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.
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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.
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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 shoul
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