address the role of the law where women take the procedure into their own hands.

In June, National Advocates for Pregnant Women notched an important legal victory in the ninth circuit court of appeals in a case that similarly involved a woman who was prosecuted for ending her own pregnancy. Jennie McCormack, an Idaho woman, had self-medicated with an abortion drug bought over the internet.

In its opinion, the federal appeals court ruled that it was unconstitutional to prosecute women for having abortions, even when they did so themselves outside the context of medical care.

Yocca is one of a growing number of women who have faced criminal prosecutions for the outcomes of their pregnancies. In October, Amanda Kimbrough was released from Tutwiler prison in Alabama having served more than three years after her baby was delivered prematurely and died from complications at birth.

Kimbrough had taken a small quantity of methamphetamine, and was prosecuted for the “chemical endangerment” of her fetus.

In 2012, prosecutors in Indiana charged Bei Bei Shuai with murder after she tried to kill herself, losing her unborn child in the process. Charges were dropped the following year after she pleaded guilty to criminal recklessness.

Purvi Patel is serving a 20-year sentence, also in Indiana, for “feticide” after she was accused of abandoning her live-born baby in a dumpster. She insists that the baby was stillborn and is appealing the sentence.