Woman faces criminal charges after miscarriage
Ohio case attracts controversy in wake of Supreme Court decision affecting abortions
— Ohio was in the throes of a bitter debate over abortion rights this fall when Brittany Watts, 21 weeks and 5 days pregnant, began passing thick blood clots.
Watts, 33, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor’s office behind Mercy HealthSt. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a city about 60 miles southeast of Cleveland.
The doctor said that, while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts’ water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised heading to the hospital to have her labor induced, so she could have what amounted to an abortion to deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face “significant risk” of death, according to case records.
That was a Tuesday in September. What followed was a harrowing three days entailing: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarrying into, and then flushing and plunging, a toilet at her home; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is Black, being charged with abuse of a corpse. That’s a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Her case was sent last month to a grand jury. It has touched off a national firestorm over the treatment of pregnant women, and especially Black women, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump elevated Watts’ plight in a post to X, formerly Twitter, and supporters have donated more than $100,000 through GoFundMe for her legal defense, medical bills and trauma counseling.
Whether abortion-seekers should face criminal charges is a matter of debate within the anti-abortion community, but, post-Dobbs, pregnant women like Watts, who was not even trying to get an abortion, have increasingly found themselves charged with “crimes against their own pregnancies,” said Grace Howard, assistant justice studies professor at San José State University.
“Roe was a clear legal roadblock to charging felonies for unintentionally harming pregnancies, when women were legally allowed to end their pregnancies through abortion,” she said. “Now that Roe is gone, that roadblock is entirely gone.”
Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Policing The Womb,” said those efforts have long overwhelmingly targeted Black and brown women.
Even before Roe was overturned, studies show that Black women who visited hospitals for prenatal care were 10 times more likely than white women to have child protective services and law enforcement called on them, even when their cases were similar, she said.