Update: On Jan. 11, 2024, a grand jury declined to indict Brittany Watts on a felony charge after she miscarried at home, NBC News reported.
Give birth, die trying, or go to jail.
To the anti-abortion politicians and lobbyists who got their wish when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, these have always been the only acceptable pregnancy outcomes. Ideally, they’d like a country full of meek, compliant (and mostly white) women whose sole mission in life is to have children. But since pregnancy is dangerous, it’s unavoidable that a number of those women will die in the process — especially in the United States, where our maternal mortality rates (particularly for Black and brown people) are already exceptionally high, and rising. That’s too bad, of course, but for anti-abortion forces it’s better than the alternative: Women who think we have the right to make our own decisions about when, where and whether to carry a pregnancy to term.
Those women will have to be taught a lesson. That’s what’s happening to Brittany Watts, a Black woman from Warren, Ohio, who is facing felony charges not for seeking or having an abortion, but for having a complicated pregnancy and experiencing a miscarriage in her bathroom at home in October.
If convicted, Watts faces up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Aware that, at just over 21 weeks’ gestation, her pregnancy and potentially her life were in danger, Watts sought medical care at a local Catholic hospital multiple times and was told her only option was to induce labor. The day she finally miscarried, Watts waited for eight hours, allegedly because hospital officials were deliberating over whether Ohio law even permitted them to provide the very care they recommended. It’s no wonder Watts felt more comfortable handling the end of her pregnancy at home.
After delivering the nonviable fetus over her toilet, Watts ended up back at the hospital. She “was still hooked to an IV, sick for almost a week from a potentially fatal miscarriage, when a detective from the Warren Police Department in Ohio stepped into her hospital room,” The Washington Post reported. The subsequent investigation — which included visiting Watts’ home and breaking apart her toilet to inspect the fetal remains — confirmed that the fetus had died in utero. Nevertheless, local prosecutors have asked a grand jury to consider indicting Watts on charges of felony abuse of a corpse. If convicted, Watts faces up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
We can expect to hear more stories like Watts’ going forward. What’s happening to her is hardly new and not unusual for women and pregnant people of color in the United States. As reproductive legal expert Michele Goodwin told The Associated Press, Black women are “canaries in the coal mine” when it comes to the policing and prosecution of pregnancies. According to research from legal organizations such as Pregnancy Justice and If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, anti-abortion politicians, along with police and prosecutors, have long targeted low-income people for their pregnancy outcomes, including alleged self-managed abortion and miscarriage.
This targeting happens even in cases and places, like Watts’ in Ohio, where legal statute forbids charging people for what happens during their pregnancies. Not only did a police officer outright lie to Watts in her hospital room, telling her she wasn’t in any trouble, but the reason he was there in the first place was due to a police report made by Watts’ nurse. Indeed, it is often the very medical professionals tasked with protecting and caring for pregnant people who report them to law enforcement despite there being no legal obligation (or medical need) to do so.
Nothing that happened to Watts, from the first moment she sought care for her pregnancy until now, has been just or even justified — morally, ethically or statutorily. As law professor Mary Ziegler pointed out to Slate, “there is no standard guidance about what to do with fetal remains” and prosecutors have not explained how Watts should have handled the traumatic situation. She should be healing at home today, not being dragged to court to relive a heartbreaking experience that she had every right to navigate on her own terms.
Post-Roe politics demands every pregnancy be treated as a potential crime scene.
But post-Roe politics demands every pregnancy be treated as a potential crime scene. There is simply no way to enforce abortion restrictions and bans other than to entitle the state — or, in states with “bounty hunter” laws like Texas, random citizens — to investigate any and every pregnancy that doesn’t end in a live birth. Politicians who back forced-pregnancy policies know this, even the ones who claim to be seeking so-called “compromises” with 15-week abortion bans and useless abortion “exceptions.” Even the ones who say they’ll exempt pregnant people from charges. They can’t, they won’t, and most importantly: They don’t want to. They believe they are entitled to dictate the terms of other people’s reproductive lives, and that those who won’t comply voluntarily must be terrorized and threatened until they are forced to do so.
It’s why you haven’t heard any outcry from the so-called “pro-life” contingent about protecting and defending Brittany Watts, and the ones leading the call to get the charges against her dropped are reproductive health, rights, and justice groups. It’s why Missouri Republicans just tried again to propose homicide prosecutions for people who have abortions, mirroring similar efforts in at least a half-dozen other states over the last several years, even before the end of Roe. It’s why Kate Cox was forced to flee her home state. It’s why Roe was overturned in the first place, and it’s only the beginning.
Andrea Grimes
Andrea Grimes is a journalist and activist living in Austin, Texas.