North Carolina Called Abortion Pills a “Deadly Weapon” and Arrested an 18-Year-Old Mother Six Days After She Gave Birth

Let me tell you something. I have four kids. I have been pregnant four times. I have sat on that bathroom floor at 2 a.m. wondering if what was happening was normal, and I can tell you right now that the last thing any terrified teenager needs in that moment is a pair of handcuffs.

But that is exactly what happened to 18-year-old Syeisha Johnson in Durham, North Carolina. Six days after she gave birth to a premature baby in her own toilet, cops showed up at her door and arrested her. Her boyfriend, 19-year-old Elijah Speight, got arrested too. The charge? Assault with a deadly weapon. The “deadly weapon”? Abortion pills.

I’m sorry, what?

Let me walk you through this, because I read every warrant and every news report I could find, and I still had to pick my jaw off the floor. Johnson says she found out she was pregnant at 20 weeks. In June. She ordered Mifepristone from Virginia. The medication is designed for pregnancies under 70 days. She took it anyway, went into labor, delivered a baby in a toilet, and first responders did CPR and got that baby to a hospital alive. And then Durham police decided the appropriate response was to classify medication the World Health Organization calls an essential medicine as a “deadly weapon” and charge this girl with “intent to kill.”

Taber Andrew Bain (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Here is what I want to ask the manager: since when is taking a pill the same as picking up a knife? Since when is a teenage girl in shock a criminal mastermind? The search warrant says she “left the child in the toilet.” Left him there. Like she was casually checking her phone. She was an 18-year-old who just went into labor unexpectedly in her own bathroom and called for help. That is not negligence. That is a scared kid doing the only thing she knew to do.

And here is the part that really makes me want to scream. North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban does not criminalize self-managed abortion. It just doesn’t. The cops pasted the full text of the ban into the warrant anyway, like they were building a scarecrow instead of a case. There is no statute in North Carolina or anywhere else in this country that says a woman taking abortion pills is committing a crime. So they invented one. They took “assault with a deadly weapon” and stapled it to a bottle of pills and called it justice.

Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry at least had the decency to say she believes a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body and will review the evidence “in that light.” The bond was set at $1,000, which Deberry herself said shows these two teenagers are not a danger to anyone. So even the prosecutor seems to know this is nonsense. But Johnson still got arrested. She still sat in a jail cell while her body was recovering from giving birth. She still had to stand in front of a judge the next morning.

Elizabeth Ling, a lawyer with the reproductive rights group If/When/How, called this “cops twisting abortion stigma into a crime.” Dana Sussman from Pregnancy Justice said these cases follow “a familiar pattern” of charges being “manipulated to criminalize pregnancy and abortion in impermissible ways.” I have done my own research, and I agree with every word. This is not about protecting babies. If it were, they would not be dragging a postpartum teenager out of her home in front of her mother and hauling her to jail.

This is about control. It is about making an example out of a young woman of color who had the audacity to make a decision about her own body without asking permission from a legislature full of men who have never been pregnant and never will be. It is about scaring every other woman in this state into thinking that a pill she orders online could land her in a prison cell.

Plancpills (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

I have raised four kids. I have made a thousand decisions about my own body and my own family. And I am telling you, as a mother and as a person with eyes: if they can do this to Syeisha Johnson, they can do it to your daughter. They can do it to mine. And they will keep doing it until every one of us stands up and says enough.