The case against Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman facing indictment for abuse of a corpse after she had a miscarriage, will not be moving forward, a grand jury decided on Thursday.
The Trumbull county, Ohio, grand jury declined to indict Watts, who was reportedly turned in to police after a miscarriage in September, by returning a “no-bill” in her case. Watts’s case had sparked nationwide shock and outcry, as reproductive health and justice advocates held it up as an example of how pregnant people can easily end up facing criminal consequences – especially in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade.
“This decision does not erase the harm that Brittany has experienced as the result of this case. Brittany should have been able to focus on taking care of herself after her pregnancy loss,” said Yveka Pierra, senior litigation counsel at If/When/How, a reproductive justice advocacy group, in a statement on Thursday. “Cases like Brittany’s show us that, depending on your identity, the state treats some losses as tragedies and other losses as crimes.”
Watts reportedly miscarried into a toilet in September, when she was roughly 22 weeks into her pregnancy. She tried to remove the mass that clogged the toilet, then went to the hospital, where a nurse reportedly alerted the police.
Watts had previously shown up at the 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, can lead pregnant people to slip into deadly sepsis – which has happened in other states post-Roe.
Ohio’s “abuse of a corpse” charge hinges on whether someone has treated a corpse in a way that would “outrage reasonable community sensibilities”. Had Watts been convicted of the fifth-degree felony, she could have spent a year behind bars.
Before Thursday’s decision, Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights had sent an open letter to the Trumbull county prosecutor, Dennis Watkins, on Watts’s behalf.
“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.”
A spokesperson for the Trumbull county prosecutor’s office told the Guardian in an email that Watkins was preparing a statement.
