ATLANTA — A Georgia woman is no longer facing a murder charge for using an abortion pill to end the life of her unborn child late in her pregnancy. However, the case highlights a problem: Women are able to obtain abortion drugs off the Internet without a prescription. And the case also demonstrates the contradictory state of contemporary U.S. law when it comes to protection of unborn lives.

Kenlissia Jones, 23, had taken the abortion pill Cytotec, which requires a prescription, when she went into labor and delivered her unborn child at five and a half months gestation in the back of a car. According to local reports, Jones’ child lived only 30 minutes and was pronounced dead at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Ga., in early June.

Dougherty County District Attorney Greg Edwards had originally planned to charge Jones with malice murder, but he dropped the charge. In a statement, Edwards said upon further review his staff determined that “Georgia law presently does not permit prosecution of Ms. Jones for any alleged acts related to the end of her pregnancy.”

Jones, however, still faces a misdemeanor charge for unlawful possession of a dangerous substance.

Edwards indicated in his statement that he has not ruled out going after the Canadian-based Internet provider that sold the abortion pill to Jones, but that was as far as the law permitted him to go. “Although third parties could be criminally prosecuted for their actions relating to an illegal abortion, as the law currently stands in Georgia, the criminal prosecution of a pregnant woman for her own actions against her unborn child does not seem permitted.”

“This has been a heartbreaking tragedy,” Genevieve Wilson, co-executive director of Georgia Right to Life, told the Register. “Abortion is not the quick fix. It is obvious that Ms. Jones and her family are suffering now because of what she did.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, Jones’ brother, Ricco Riggins, said he believed that his sister may not have understood the gravity of what she was doing. “At the end of the day, she is mentally unstable. It doesn’t make it right to take a life, too, but still,” he said.

Wilson said that pregnancy-resource centers potentially could have connected Jones with either private organizations, relevant government services or a combination of community-based resources to help her care for her child.

“Part of the problem is that, unfortunately, the women in need can’t seem to find the centers,” she said. “We need to find a way to connect the women who need this help to the pregnancy-resource centers.”

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a public interest firm that supports legal access to abortion, agreed there are negative social ramifications to consider regarding prosecuting women in such circumstances.

“If a woman fears that by seeking help for any aspect of pregnancy — continuing to term, experiencing a miscarriage or stillbirth or having an abortion — she can go to jail, there is no good reason for her to seek help,” Paltrow said. “That, ultimately, is bad for babies.”

The ability to obtain abortion drugs from the Internet without physician oversight or a prescription is a concern to some medical professionals.

“It is easy to obtain drugs that can cause abortions over the Internet,” said Donna Harrison, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “It’s a terrible public-health concern, because any chemical abortion gets riskier and riskier the further she is along in pregnancy.”

Cytotec is the brand name for misoprostol, the drug that expels an unborn child in the RU-486 chemical-abortion regimen. However, obtaining Cytotec in the U.S. legally requires a prescription, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations state that misoprostol’s abortion use is limited to the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

“Without anybody supervising these women or screening them, they are at tremendous risk for major hemorrhage — from dying by bleeding to death, especially if they are later [along] than they think they are,” Harrison said. “The added tragedy is that, at five and a half months, the baby might have survived if the baby had been delivered at a place where the baby could have received care.”

According to FDA consumer warnings, there are many rogue sites that may look professional but are illegal operations selling unapproved drugs that may have wrong or dangerous ingredients.

Generally, women in the United States who obtain abortions illegally do not face prosecution. However, some states have prosecuted women under fetal-harm laws for drug abuse. Georgia has a law banning abortion past the 20th week of pregnancy, which has been temporarily blocked by a state judge. Post-first trimester abortions are required to be performed in hospitals or a licensed ambulatory surgical or abortion facility.

While Georgia’s fetal-homicide law mandates a life sentence for deliberately killing an unborn child, the law also explicitly excludes prosecuting “any woman with respect to her child.”

Casey Mattox, senior counsel with the public interest firm Alliance Defending Freedom, said the state has a “strong interest” in protecting an unborn child’s life, especially one that at five and a half months was on the point of viability and could feel pain. However, “Roe v. Wade introduces all of these contradictory elements in the law, where we have to treat abortion differently than we would any other medical procedure.”

Mattox pointed out that, in some states, a woman can be liable for misusing drugs that harm a child she intends to keep, but then not be liable if she intended to end her pregnancy. This, he said, sends the message that “negligence is worse than intent.” He added that states ordinarily have enormous power to prosecute prescription-drug abuse that they cannot exercise “in the abortion context.”