Mother Who Left Her Baby to Die in the Toilet is CNN's New Pro-Choice Poster Child

“She was accused of murder after losing her pregnancy. SC woman now tells her story.” After reading this CNN headline, would you guess that Amari Marsh went through early labor—likely due to her chlamydia infection—and was charged because she didn’t remove her live child from the toilet after 911 dispatchers told her to? Probably not.

What’s even more puzzling is that CNN went on to make this article about abortion rights and the danger of enacting pro-life laws. You don’t even know until paragraph 35 in CNN’s article that: “The arrest warrant alleges that not moving the infant from the toilet at the urging of the dispatcher was ultimately ‘a proximate cause of her daughter’s death.’” Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, claimed Marsh’s case is a “prime example of how pregnancy loss can become a criminal investigation very quickly.” She also said, “The Dobbs decision unleashed and empowered prosecutors to look at pregnant people as a suspect class and at pregnancy loss as a suspicious event.”

Marsh did not have a miscarriage. She was also no longer among the class of “pregnant people” once that baby exited her womb. She gave birth to a living child, panicked, and didn’t take her baby out of the toilet, even though she admitted the dispatchers kept telling her to do so. She said, “I couldn’t because I couldn’t even keep myself together.”

CNN wrote, “Marsh’s case also highlights what’s at stake in November.”

Now, what does a newborn baby drowning in a toilet have to do with abortion? Why is seeking justice for a newborn baby a threat to abortion rights? When U.S. Rep. James Clyburn referred to this case, he said, “This is not a slogan when we talk about this being an ‘election about the restoration of our freedoms.’” Does this democratic congressman believe women should have a blanket right to allow their newborns to drown in a toilet?

Of course, she should have been investigated. The grand jury decided not to proceed with a criminal trial, but there was a living human being who died. To believe there should be no accountability—at the very least, an investigation—is to ignore the child’s humanity. You can kill someone in self-defense and still be investigated and even indicted. Ending a life is a serious matter, and it ought to be. Marsh’s case isn’t even about bodily autonomy.

The truth is abortion is not about a woman’s right to do whatever she wants with her body. Women don’t have blanket authority to do whatever they want anyway, especially when they want to use their bodies to harm other humans deliberately.

Abortion is about relieving women of the burden of having a living biological child. That is why women don’t give them up for adoption. That is why activists are trying to establish a right to abortion before technology makes artificial wombs a reality. That is why Democrats want elective abortion after fetal viability to be available, even though they wrongly and repeatedly claim women only get late-term abortions for tragic circumstances.

Anti-abortion activists care about the mothers, but they also care about the rights and the lives of their children. If both can live, both should live. Abortion activists claim they care about “living breathing children who are born,” and this child fits those parameters. The child should not have died in the toilet.

Perhaps the grand jury made the right decision. They have more details about Marsh’s state of mind when it happened than we do, but Marsh and her lawyers are making her out to be the victim of racism because she was treated “as a criminal instead of a grieving mother.” What happened to Marsh was tragic and she didn’t choose to give birth early (unless she’s being dishonest about whether she kept her scheduled Planned Parenthood appointment). Perhaps she was too emotionally fraught to get the baby out of the toilet. But how she proceeds with her story is a choice, and now, she’s being used to advocate for more dead babies.

CNN did quote Solicitor David Pascoe, and he pointed out “the issues of abortion and reproductive rights weren’t relevant to this case,” but I also believe CNN knows most people won’t read beyond the headline and certainly won’t dig too deep into the article. And why are they referring to birthing a child as a “loss of pregnancy?” They are trying to conflate miscarriages to scare women into supporting no restrictions on abortion.

We’ve even seen the Vice President use the death of a Georgia woman, who died from medical complications after a legal abortion, to blame pro-life laws and win elections. The conflation between induced abortions and using a D&C for miscarriage management is causing confusion in the medical community, and that confusion is designed and pushed by the abortion industry. Some doctors are engaging in medical malpractice, and they should be held accountable. They should also know the law because it certainly isn’t illegal to have a D&C after a child has already passed away.

After Kate Cox’s viral story—a mother who aborted her disabled child because she wanted to save her C-section for a healthy baby—activists began to say that pro-life laws that allow exceptions aren’t good enough because doctors still won’t grant a woman “life-saving abortions” (even though Kate Cox’s doctors did not argue she needed one to preserve her life under the standards set by Texas law, nor did they argue her life was in imminent danger).

The pro-abortion community conflates miscarriages and abortion so much that activists were calling Jessa Duggar Seewald a hypocrite and a coward for having a D&C after her child naturally passed away in the womb, and they insisted she had an abortion.

What we legally understand to be an induced abortion and how a hospital codes its procedures can be different. Thinking that miscarriage management is the same as an induced abortion is like believing there’s no difference between cremation and setting an alive person on fire. Abortion activists know the difference. They want the voters to be confused and to attach ectopic pregnancies and other things under the abortion umbrella. They need the conflation because abortion is mainly done not for medical reasons but to preserve the lifestyle choices of the mother.

Last year, abortion activists stood up for a Nebraska woman who had an illegal abortion and was sentenced to 90 days in jail. She wasn’t even charged for the abortion. She was charged for burning the body of her child who was around 28 weeks, after claiming she delivered a stillborn baby. So, it shouldn’t be surprising what sort of lengths pro-abortion activists will resort to, but stanning for a woman who left her baby to drown in a toilet is a new low.