Black Ohio woman criminally charged after miscarriage underscores the perils of pregnancy post-Roe

Columbus, Ohio — Ohio was embroiled in a bitter debate over abortion rights this fall when Brittany Watts, 21 weeks and 5 days pregnant, began experiencing large 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 Health-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland.

The doctor said that although there was still a fetal heartbeat, Watts’ water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised her to go to the hospital to have labor induced so that she could undergo what amounted to an abortion to give birth to the non-viable fetus. Otherwise, she would be at “significant risk” of death, her case records show.

That was a Tuesday in September. What followed were three harrowing days involving: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarried and then flushed and flooded a toilet in his house; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is black, charged with abuse of a corpse. It is a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to one year in prison and a $2,500 fine.

His case was sent last week to a grand jury. She has sparked a national storm over the treatment of pregnant women, and especially black women, following the US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump elevated Watts’ plight in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Policing The Womb,” said the case follows a pattern of criminalizing women’s pregnancies. She said those efforts have long overwhelmingly targeted Black women and women of color.

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 be called by child protective services and law enforcement, even when their cases They were similar, he said.

“After Dobbs, what we see is kind of the Wild West,” Goodwin said. “You see this kind of show of force from district attorneys and prosecutors who want to show that they are going to be vigilant and that they are going to stop women who violate the spirit that comes from the state legislature.”

She called black women “canaries in the coal mine” for the “kind of hypervigilant surveillance” that women of all races could expect from the national network of health care providers, law enforcement and courts now that abortion is no longer legal. It is protected at the federal level.

At the time of Watts’ miscarriage, abortion was legal in Ohio during 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. Her attorney, Traci Timko, said Watts sat for eight hours at Mercy Health-St. Joseph is awaiting care on the eve of her pregnancy reaching 22 weeks, before leaving without treatment.

Timko said hospital officials had been deliberating on the legal aspects.

“It was the fear of whether this would constitute an abortion and whether we could do it,” Timko said. The hospital did not respond to calls seeking confirmation and comment.

But B. Jessie Hill, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, said the hospital was in a bind.

“These are knife-edge decisions that health care providers are forced to make,” he said. “And all the incentives are pushing hospitals to be conservative, because on the other side is criminal liability.”

Warren Deputy Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri told Warren Municipal Court Judge Terry Ivanchak during Watts’ preliminary hearing that she left her home for a hairdresser’s appointment after suffering a miscarriage and left the toilet. blocked. Police would later find the fetus trapped in the pipes.

“The issue is not how the child died, when he died,” Guarnieri told the judge, according to television station WKBN. “It’s the fact that they put the baby in a toilet, it was big enough to clog it, they left him in that toilet and she went about her day.”

In court, Timko became enraged.

“This 33-year-old girl with no criminal record is demonized by something that happens every day,” he said.

The size and stage of development of Watts’ fetus became an issue during his preliminary hearing.

At the time, a vigorous campaign on Issue 1, an ultimately successful amendment to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio’s constitution, included ads claiming that the amendment would allow abortions “up to birth.”

A county forensic investigator reported feeling “what appeared to be a small foot with toes” inside Watts’ bathroom. Police confiscated the toilet and smashed it to recover the intact fetus as evidence. An autopsy confirmed that the fetus died in utero before passing through the birth canal and did not identify “any recent injuries.”

The judge acknowledged the complexities of the case when he referred it to the grand jury.

“There are better scholars than me to determine the exact legal status of this fetus, corpse, body, birth tissue, whatever it is,” he said from the stand.

Trumbull County Assistant Prosecutor Diane Barber, the lead prosecutor in the Watts case, could not speak specifically about the case other than to say the county is obligated to move forward with it. She doesn’t expect a grand jury to rule this month.

Timko, a former prosecutor, said Ohio’s corpse abuse statute is vague.

“From a legal perspective, there is no definition of ‘corpse,’” he said. “Can you be a corpse if you never breathed?”

Grace Howard, assistant professor of justice studies at San Jose State University, said it is essential to clarify what part of Watts’ behavior constituted a crime.

“Her miscarriage was completely normal,” he said. “So I just want to know what he (the prosecutor) thinks he should have done. “If we are going to require people to pick up and bring used menstrual products to hospitals so they can make sure it is indeed a miscarriage, it is as ridiculous and invasive as it is cruel.”