Columbus, Ohio — Ohio was in the grip of a bitter debate over abortion rights this fall when Brittany Watts, 21 weeks and 5 days pregnant, began developing massive blood clots.
Watts, 33, who hadn't even shared the news of her pregnancy 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 town about 60 miles southeast of Cleveland.
The doctor said that while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts' waters had ruptured prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He recommended that she go to the hospital to have her labor induced so that she could have an abortion to deliver the non-viable fetus. Otherwise, she would face a “significant risk” of death, according to her case details.
That was a Tuesday in September. What followed were three harrowing days with: several trips to the hospital; Watts miscarries in a toilet at her home, then flushes and dumps; a police investigation into those actions; and Watts, who is black, is accused of abuse of a corpse. That's a fifth-degree felony, punishable by up to one year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Her case was sent to a grand jury last week. It has created a national firestorm over the treatment of pregnant women, especially Black women, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump raised 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 against them. She said these efforts have long overwhelmingly focused on Black and brown women.
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 receive child protection services and were called upon by police even when their cases were similar, she said.
“What we see after Dobbs is kind of a wild, wild West,” Goodwin said. “You see this kind of muscle flexing from district attorneys and prosecutors who want to show that they will be vigilant, that they will take down women who violate the ethos that comes out of the state legislature.”
She called Black women “canaries in the coal mine” because of the “hyper-vigilant brand of policing” that women of all races would expect from the national network of health care providers, law enforcement and courts now that abortion is not federally protected.
At the time of Watts' miscarriage, abortion was legal in Ohio at 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. Her attorney, Traci Timko, said Watts spent eight hours at Mercy Health-St. Joseph awaits care on the eve of her 22-week pregnancy, before leaving without treatment.
Timko said hospital officials had debated the legalities.
“It was the fear of whether this would be an abortion and whether we could do that,” Timko said. The hospital did not return 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 trouble.
“These are the toughest decisions health care providers are forced to make,” she said. “And all the incentives force hospitals to be conservative, because on the other side there is criminal liability.”
Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri told Warren Municipal Court Judge Terry Ivanchak during Watts' preliminary hearing that she left the house for a hair appointment after a miscarriage, causing the toilet to clog. Police would later find the fetus wedged in the pipes.
“It is not about how the child died, when the child died,” Guarnieri told the judge, according to television channel WKBN. “It's the fact that the baby was put in a toilet, was big enough to clog the toilet, was left in that toilet, and she went about her day.”
In the courtroom, Timko reacted angrily.
“This 33-year-old girl with no criminal record is being demonized for something that happens every day,” she said.
The size and stage of development of Watts' fetus became an issue during her preliminary hearing.
At the time, there was a vigorous campaign for Issue 1, an ultimately successful amendment to enshrine the right to abortion in the Ohio Constitution, and included advertisements claiming that the amendment would allow abortions “up to birth.”
A county forensic examiner reported feeling “what appeared to be a small foot with toes” in Watts' toilet. Police seized the toilet and broke it apart to recover the intact fetus as evidence. An autopsy confirmed that the fetus died in utero before passing through the birth canal and identified “no recent injuries.”
The judge acknowledged the complexity of the case when he turned it over to the grand jury.
“There are better scientists than me to determine the exact legal status of this fetus, the corpse, the body, the birth tissue, whatever it is,” he said from the bench.
Assistant Trumbull County Prosecutor Diane Barber, the lead prosecutor in the Watts case, could not speak specifically about the case other than to say the county has been forced to move forward with it. She does not expect a grand jury verdict this month.
Timko, a former prosecutor, said Ohio's statute on corpse abuse is vague.
“From a legal perspective, there is no definition of 'corpse,'” she said. “Can you be a corpse if you never breathe?”
Grace Howard, an assistant professor of justice at San Jose State University, said clarity on what constitutes Watts' conduct as a crime is key.
“Her miscarriage was very common,” she said. “So I just want to know what (the prosecutor) thinks she should have done. Requiring people to collect used menstrual products and take them to hospitals so they can be sure it is indeed a miscarriage is as ridiculous and invasive as it is cruel.”