A Georgia bill requiring investigations of miscarriages is the latest episode in a frightening new turn of pro-life extremism.

A Georgia state representative known for his fringe politics has introduced a radical pro-life bill that not only calls for the nullification of Roe v. Wade, but also makes having a miscarriage a capital offense unless the mother can irrefutably prove that there was “no human involvement whatsoever in the causation of such an event.” Laced with misogyny, insensitivity, and pseudo-science, Representative Bobby Franklin’s House Bill 1 (HB1) could be considered ridiculous, if it was not just the latest episode in a frightening turn of right-wing pro-life extremism that targets pregnant women.

HB1 rationalizes that, because “Georgia has the duty to protect all innocent life from the moment of conception until natural death,” the failure of an inseminated egg to come to term should fall under suspicion as an act of “prenatal murder.” So, if Franklin has his way, hospitals would be mandated to report every miscarriage (which, he points out, is known medically as “spontaneous abortion”) to the local police, who would then somehow ascertain the cause of the miscarriage. The burden of proof, in other words, would be placed on the woman who might be mourning the loss of her pregnancy.

There are many egregious problems with this bill, but, for starters, consider just the scientific angle. According to the National Institute of Health’s website, “among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is about 15-20%.” According to the Mayo Clinic, this is a conservative estimate, and it does not include the miscarriages that occur when a fertilized egg fails to implant properly and is thus released from the body during menstruation. In these circumstances, women rarely know that they are pregnant, let alone that they have miscarried. (Some women have recently sent Franklin form letters along with photos of their used tampons, writing, “I would like to be sure that I am not killing any more Georgia citizens.”)

But, even when women do know they’ve conceived, it’s not always easy to determine what caused a miscarriage. “It would be difficult to discern if [a miscarriage] was purposely induced unless it was extremely obvious, as it was in the days before the abortion was legal and there was the use of dirty hangers,” says Dr. Lisa A. Nicholas, a clinical assistant professor at the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine. Nicholas adds that, given the extreme trauma and psychological stress a woman often undergoes following a miscarriage, accusation and investigation would be a “horrible action without any possible benefit.”

The fact that the bill doesn’t define what “human involvement” in a miscarriage means also complicates matters. What about exigent circumstances that would necessitate intervention? If, for example, a woman had a partial miscarriage, would she have to wait until her body ejected the partial remains of her fetus, risking septic shock, so that she and the physician who assisted her wouldn’t be criminally libel? Numerous attempts by TNR to contact Franklin to pose such questions went unanswered, save for the representative’s prerecorded answering machine thanking callers “for giving me your encouragement about my sponsorship for House Bill 1, recognizing that prenatal murder is murder.”