GIST: "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."
