A woman who had a miscarriage is now charged with abusing a corpse as stricter abortion laws play out nationwide
by mixplate
A woman who had a miscarriage is now charged with abusing a corpse as stricter abortion laws play out nationwide
by mixplate
48 comments
>An Ohio woman who had sought treatment at a hospital before suffering a miscarriage and passing her nonviable fetus in her bathroom now faces a criminal charge, her attorney told CNN.
>Brittany Watts, 33, of Warren, has been charged with felony abuse of a corpse, Trumbull County court records show.
>“Ms. Watts suffered a tragic and dangerous miscarriage that jeopardized her own life. Rather than focusing on healing physically and emotionally, she was arrested and charged with a felony,” her attorney, Traci Timko, told CNN in an email.
>“Ms. Watts’ case is pending before the Trumbull County Grand Jury. I have advised her not to speak publicly until the criminal matter has resolved.”
>Though a coroner’s office report said the fetus was not viable and had died in the womb, Watts’ case highlights the extent to which prosecutors can charge a woman whose pregnancy has ended – whether by abortion or miscarriage.
America you OK?
This is what the “pro-life” movement is all about. Punishing women. If you call yourself pro-life, go fuck yourself this is your fault
Ohio should change its state motto to the chauvinist state.
This is only the BEGINNING of the promised anti-women atrocities from maga leaders if re-elected. Stop voting for hateful maga trash.
3 words… What the fuck???
America is quickly being destroyed by religious zealots and brain dead superstitious GOP terrorist.
Authoritarians just love to punish and control women.
Again.
Fuck every republican imaginable.
They are not to be respected nor listened to.
They are monsters, whose only morals are to keep them in power.
“conservative”. Yup. By meaning they want to conserve their place in government until their saggy balls cave in.
Future headline: [Texas charges Fetus as “Abortion Accomplice”](https://imgur.com/MD0g6Eb)
(from Real Time with Bill Maher)
This is horrifying. The state has no business criminally investigating the disposal of a miscarried fetus.
What was she supposed to do, and how does anyone feel it’s their place to judge her? Is the expectation that all women who miscarry at any point should immediately phone EMS, the coroner, and a funeral service director?
Ohio GOP, walk us through the lawful etiquette when a “corpse” dies inside your body and is unexpectedly expelled.
Another horrific story about birth-zealots pushing their agenda.
End the electoral college.
Expand the Supreme Court.
Expand the House.
End minority rule.
This is the land of the free where there should be a separation between church and state, correct?
Ohio will always be Ohio
Truly horrifying. Cannot imagine how traumatizing the situation was in the first place then for all of this to take place after… what the fck.
I miscarried into a toilet at 6.5 weeks and that was extremely hard on me and mentally you don’t know what to do at the time. No one tells you what to do when that happens. At first I tried to fish it out then I just went to denial and flushed it.
Should not have ever happened. She should have been able to get an abortion at a medical facility. It’s cruel to be forced to carry a nonviable fetus. Dumb fucking country.
She needs to split town and move to a rational state.
Really curious how extradition would play out.
It’s not about pro-life. It’s about punishing women.
Get your children, yourselves, and your money out of Gilead **while you still can**.
Anti-abortion individuals don’t know or care to know about human anatomy (unless it involves the penis) because if they did they might actually not support half of the anti abortion bills that come out of the “””pro life*””” Republicans and their governments. *not a good life mind you just life for life’s sake even if its in total agony.
Fuck Lewis Guarnieri
This is what the republican party wants for all American women. To terrorize them, to let them die for no reason when modern medicine could easily save their lives and to jail them if possible.
Its only the beginning. They are coming for medicines and BC pills next. Women will be slaves to men and treated worse than cattle in this country if these MAGA bastards are not stopped!
Shithole country
Pretty evil.
White men making decisions for women strikes again.
Republican forced-birth fanaticism working *exactly* as intended.
The same crowd that hallelujah’d the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 evisceration of women’s reproductive freedom supports the whacko “fetal personhood” movement.
Republicans’ stupefyingly creepy fetus fetish renders living, breathing women superfluous.
This is the endgame of the pro life movement; miscarriage = manslaughter
As white Jesus intended.
This illiterate Twilight Zone episode that modern conservatism has us all trapped in has gotten beyond old.
There’s no way if she takes this to trial even if the prosecution lays out the case there is no way she’s found unanimously guilty…or do I have too much faith?
This poor woman. Has to deal with the physical and emotional trauma of losing a child on top of being vilified for something she had zero control of.
Okay wait, she got hospital treatment but ended up having a miscarriage… why is she being charged and not the hospital? Like man I get that the lunatics are pro life or whatever, but what the fuck, sometimes people have miscarriages, you can’t fucking arrest people for that. That’s legitimately medieval, like we understand that science, those officers are aware the woman got treatment in the hospital and this couldn’t be prevented. This is actually sickening
I’m from a fam of basically all girls, no male cousins, siblings and one single first uncle, me and my father. I will never ever ever fucking forgive or show respect to anyone who helped or supported revoking roe and take women’s choices away, and I’m from the south and religious. This is fucking Al qaeda type shit. The modern world has no fucking place for this shit
Like do these motherfuckers think god is happy with this? You think god is happy a woman just failed to give birth, lost her child despite the pain and burden she went through, just to be thrown in a fucking jail cell? You think god is smiling down like “yeah they are doing my will, good job guys” What about this shit is fucking godly or Christian to goddamn anyone?
“But that’s never going to hapoen”
“This is like 1% of pregnancies”
“Nobody is actually trying to punish women”
“Obviously people with extenuating circumstances wouldn’t be punished”
Except literally every warning has come true, exactly as it was said that it would. I’ve been saying for the better part of a decade that if they start outlawing abortion, women with miscarriages would suffer, but nobody believed me.
i fucking hate it here
Ohio, you are wrong. And abusive. You took her devastating loss and made it about what you think you have a right to think about what she’s going through. 👎 👎
This is the shit that boils my blood. As a mom, I am even more pro choice and these scenarios are part of why I feel even more strongly now. I’ve had 2 life threatening pregnancies. My first pregnancy resulted in placenta previa at 20 weeks. This means that my placenta was positioned near the cervix and as my uterus expanded, it ended up over my cervix which detached it from my uterus. Because of this, I woke up one morning feeling like I was having horrid period cramps and covered in blood. I obviously went to the hospital and was hooked up to all of the monitors and told that it was too early to save the baby and that I was in danger of bleeding to death. I literally had a 15% chance of living in this situation and I had to sit there and listen as my baby’s heart beat slowed and then stopped. I had to deliver a dead baby who was not viable at that age. I had to hold my dead baby while I processed this, while I covered the bed in blood, while people I knew came in because they were told that they might want to say goodbye to me because I might not make it. I was 20. No one had talked about things like placenta previa, like bleeding to death or making funeral arrangements for your baby. In case you need a public reference, this is what Chrissy Teagan and John Legend were faced with when she went on bed rest because of her placenta position and then her baby didn’t make it either. It’s fucking tragic and has nothing to do with what the mother has done. I was the picture of health and every single thing was perfect until it wasn’t, until I woke up one morning and my entire life changed.
I then watched as the other 5 women that I was close to in turn had their absolutely fine births and babies and it felt like absolute torture to put on a happy face and receive baby shower invites while I was dying inside.
I decided that if I was deemed healthy enough, after enough time that I would try again. 5 months into my 2nd pregnancy my appendix ruptured. I had no family history, it just decided to start freaking out while I was running errands one day. I walked into the ER. told them I was presenting with text book appendicitis symptoms and that I needed to get to the OR asap. Their choice was to repeatedly do ultra sounds that made me arc off of the table and scream, to ask the same questions on repeat, to take kidney stone tests that I knew would be negative because why would anyone actually listen to what a woman is saying about her own body? How could a mere woman tell the difference between excruciating pain slightly below and to the right of her navel and pain in her lower back and blood in her urine? I said that I had no kidney stone symptoms repeatedly but I’m just a woman and I was about to die so wtf could I know?
They fucking sent me home. With a high fever, stabbing pain and an inability to keep anything down. Like even a Tablespoon of water. They sent me home to die. Around midnight that night I called my midwife and told her if she didn’t bring me back my baby and I were dead. She had been out of town that afternoon but she knew what was happening, had already yelled at the staff and picked me up. If she hadn’t brought me in there and declared that if they didn’t operate our blood was on their hands, we would be dead. My ex husband was around and was also useless which is why I am just now mentioning him, he was not the person who stood up for us, my midwife was. If he had been in charge, we’d both be dead because I barely had the strength to make that call, if she hadn’t been on speed dial, we would probably be dead. I obviously got the operation and they sent me home within 8 hours, that’s how much they gave a fuck.
If all of this had played out in the GOP fascist fever dream that they want us all to suffer and die under I could have been arrested too. I could have been in jail while other people planned and attended my first baby Quinlan’s funeral. I could have been under some kind of medical testing and interrogation while people were crying over my baby’s grave for me while I was behind bars because my placenta was poorly placed. I could have been charged with abuse of a corpse if I didn’t make it to the hospital on time. If things had played out slightly differently with my appendicitis, I could have been charged for murder or reckless endangerment, negligence, manslaughter. I could have been charged with abuse of a corpse if I had miscarried after the fucking hospital sent me home if I had delivered in my living room due to the stress.
If anyone is unsure, I can confirm that delivering a dead baby is absofuckinglutely traumatizing. Holding your dead baby while you name him and fill out paper work is traumatizing. Planning your dead baby’s funeral when all you wanted was to wrap him in the blanket that you crocheted for him for the ride home from the hospital to his super cozy room is traumatizing. Recovering from near fatal blood loss while you are consumed with grief and you can barely walk across your house while looking at all the cute things that you bought for your baby that you will never hold again is traumatizing. This is the plan for all of us if the architects of it aren’t permanently defeated. This is what your friends, neighbors, sisters, relatives, daughters and wives could go through, the trauma of malfunctioning nature and then the trauma of intentional, relentless cruelty by people yelling about “family values” and being “pro life”. These people would charge women with murder for aborting or miscarrying a baby with barely a brain stem, with all manner of disability.
I am honestly so relieved that I am no longer fertile and I want all of you to know that I vote and petition and protest on behalf of everyone who wants to make their own choices and also not be punished for the choices that nature makes for us.
This is what the pro-life movement wanted. Don’t let b them tell you otherwise.
People should realize that states like Texas and Alabama are actually prison camps for poor labor managed by rich white wardens. Either riot and burn that shit to the ground or escape but treat it like prison not like a lush green once (never actually) state.
Time to move…
Seems like this is a perfect chance to sue for billions. If m sure this hospital just let her check herself out 3 times because they gave her helpful options. I will say they most likely take federal money and deserve to be critiqued on every procedure and action they took. Go after the DA and coroner also. Was she informed of these laws that she supposedly broke?
This whole thing is about punishing women
I feel so sad for her. Literally this is so scary for so many women.
Sounds like a threat to not try to conceive or they’ll kill or arrest you
Republicans are punishing women for having sex. That’s it. That’s the point. They want women back fully under the control of men. Whether through marriage and forced birth or through the prison system, women aren’t meant to be free in the Theocracy they want to enact.
Republicans hate women.
Lewis Guarnieri the prosecutor stated that the issue isn’t that the baby passed, it’s that the baby was left in a toilet. Perhaps Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri should get his head out of his ass and realize that only happened because she was denied healthcare when she went to the hospital. My contempt for these christo-facists is growing stronger by the day. Anything short of this guy being disbarred, removed from office, imprisoned, and this woman being freed with a large settlement is a miscarriage of justice.
When you start introducing concepts of fetal personhood, you open the door for these sort of absurd interpretations of laws. It sounds like Ohio has laws about desecrating corpses but also has some protections for mothers with miscarriages…except that those are now in conflict due to these new laws they rushed out post-Dobbs.
The GOP were so caught up in their ideological crusade to pack the courts with activist judges who would spew out whatever ruling they wanted without a good legal justification and their blind rush to pass restrictions that they didn’t stop to think through the details. And thus we now have these giant messes on our hands playing out across red states.
If I were a cop I would have refused to arrest her. My state embarrass me again.
Why isn’t this bigger news??
Just so I’m clear on the chain of events:
* She went to the hospital due to vaginal bleeding during her pregnancy (21w 5d)
* The doctor informed her that her pregnancy was nonviable
* The doctor was willing to treat her (induce labor to remove the nonviable fetus)
* She left the hospital before she could be induced, against the medical advice of her doctor
* She went back to the hospital for the same issue the next day (21w 6d)
* The doctors were willing to treat her (again)
* She left the hospital against the advice of the doctors (again)
* She went to the hospital again for the same issue the next day (22w)
* The doctors were now debating if they could legally induce premature labor due to the (effectively) 22 week abortion ban
* She left the hospital against the medical advice of her doctors (again x2)
* She went home and miscarried on her toilet the following morning
* She is now being charged for abusing a corpse for leaving the fetus in the toilet
I’m not saying abortion bans are good (in fact I am strongly opposed to them, as I don’t consider fetuses to be fully living and conscious humans yet), nor do I think she should be charged for miscarrying, nor do I think she should be held responsible for not “properly disposing” of her miscarriage, but why did she constantly leave the hospital against her doctor’s medical advice? I’m a guy, so I can’t really relate, but I’ve asked the various women in my life (cousins, my mother, grandmothers, etc., all of whom have had one or more children) about this, and none of us could think of any reason that a pregnant woman should leave the hospital after being told they would receive treatment for a serious issue, especially if that issue dealt with miscarrying, and even more inconceivably do so multiple times.
I am not assigning fault to her, as some have pointed out that she may not have had any kind of support system in place to help her, other issues to do with her mental state likely weren’t helping either (hormones and the stress of knowing you will miscarry would likely take its toll), and I’d be willing to bet that our backwards ass medical care system was trying to run up the tab, but she will have to explain this in court. I really think it will be an uphill battle for her legally. It’s tragic, but it makes so little sense that she would do this that she will likely be found guilty because she effectively refused treatment twice when it was offered, thus causing this whole incident (in the likely words of the prosecution, not my own thoughts on the matter).
All of that being said, I really wish people would get off their asses and vote to remove the assholes who put these bans in place so that this kind of terrible circumstance never happens again, as that is the true root cause of all of this.