Moira Akers, a stay-at-home mother of two, delivered a stillborn alone in her bathroom while her youngest slept downstairs and her husband picked up their eldest from the school bus stop.

Akers wrapped the newborn in a towel but quickly realized he wasn’t crying or moving — there were no signs of life, according to court documents. She cut the umbilical cord with cuticle scissors and brought the stillborn into her bedroom. Akers was devastated that the baby was stillborn, but she had not felt the fetus move for several days and had concluded “it had already passed,” she later told a detective. Not knowing what else to do, she put the stillborn in a bag and placed the bag in her closet.

Her husband arrived home shortly after to find blood throughout the upstairs hallway, bathroom and bedroom. He saw his wife cleaning the bathroom, still bleeding profusely, and called 911.

Akers didn’t tell anyone that she had had a stillbirth until she was questioned by hospital staff, and she later told police where she had put the stillborn in her home.

The state of Maryland charged her with second-degree murder and first-degree child abuse resulting in death. Prosecutors refuted that the baby was stillborn and argued that Akers had “snuffed out” the newborn’s life by suffocating him, despite an abundance of evidence that showed the baby was not born alive. The stillborn’s lungs were red and mottled, not pink and airy — signaling the baby was not born healthy. The state also ruled the death homicide by asphyxiation, but there were no marks on the newborn or redness around the eyes that would indicate suffocation.

Four years later, in 2022, Maryland convicted Akers on both counts of murder and child abuse and sentenced her to 30 years in prison.

“This was unbelievably traumatic. Not just the stillbirth but then getting charged,” Debra Saltz, Akers’ defense attorney, told HuffPost. “The state was reacting emotionally. They are not reacting based on fact.”

The most radical anti-abortion lawmakers (with a few exceptions) have made it clear that pregnant women should not be criminalized for abortions, let alone pregnancy loss due to miscarriage. Nearly every state in the country has a provision to ensure a pregnant person cannot be criminally charged for having an abortion.

But it seems prosecutors and law enforcement, even in some blue states, haven’t gotten the memo.

Around 21,000 pregnancies end in stillbirths every year, according to a recent Harvard study — a much higher rate than previously believed. Many prosecutors and police are misapplying laws or relying on laws originating in the 17th and 18th centuries — a time when it was considered a crime to get pregnant out of wedlock — to punish women for their pregnancy outcomes. These crimes include “concealing a birth,” or not telling people you’re pregnant, and abuse of a corpse.

Concealment-of-birth statutes are based on the archaic idea that a woman who had sex outside of marriage was immoral and more likely to kill a newborn. These laws date back to 1696, when 10 American colonies adopted concealment-of-birth statutes because it was common law in England. During that time, the most common crimes women were charged with were having sex out of wedlock, punishable by public whipping, and concealment of birth, punishable by death.

Over 300 hundred years later, 15 states still have laws that criminalize someone for concealing a pregnancy loss. And 19 states have laws that make it a crime to dispose of pregnancy loss remains or categorize disposal of remains as “abuse of a corpse.”

In the first year after Roe v. Wade fell, there were at least 412 pregnancy-related prosecutions — the highest number documented in one year since Pregnancy Justice, a legal advocacy organization for pregnant people, began tracking in 1973. When it comes to prosecutions specific to pregnancy loss, at least 161 people have been prosecuted in the last 20 years — many, many more have been investigated. Out of that group, 24 were criminalized in the first two years after the fall of Roe.

Women are subjected to questioning about every step they took throughout their pregnancy. Too often, common choices are recast as something nefarious and used to determine arrest or prosecution: What did you do before the stillbirth? Did you go to the hospital? Did you Google how to get abortion pills? Did you want this pregnancy? Why did you miscarry in the toilet? Why did you flush the fetal remains? Why did you bury the fetal remains? Why did you bring the remains to the hospital? Why did you put them in a plastic bag?

“We’re seeing women who are, all of a sudden, villains in their own tragedies, and their mugshot is plastered all over the news before they can even launch their defenses,” Kulsoom Ijaz, senior policy counsel at Pregnancy Justice, told HuffPost.

It’s not just deep red states that still have antiquated laws on the books. Michigan, which recently passed a constitutional amendment protecting reproductive freedom, still has a law that punishes unmarried women for hiding their pregnancy outcomes. Massachusetts, which has some of the best shield law protections for abortion providers, criminalizes the “concealment of the death of a child born out of wedlock” because it goes against “chastity, morality, decency, and good order.”

“We're seeing women who are, all of a sudden, villains in their own tragedies, and their mugshot is plastered all over the news before they can even launch their defenses.”

If/When/How, a national legal organization defending reproductive justice, is working alongside state partners to repeal many of these antiquated laws in blue or purple states by passing laws that would protect women from being investigated for having a miscarriage or stillbirth. These laws would repeal concealment-of-birth statutes and ensure laws that require people to report a death don’t include abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth. The organization has already successfully passed pregnancy-loss protections like this in California and Washington, and recently introduced similar bills in Kentucky and Massachusetts.

“There are states with progressive legislation around reproductive rights — passed in the aftermath of Dobbs — but they’re falling short of protecting people navigating the aftermath of what are essentially medical events and tragedies,” said Ijaz, whose organization is doing similar work to protect women from pregnancy criminalization.

In Maryland, a state with robust reproductive freedom protections, Akers was investigated in part because she did not disclose her pregnancy to her husband and other family members.

Six months before Akers’ stillbirth, she and her husband drove to her OB-GYN, where her physician confirmed she was pregnant. Akers had a panic attack during the exam — crying because she said they were not ready for a third child, according to court documents. She and her husband agreed they wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but she left her physician’s office believing she was too far along to get an abortion in the state of Maryland.

She turned to the internet for help, Googling: “over the counter pills that cause miscarriage,” “rue tea for abortion,” “how to treat ectopic pregnancy naturally,” according to court documents. (At the time of her internet searches, she was still able to obtain an abortion legally in the state of Maryland.) Some time after, Akers told her husband that the pregnancy was ectopic and terminated on its own; she lied to him because she was in denial over the pregnancy, she told investigators. She later told police that she had decided she would continue the pregnancy but leave the newborn at a safe haven fire station or hospital when she gave birth.

Maryland prosecutors argued that all of this, plus the fact that she didn’t receive prenatal care, indicated Akers had intended to commit murder.

The state also heavily relied on a lung float test, a deeply flawed test used by medical examiners that claims to determine if a baby was born alive or dead. Critics point out that there’s no standard way to conduct the test because it was created in the 1600s. Many have drawn parallels between the lung float test and 17th century witch trials, during which women were thrown into open water and deemed witches if they floated. The National Association of Medical Examiners published a report last year stating that the test has “known pitfalls” and is of “questionable value.”

During Aker’s trial, Maryland’s then-chief medical examiner, Dr. David Fowler, testified for the state and championed the lung float test as irrefutable evidence that the newborn had been born alive. In 2021, Fowler also testified on behalf of former police officer Derek Chauvin, and was the only medical examiner to conclude that heart disease and the carbon monoxide from a nearby car exhaust — not Chauvin’s knee — had killed George Floyd. Fowler was later investigated over allegations that he colluded with law enforcement to falsify information in more than 100 police custody deaths. He has since retired and is no longer used as an expert witness by the state of Maryland.

Akers’ conviction was overturned last year, after she had served three years in prison. The Maryland Supreme Court ruled that her internet search about abortion and lack of prenatal care was inadmissible evidence. Her retrial is set for June.

The state’s main piece of evidence now is the lung float test. The Maryland Legislature recently introduced a bill that would ban the use of the lung float test in cases like Akers’. The bill is likely to pass before the end of the legislative session next month, which would have a huge impact on Akers’ retrial.

“That’s the end of the case,” said Saltz, Akers’ attorney. “The state can’t go forward without it. They don’t have anything else.”

In 2015, the state of Arkansas charged and convicted Anne Bynum for concealing a birth because she didn’t tell her mother she was pregnant. Bynum delivered a stillborn in the morning, got her young child ready for school, ate breakfast and took a nap. Later in the day, she went to the hospital and brought the stillborn in a plastic shopping bag.

“I never thought I’d be arrested for experiencing a tragedy,” Bynum told The New York Times in 2018. She was sentenced to six years in prison, though her conviction was ultimately overturned.

“These cases come into being because somebody was shocked and offended,” Farah Diaz-Tello, an attorney on Bynum’s legal team and senior counsel at If/When/How, told HuffPost.

The situation would have been different “if the intake nurse or triage at the hospital had been like, ‘Oh this is a tragedy, I’m so sorry this happened to you’ instead of being like, ‘Oh my god, this is macabre, why are you bringing a dead baby in a bag?’” Diaz-Tello said. “But what else was [Bynum] supposed to do?”

Bynum was also charged with abuse of a corpse, which is the most common charge used in abortion and miscarriage cases. The law, which has a legitimate purpose of prohibiting grave digging and necrophilia, is being used to criminalize women for what they do after a pregnancy loss.

“I don’t want what happened to me to ever happen to any other woman.”

Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman, was charged with abuse of a corpse in 2023 after miscarrying at home and attempting to flush the remains. Earlier, she had gone to the hospital with vaginal bleeding, and doctors confirmed the fetus was nonviable and she was at significant risk of death or sepsis. She left after waiting eight hours for a hospital ethics panel to decide if they could induce her pregnancy without breaking Ohio’s abortion ban. She went back the next day and left again without treatment.

When she miscarried at home — which had been expected by every doctor she had seen by that point — she was investigated for trying to flush the remains, a common practice after miscarriage. The toilet clogged, and Watts told police she had disposed of what she believed to be the remains in a bucket in her backyard. Police later removed the toilet from Watts’ home and took it to a morgue to retrieve the fetal remains for the investigation. Watts faced up to a year in prison for her pregnancy loss.

“I don’t want what happened to me to ever happen to any other woman,” Watts said after filing a federal lawsuit against the hospital staff and law enforcement in Warren, Ohio, in January 2025. An Ohio grand jury declined to indict Watts.

Despite prosecutors going after people for how they handle miscarriage or stillbirth remains, there’s seemingly no right answer: Women have been investigated for flushing fetal remains down the toilet, for burying remains and for bringing them to the hospital. And even if they aren’t prosecuted or imprisoned, their lives are still turned upside down by media coverage that uses mug shots and centers dramatic language like “abuse of a corpse” to demonize women for their pregnancy loss.

“This is about decriminalization, yes,” Diaz-Tello said of the importance of passing pregnancy loss protections. “But it’s also about restoring people’s dignity and centering the humanity of people who are going through these experiences who should be met with compassion, not punishment.”

Akers has now been out of prison for about a year, awaiting her retrial this summer. She got her paralegal degree when she was inside and is now working. Her husband and family have supported her throughout the ordeal, and she gets regular supervised visits with her two children.

“They know she was in jail, they know why, they know there was a baby — and they love her,” Saltz said of Akers’ kids. “They’re just living their lives, and she’s doing her best to make sure it stays that way.”