South Carolina prosecutors said the homicide charge filed against 23-year-old Amari Marsh ‘had nothing to do with’ the state’s abortion laws.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the media’s latest attempt to mislead on state abortion laws, and we cover more media misses.
Another Deceptive Abortion Story
The media has moved on from falsely politicizing the tragic death of 28-year-old Amber Thurman, who died after experiencing complications from a chemical abortion, and has found a new pregnancy-related story to demonize abortion restrictions — that of 23-year-old Amari Marsh.
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi tells us after Marsh “delivered her baby prematurely, the state of South Carolina met the mourning mother with an ankle monitor and a murder/homicide charge.”
“That’s the reality of post-Roe America,” he adds on X.
Marsh’s story first entered the national spotlight thanks to an article published by KFF Health News. (As Live Action notes, the outlet is “heavily pro-abortion and Kaiser’s own website lists multiple pro-abortion philanthropists as ‘funders,’ including the Gates and Buffett Foundation.”
Marsh was arrested in June 2023 and charged with homicide after she gave birth during her second trimester on the toilet at home. When first responders arrived, her baby was in the toilet covered with used toilet tissue. The baby, who showed signs of life, was taken to the hospital where she was pronounced dead despite first responders’ efforts to save her.
Marsh had arrived at a local hospital hours earlier with abdominal pains, but left without being discharged by medical personnel. Her hospital visit on February 28, 2023, came roughly one month after she had a chemical abortion at the Planned Parenthood in Columbia, S.C., according to the police report. She found out she was pregnant in November 2022.
She told police she was supposed to have a follow-up appointment to ensure the chemical abortion “worked” but never went back.
However, despite telling authorities about her chemical abortion, she later claimed that she never visited Planned Parenthood.
Nonetheless, abortion law had nothing to do with the case brought against Marsh, who police said had been informed at the hospital that she was pregnant before she left without being discharged.
She went into labor at 3 am on March 1 while at home with her boyfriend.
EMS supervisor Sherron Washington told police she had “responded to the incident location for the medical call” with two other medics. Washington said that Marsh had been “transported to RMC earlier by EMS and upon arrival, she jumped from the stretcher and ran away from the location.”
Washington explained that “Marsh was asked several times to remove the infant from the toilet but when they arrived, the infant was still located inside of the toilet.”
Prosecutors in the case said it “had nothing to do with” the state’s abortion laws. In fact, abortion was still legal in South Carolina for up to 22 weeks when Marsh gave birth, which means she could have legally obtained an abortion during her pregnancy. South Carolina law also does not allow for the prosecution of the mother for obtaining an abortion.
Instead, the key fact in the case is that a 911 dispatcher told Marsh to “take the baby out” of the toilet and she did not comply.
The arrest warrant said that leaving the baby in the toilet was a primary cause of the baby’s death, in addition to “respiratory complications” from premature delivery, due to a maternal chlamydia infection.
A grand jury ultimately decided there was insufficient probable cause to proceed with charges.
Despite the facts of the case, KFF Health News and CNN somehow concluded that Marsh’s case “raises questions about the state of reproductive rights in this country.”
“She was accused of murder after losing her pregnancy. SC woman now tells her story,” KFF reported.
And when gun-reform activist Shannon Watts shared the CNN article last week she told her 625,000 followers on X: “After 23-year-old Amari Marsh delivered her baby prematurely, the state of South Carolina forced her to wear an ankle monitor and charged her with homicide. A Trump/Vance administration would encourage and allow this targeting of women”
Headline Fail of the Week
Former president Donald Trump has faced highly-exaggerated comparisons to Adolf Hitler since he first ran for president in 2016. But apparently The Atlantic didn’t think comparing Trump to just one dictator went far enough: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,” according to a headline published by the outlet last week.
“The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics,” Anne Applebaum wrote, calling Trump’s political rhetoric “ugly and repellent.”
“These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often,” the article says. “In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped ‘cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.’”
Scott Stossel, the magazine’s national editor, celebrated Applebaum’s piece: “My colleague [Applebaum] knows as much about the history of authoritarian regimes as anyone. When she says that Trump has begun using the language of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini with clear intentionality, pay attention.”
Media Misses
- Disgraced former NBC News and MSNBC anchor Brian Williams will return to the spotlight on Election Night as he hosts a special for Amazon Prime: “Election Night Live With Brian Williams.” Williams previously anchored the NBC Nightly News for 11 years until 2015, when he was suspended for six months after he was found to have falsely claimed to have been aboard a helicopter that was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade while in Iraq. In fact, his aircraft was actually following the helicopter that came under fire. The embellishment led to an NBC News internal investigation which unearthed other examples where Williams had fabricated or embellished in his reporting.
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he is beefing up his personal security after the left-wing German magazine Der Spiegel put him on its cover and dubbed him “Public Enemy No. 2,” coming in second only to Trump, who has survived two assassination attempts.
- Political commentator Angela Rye said during a recent CNN panel that “white folks” should be held accountable “for not showing up to save democracy” if Kamala Harris loses on Election Day. “What I think is a mistake is to let White folks escape the accountability that they must face for not showing up to save democracy themselves,” she said. “They want to get mad at presidential candidates, right, when they don’t wear a flag lapel pin or they don’t see you pledging allegiance to the flag,” Rye continued. “That’s what they want to get upset about. Now, the face of patriotism to them looks like trying to tear down the Capitol in a terrorist attack on January 6th, 2021.”