A grand jury is set to decide whether an Ohio woman who miscarried a nonviable fetus should face criminal consequences.
Brittany Watts, who was reportedly turned into the police after her September miscarriage, has been charged with the fifth-degree felony of “abuse of a corpse” in Trumbull county, Ohio. Her case has been held up as evidence of how easily pregnant people can find themselves in law enforcement’s crosshairs – especially since the overturning of Roe v Wade and amid tightening abortion restrictions in the US.
If convicted, Watts could spend up to a year behind bars.
In September, Watts showed up at an Ohio hospital with signs that her water had broken prematurely, according to CNN. That condition can make it impossible for a pregnancy to continue and, if left untreated, pregnant people in that condition can slip into deadly sepsis – which has happened in other states post-Roe.
Watts was 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy, CNN reported. At the time, Ohio law banned abortion past 22 weeks of pregnancy. That law has since changed: thanks to a November referendum, Ohio now permits the procedure until viability, a benchmark that generally occurs at about 24 weeks of pregnancy. Still, the Washington Post reported that staffers at the hospital spent hours debating how to proceed with Watts’s case.
Watts left the hospital against medical advice because, she told the doctor, she could “better process what was happening to her at home”, according to the Post. She returned the next day, but left again.
Watts ended up miscarrying the fetus at home, into the toilet, which became clogged with blood, tissue and stool, according to the Washington Post. Watts thought that she removed the mass clogging the toilet and “placed it outdoors”, in the words of the outlet.
Afterward, she went to the hospital – where a nurse reported her to the police, Watts told the Washington Post.
In situations where a person is criminalized over their pregnancy, medical professionals are often responsible for instigating the case: one in three cases are initiated by a medical professional, according to an analysis of nearly 1,400 such cases by Pregnancy Justice.
The “abuse of a corpse” charge turns on the question of whether someone has treated a corpse in a way that would “outrage reasonable community sensibilities”, according to the text of the law. Watts’s attorney, Traci Timko, told CNN in an email that Ohio law does not require miscarrying women to bury or cremate fetal remains.
“Women miscarry into toilets every day,” she added. (Timko did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Guardian.)
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Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, a group that helped lead the charge to protect abortion access in Ohio, agreed in an open letter to a Trumbull county prosecutor.
“By seeking to indict her, you are clearly implying that anyone who miscarries at any point in pregnancy in our state must retrieve the fetal tissue whether they are at home, at work, at school, at a restaurant or other public place and preserve it until the tissue can be disposed of properly even though Ohio law does not define what a proper disposal method would be nor require that this non-existent method be used,” the group wrote. “We have no doubt that women facing the threat of jail time and hefty fines will conceal the fact that they have miscarried and refuse to seek treatment.”
Trumbull county prosecutor Dennis Watkins said in a statement that his office has no choice but to present the case to a grand jury, the Associated Press reported.
“The county prosecutors are duty bound to follow Ohio law,” Watkins said.
