The attorney for Brittany Watts and a campaign organized on her behalf called the charges against her unjust, saying they feared the case could open the door to similar prosecutions and lawsuits over miscarriages nationwide.
Just hours after Watts, 33, was admitted to a hospital for a life-threatening hemorrhage after she miscarried in her bathroom Sep. 22, police removed her toilet from her home and searched it for fetal remains, according to a GoFundMe set up to fund her legal expenses and home repairs.
“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 and is fighting for her freedom and reputation,” her attorney, Traci Timko, said in a statement.
Timko argued in court that there is no law in Ohio that requires a woman suffering a miscarriage to bury or cremate those remains.
The Ohio Revised Code specifies that women should “in no case” be criminalized for the death in utero of an unborn child.
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of several books on the abortion debate, says Watts’ case is far from the first to criminalize a person for the outcome of their pregnancy, but could set a precedent for similar prosecutions and lawsuits if she is convicted.
“The abuse of corpse statute clearly wasn’t written with pregnancy-related conduct in mind,” Ziegler said. “It’s clearly a much older idea that isn’t usually applicable in this kind of context.”
Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, whose expertise includes the impact of abortion bans on other aspects of reproductive health care, agreed with Ziegler’s concern.
“Stillbirth has been in the crosshairs of the abortion wars, so this isn’t the first time it has been criminalized, but it might be the first time that this has happened on a national scale and certainly in a post-Dobbs context,” she said of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision that removed federal abortion protections in June 2022, marking the end of Roe v. Wade.
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