After having a stillbirth, Adora Perez was charged with murder. cecilianowell reports. In collaboration with econhardship
Illustration: Simone Noronha Adora Perez was 29 years old and 37 weeks pregnant when she woke up to deep cramps on the evening of December 30, 2017. She had been napping at her grandfather’s when the pain started. Around 10 p.m.
Resting in her hospital bed the next day, discharge papers in hand, Adora was not surprised when a police detective arrived. Her boyfriend had been in and out of court and jail and warned Adora that police might arrest her for using drugs during her pregnancy. He was right. The officer escorted Adora out of the maternity ward, back through the hospital’s sliding-glass doors and palm-tree-lined parking lot, and three minutes down the road to Kings County Jail.
Not long after the move, Adora recalls, cousins started to touch her inappropriately, and a family friend raped her when she was 9. “I always felt dirty,” she says, but she didn’t know how to talk about it. By junior high, she had started smoking weed. She realized that she liked the way it made her feel, the way it helped her forget. When she found out she was pregnant at age 14, she never thought about terminating.
She started using more and got pregnant again. Like her previous pregnancies, she tells me, her eighth pregnancy was a surprise. Adora’s uncle was able to adopt her eighth child, a friend of Sabrina’s adopted the ninth, and Adora’s ex-boyfriend got sober and took custody of his children, Adora’s two eldest. Although she didn’t have custody of any of them, she did see her six oldest children often — taking them to the playground and watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with her boys.
Adora’s case is but one of many in a long history of prosecution targeting pregnant people and the decisions they make. In a 2013 study, scholar Jeanne Flavin and National Advocates for Pregnant Women executive director and founder Lynn Paltrow identified 413 cases of arrests or forced interventions on pregnant women in the United States between 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2005.
Paltrow says that in the ongoing process of updating her and Flavin’s report on pregnancy prosecution, she has observed a demographic shift. “One of the things that we know since 2005 is that the majority of women being arrested currently and disproportionately so are rural, low income, white women,” she says. Instead of “crack babies,” newsrooms now fear for the futures of “oxytots” — children born to opioid-using mothers. “It isn’t that racism has gone away,” says Paltrow.
“At first, I was like, ‘No, they can’t. I don’t think they can keep me in here,’” Adora recalls. But then she started telling herself, “I deserve to be here because my son is gone.” Assistant District Attorney Philip Esbenshade, who was in court for the DA’s office that day, argued that “there could not be a more vulnerable victim” than a fetus. “Her continual use of methamphetamine, in my opinion, shows a selfish callousness which is a circumstance in aggravation. Absolute callousness.”
A year after Adora’s sentencing, another woman was charged with murder under nearly identical circumstances. Chelsea Becker was arrested on November 6, 2019, after giving birth to a stillborn son on September 10 at the very same hospital.
Despite those posts, Fagundes says his office’s decision to prosecute Adora and Chelsea was not politically motivated. “I don’t have any particular mantle or any mission or anything other than to uphold the law, protect victims, and do what’s right,” he tells me. In fact, he said, a female deputy attorney had brought the cases to his attention.
Just three years after Biddle’s amendment passed, Claudia Tucker was charged with murder after she shot herself in the abdomen when “her husband threatened to leave her if she had another child,” said Paltrow. As a young attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, Paltrow herself became involved in defending California mothers prosecuted for their birth outcomes when she handled Pamela Rae Stewart’s case in 1987.
Whatever the outcome of Adora’s case, Hanford will fit into an ongoing history of nationwide pregnancy prosecution that has adopted creative charges, like contributing to the delinquency of a minor, to arrest women. One charge in particular has gained traction since the 1990s: child endangerment. Back then, South Carolina adapted the law to prosecute mothers who use “dangerous” substances during their pregnancies. Since the mid-aughts, a slew of other states have followed suit.
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