North Carolina Teen Arrested for Using Abortion Pills As “Deadly Weapon”

North Carolina cops have classified abortion pills—which are safe, common, and recognized as an essential medicine by the World Health Organization—as a “deadly weapon,” and the act of taking the pills as “intent to kill.”

A teenage girl named Syeisha Johnson1 has been arrested in North Carolina for assault with a “deadly weapon” after allegedly taking abortion pills 31 weeks into her pregnancy, which prompted her to go into labor. Johnson’s boyfriend has also been arrested, and charged with negligent child abuse.

The charges are head-spinning: the “deadly weapon” appears to refer to...abortion pills. By taking the medication, cops say, the teen signaled her “intent to kill.” She is also charged with negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury and assault inflicting serious bodily injury on an unborn child.

If/When/How Associate Director of Legal Services Elizabeth Ling described the charges as “yet another example of cops twisting abortion stigma into a crime,” within a policing system “that looks at someone going through a deeply terrifying experience and only sees a villain.”

Instead of being allowed to rest and receive medical care just days after going into labor, the 18-year old was arrested and jailed on Tuesday. Johnson was then forced to show up for a court hearing on Wednesday.

Law enforcement’s sole justification for this horrific treatment of a newly postpartum teenage girl is, apparently, that she is a cold-blooded criminal for attempting to self-manage an abortion. But let’s be clear: taking abortion pills is not a crime. There is no crime here. Yet, by attacking Johnson with this mishmash of charges, cops are trying to make self-managed abortion a crime. That’s terrifying.

Johnson is just the latest young woman of color to face criminal charges and the threat of prison for the outcome of her pregnancy—from an Ohio woman charged with outrage of community sensibilities and abuse of a corpse in connection with pregnancy remains found in a trash receptacle, to a South Carolina woman charged with “desecration of human remains” for her pregnancy loss last year. In March, Alexia Moore in Georgia was charged with murder for allegedly self-managing an abortion.

All too often, these cases follow “a familiar pattern,” Pregnancy Justice Senior Vice President Dana Sussman tells us: “charges being manipulated to criminalize pregnancy and abortion in impermissible ways.” These cases tend to involve young or otherwise vulnerable women navigating intense medical trauma. Sensationalized versions of these stories then go viral based on the biased, misinformed word of local cops, who have their own agendas.

At this time, nearly all publicly available information about this case comes from law enforcement, whose word we simply can’t take at face-value—in general, and certainly with cases like this. Here’s what we know from available police documents: Johnson told police that she learned about her pregnancy at 20 weeks in June. She said she ordered abortion pills online and then, shortly after taking the pills, began experiencing abdominal pain. “She sat on the toilet and gave birth to a child,” a detective wrote.

Johnson, her partner, and her mother were present at the home when cops arrived. Per the arrest warrant, Johnson delivered an infant that weighed under 5.5 pounds. First responders gave the infant CPR, and the infant is alive and receiving medical care.

After a preliminary court hearing on Wednesday, Johnson received a $1,000 bond. Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry told local news station WRAL that the low bond shows Johnson and her partner aren’t a threat to the community. She added:

“I’ve been on the record, over and over again, saying that I believe a woman has the right to choose and has the right to make decisions about her own body. And we will review the evidence in this case in that light.”

We’re glad to hear that state authorities can recognize Johnson is by no means dangerous and that an official overseeing the case would use this language. But Durham authorities can’t undo the harm that’s already been done.

“Criminalizing people for their abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth often means sending people to jail while their body is still recovering,” Ling says.

“They are bleeding, sometimes lactating, likely in tremendous amounts of pain... What they need during this critical time is care and support in safe and clean spaces. Not to sit in a cage deprived of basic hygiene.”

There are a couple especially frustrating flags worth noting in the search warrant for Johnson’s apartment. The detective involved in the case writes that “the child was left in the toilet”—callous language clearly meant to frame Johnson as negligent and irresponsible. In reality, she is a teenage girl who was in shock after going into labor and immediately called for help.

Others who’ve been arrested for their pregnancy outcomes have been attacked for not calling 9-1-1, or not calling 9-1-1 quickly enough. But it doesn’t seem to matter if, when, or how quickly you call for help. If cops want to criminalize you, they will find a way.

In the same warrant, the detective then cites North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban, pasting the law’s full language. But that law is irrelevant to Johnson’s case, beyond fear-mongering and stoking confusion. Nowhere in the ban—nor in any other abortion ban across the nation—is there language that criminalizes self-managed abortion or attempted self-managed abortion. The ban holds no relevance to this case, and there’s no reason for cops to have detailed it in the warrant.

A separate warrant for Johnson justifies her arrest for negligent child abuse by claiming the couple left their infant “in the toilet for several minutes alone.” (The warrant for Johnson’s partner uses the same language.) But neither Johnson nor her partner are trained medical experts who were prepared for a home-birth—they’re two teens who were in a state of shock and called for help.

Even more egregious, the warrant justifies her arrest for the “assault on an unborn child” charge by claiming she “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously did assault… an unborn child by willfully and maliciously committing an act, taking Mifepristone Misoprostol, in an attempt to terminate her pregnancy.”

Unlike Moore’s case in Georgia, because Johnson’s infant is alive and healthy, she has not been charged with murder. But both cases share an alarming commonality: cops are investigating and criminalizing women over allegedly taking abortion pills.

They’re absolutely wrong to do so. Even in states where abortion is banned, self-managed abortion and having an abortion in general are not crimes. It doesn’t matter at what week Johnson allegedly took the abortion pills—again: self-managed abortion is not a crime, nor is attempted self-managed abortion.

In January, a Kentucky woman was charged with fetal homicide for allegedly self-managing an abortion, by a woman who proudly declared herself “a pro-life prosecutor.” But the state had to drop the fetal homicide charge—because Kentucky’s ban doesn’t allow for the arrest of abortion patients.

Pregnancy-related criminalization has been on the rise since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, even though these cases rarely directly involve a state’s abortion ban. Instead, patients are typically brought up on charges of ‘abuse of a corpse,’ ‘manslaughter,’ or ‘child endangerment,’ or punished for how they did or didn’t dispose of pregnancy remains.

These arrests are on the rise because abortion bans inherently shroud every pregnancy and pregnancy outcome in criminal suspicion—whether cops actually invoke the bans or not. And while alleged use of abortion pills is central to Johnson’s case, all too often, cops are so eager to criminalize someone over their pregnancy outcome that we’ve also seen women arrested for home births, stillbirths, and miscarriages that didn’t involve abortion pills.

Yet, in Johnson’s case, we have law enforcement officers who are actively, erroneously invoking a ban, even when it doesn’t apply—because that’s how desperate they are to criminalize a vulnerable teen girl who just gave birth.

As we keep an eye on this case, we’ll also keep an eye out for where else medication abortion might be mislabeled as a “deadly weapon.”

For free legal help as a patient or health practitioner, call If/When/How’s free Repro Helpline: 844-868-2812. If you’re able, please donate what you can to this fundraiser to support Johnson’s legal defense.