How Common is Fetal Abduction?

By Elizabeth Yuko

Elizabeth Yuko

When an OB-GYN at McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel, Oklahoma examined Taylor Parker on Oct. 9, 2020, he found no evidence that she had just given birth — or had even been pregnant at all. Parker, 27, who was pulled over driving to the hospital, claimed that she had delivered her baby in her car, and had the placenta in her pants to prove it. But, as the doctors quickly concluded, the baby wasn’t hers. 

Earlier that day, Parker — who had pretended to be pregnant for 10 months — stabbed her pregnant friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock 15 times, then performed a crude cesarean section, cutting the fetus out of her body with a scalpel and removing it from her uterus. Neither the baby nor Simmons-Hancock survived. Parker was eventually charged in Texas, where the crime had occurred, with capital murder, murder, and kidnapping, and sentenced to death. She is currently the youngest woman on death row in Texas.

Parker’s story, the subject of the Netflix documentary Maternal Instincts, brings to light a crime known as “fetal abduction.” The film chronicles the months of manipulation and deceit leading up to Parker committing the crime. 

“Fetal abduction is the abduction of an unborn child by attacking a pregnant woman and forcibly removing her fetus, usually near the end of the pregnancy, with the intent to claim the baby as the offender’s own,” explains Becky Steinbach, senior producer for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). In the United States, the NCMEC — the nation’s largest child protection nonprofit organization — tracks cases of fetal abduction to help prevent the crime and assist law enforcement. 

So what, exactly, prompts someone to remove someone’s fetus from their womb and claim it as their own? And how common is fetal abduction? Here’s what to know about this brutal criminal act.

What is fetal abduction?

Fetal abduction is one type of infant abduction, which is defined as the kidnapping of a child under the age of one. “[Infant abduction] is a long-established criminal scheme, whether to remedy the consequences of a woman’s infertility or to extort money from a family desperate to recover a kidnapped infant,” says Michael Welner, MD, a forensic psychiatrist, chairman of The Forensic Panel, and clinical professor of psychiatry at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. 

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However, in recent decades, maternity wards and neonatal care centers have taken additional steps towards preventing the kidnapping of newborns when they are separated from their mother — to the point where this crime essentially no longer occurs in healthcare settings, he says. 

Without that option, Welner says that “a rare cohort of women” have taken another approach: killing a near-term pregnant person and extracting their fetus from the womb. Though commonly known as “fetal abduction,” Welner coined the term “fetal abduction by maternal evisceration” (FAMAE) to highlight the forced cesarean section component and the (usually fatal) effect it has on the mother. “It’s not like mothers are sedated and then some ‘delivery’ occurs,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It’s a brutal crime.”

How common is fetal abduction?

There have been 24 fetal abductions reported to the NCMEC in the United States since 1974, according to Steinbach.

“Fetal abductions are incredibly rare, but they are among the most violent crimes involving children and families,” she tells Rolling Stone. “In the cases NCMEC has tracked, 22 mothers were killed or died as a result of the attack, and nearly half of the abducted fetuses also did not survive.”

NCMEC receives reports of fetal abductions from law enforcement agencies and legal guardians. “Depending on the circumstances, both the pregnant mother and unborn child may initially be reported missing,” Steinbach says. “In other cases, the mother may be located while the baby is subsequently reported missing.”

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While fetal abduction takes place around the world, the same offense is more likely to remain unreported or even undiscovered outside the U.S. in societies where there is less enforcement of individual rights, eroded policing, endemic violence, and a lack of media accountability, Welner says. As of 2022, there were eight reported cases of fetal abduction from South Africa, Colombia, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Mexico. 

Who commits fetal abductions, and why do they do it?

Though every case is unique, based on those that the NCMEC has tracked, there are some common characteristics among individuals who carry out fetal abductions, Steinbach says. “The primary abductors in fetal abduction cases are women,” she explains. “Many have experienced a miscarriage or are unable to become pregnant.” In all but one of the fetal abduction cases, the offender had falsely claimed to be pregnant. 

A seminal 2002 article on fetal abduction published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences identified a dual motive for committing the crime: “To cement a failing partner relationship and to fulfill a childbearing and delivery fantasy.” In many cases, the woman is convinced that establishing herself as a mother to her partner’s child would maintain that relationship, Welner says. 

“Premeditated homicide is a profoundly dysfunctional way of working through such a conflict, which is why the crime is so rare,” he explains. “The perpetrators have an unusual level of callousness toward others that enables them, under circumstances of being desperate, to stalk and kill a target pregnant woman without hesitation or ambivalence.”

Victims of fetal abduction are often young, expectant mothers — the average age being 23, and 71 percent being between the ages of 17 and 23. “Many were lured by offers of free or discounted baby clothes, baby supplies, or transportation,” Steinbach says. The average age of abductors is 33, with nearly two-thirds being between the ages of 30 and 41.

According to Welner, fetal abduction is deviant behavior rather than a psychiatric condition. “The crime occurs in those whose identity is wrapped up in maintaining a particular relationship through achieved birthing,” he says. 

How does a fetal abduction take place?

The murder of the pregnant person and forcible removal of a fetus from their uterus is the culmination of a crime that took extensive planning.

Timing is a key component of fetal abductions, Welner says. “The perpetrator has falsely represented to her male partner for months that she is pregnant, has faked the pregnancy, and has concealed that deception from her partner,” he explains. “Approaching and into the ninth month, with no real baby coming, the perpetrator faces the choices of telling the partner that she ‘lost’ the pregnancy, or otherwise ‘delivering.’” 

In order to identify a pregnant woman close to term that she might target, the perpetrator visits and surveils stores where baby clothes are sold as well as obstetric outpatient care clinics. “The perpetrator will look for someone whom she believes would birth a baby that the perpetrator could represent as her own, so there is some visual profiling,” Welner says.

Online interactions have also become an important factor in these cases. “Over the past 10 years, NCMEC is aware of seven fetal abductions, and 71 percent involved an online component, with victims connecting with the offender through social media or online marketplaces while searching for baby items,” Steinbach says.

Perpetrators often utilize confidence-style tricks to gain the trust of their victims. Once they have identified and made contact with a potential target, they continue to build enough trust with the pregnant person that they’d agree to meet up with them alone on a separate occasion. This has included perpetrators pretending to administer a survey in their car, posing as a social worker giving away free baby items at their home, accompanying victims to a doctor’s appointment at a nonexistent clinic, and luring them to fake baby showers.

“Once alone, the assailant(s) overpower the pregnant woman, kill her, and remove the fetus as quickly as possible to save the fetus’ life,” Welner says. “The perpetrator claims the baby as her own.” 

Hospitals treating the post-term “mother” are often the first to be suspicious about whether she gave birth to the newborn that she brought in.

What are some examples of fetal abductions?

There have been other instances of fetal abductions similar to Parker’s. In 2015, a decade before Parker murdered Simmons-Hancock, Dynel Lane of Denver, a 34-year-old mother-of-three, killed 26-year-old Michelle Wilkins when she was seven months pregnant, as well as her fetus, after luring Wilkins to her home by posting a Craigslist ad for baby clothes.

That same year, Ashleigh Wade, 22, faked being pregnant, then murdered her childhood friend, Angelikque Sutton, 22, in the Bronx after reconnecting with her and bonding over the fact that they were both pregnant and due around the same time.

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