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No matter what she decides, Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry will be closely watched across North Carolina and beyond as she weighs whether to proceed with the criminal case against two teens charged in an alleged failed abortion.
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Syeisha Jadan Johnson, 18, is charged with assault inflicting serious bodily injury on an unborn child, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury, The News & Observer previously reported.
Elijah Jshaun Speight, the child’s 19-year-old father, is charged with negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury, according to court records.
Durham police allege Johnson learned of her pregnancy in June and ordered abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol online. She’s accused of taking the pills three days before giving birth to a 5.5-pound baby in a toilet at her home July 29; investigators believe Johnson was 31 weeks pregnant at the time.
The couple is accused of leaving the baby in the toilet until first responders arrived and performed CPR. Police told The N&O the infant was in stable condition at a hospital as of Thursday afternoon.
Deberry, a progressive Democrat, has said her focus is prosecuting only the most violent of crimes. She pledged in 2022 not to prosecute women who had abortions or the healthcare providers involved if abortion were criminalized in the state, according to an X post from her office.
“Criminalizing personal health care decisions around abortion creates untenable choices for women — particularly those experiencing sexual assault and domestic violence — and undermines trust and fairness in our criminal legal system,” Deberry wrote at the time.
Four years later, Deberry told reporters outside a Durham courtroom Wednesday that her stance remains the same. She also attended the first court appearance for the defendants — whom she called “very young” — something district attorneys rarely do.
“What I can say is that I have been on the record over and over again saying that I believe a woman has the right to choose and has the right to making decisions about her own body, and we will review the evidence in this case in that light,” Deberry said.
Maxine Eichner, a law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, told The N&O the case stands on its own for many reasons.
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“These are interesting and not-settled issues of law,” Eichner said. “There’s a real question about all of this.”
While North Carolina does prohibit shipping abortion pills into the state, that charge isn’t often prosecuted and would only affect the provider of the pills, which court documents in this case indicate is based in Virginia. The maximum penalty is a $5,000 civil fine, Eichner said.
“We don’t have a clean fit on our abortion laws and what happened here,” she said, adding that’s why the teens’ charges include child abuse and assault.
“They’ve basically repurposed other laws because our abortion laws don’t clearly cover this,” she explained. “Traditionally, abortion laws around the country, and certainly in North Carolina, too, only punished the providers.”
The baby’s survival and gestational age at the time of birth further complicate the case.
“Usually, these cases involve a fetus that is not viable and is no longer alive,” Eichner said. “What we have here in this case, though, is an infant.”
All told, Eichner said, she views the case as an example of “sui generis” — cases that are so unique they stand on their own legally.
“There are many things about this case that fit into that,” she said. “There’s a number of these kinds of cases from South Carolina, but I haven’t heard any from North Carolina that would be anything close to this.”
Both teens posted $1,000 bail bonds Wednesday and were released from jail. Their charges remained pending as of Thursday afternoon.
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This story was originally published August 7, 2026 at 5:30 AM.