When the police showed up at her door in Nevada, Patience Frazier assumed the officers had come for someone else. As a woman in uniform started asking her questions on a Saturday morning in May 2018, five men eyed Frazier from the driveway, most in heavy tactical vests, the words “sheriff” and “police” emblazoned on their backs. A few had fanned out to survey her home’s perimeter, hands on their holsters as if bracing to shoot. Frazier told the female sheriff’s deputy that her boyfriend wasn’t home, guessing he was in some kind of drug trouble. Then the woman asked about “Abel.” Standing on the porch steps in socks and black leggings, the 26-year-old had a terrifying realization. The officers were there for her, the Washington Post reports. Earlier that month, Frazier had shared a Facebook post about the son she lost. She had apologized to Abel, saying she was “so scarred n afraid” and “didn’t know what to do,” court records show. “Why would you be sorry?” asked Jacqueline “Jac” Mitcham, the 31-year-old deputy on Frazier’s doorstep, according to body-camera footage. “Why would you be sorry, Patience?” Frazier looked over at the other armed officers standing 10 feet away.
“I’m not allowed to have personal things in my life?” said Frazier, a mother of three. “I had a miscarriage, okay? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f---ing miscarriage?” Even before Roe v. Wade fell, a consensus had emerged across much of the antiabortion movement that women who seek abortions should not be prosecuted. The abortion bans that have taken effect since Roe was overturned, as well as restrictions that existed before the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, do not allow women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished, instead targeting doctors and others who help facilitate abortions. Those measures don’t tell the full story. In rare and often little-noticed cases, authorities have drawn on other laws to charge women accused of trying to end their pregnancies. Some prosecutors in both red and blue states have used sweeping statutes entirely unrelated to abortion — like child abuse, improper disposal of remains or murder — while others have relied on criminal laws written to protect a fetus. In Nevada, Frazier was charged with manslaughter under a unique 1911 law that supplements the state’s abortion restrictions, titled “taking drugs to terminate pregnancy." As in Frazier’s case, women who are prosecuted are typically accused of trying to end pregnancies without the help of a medical professional — a method frequently chosen because they live far from an abortion clinic and can’t afford to get to one. These prosecutions often occur when women are thought to be far along in pregnancy, near or past the point when a fetus could potentially survive outside of the womb. Based on a review of hundreds of documents, hours of body-cam footage and interviews with those involved, a Post investigation of Frazier’s case offers new insight into the messy complexities and intensely personal emotions embedded within such a prosecution. From the start, deep moral questions loomed over a local justice system as it struggled to distinguish a miscarriage from an abortion, a fetus from a baby, culminating in a conviction one judge would ultimately characterize as “a total miscarriage of justice.”