Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman who miscarried at home, will not be indicted: A look back at the case

On Thursday, Ohio’s Trumbull County Grand Jury declined to indict Brittany Watts, a 34-year-old Black woman who had been charged with felony abuse of a corpse following her miscarriage of a nonviable fetus in September. The grand jury decided that there was not enough evidence to support the indictment against Watts, a Warren, Ohio, resident, issuing a “no-bill” in her case.

What happened in September?

Watts was 21 weeks pregnant in mid-September when she started experiencing vaginal bleeding and clotting.

On Sept. 19, she was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital’s labor and delivery department where, CNN says, a Trumbull County coroner’s office report revealed her water had prematurely broken and she had a low amount of amniotic fluid.

According to CNN, the report states that even though the fetus’s heartbeat was detected, medical staff recommended that she should be induced to deliver because the fetus would not be able to survive and she was at significant risk of maternal death.

Watts signed herself out of the hospital, against medical advice, but then returned the next day, experiencing the same symptoms. She left again after a panel of doctors spent hours debating the ethics of inducing labor for a case like hers, the Washington Post reported.

On Sept. 22, while using the bathroom in her home, Watts miscarried into the toilet. She then tried to flush the remains, but the toilet became clogged and she then tried to plunge the remains. She returned to the hospital and underwent a procedure to remove the placenta. The hospital alerted the Warren Police Department about Watts's miscarriage and police visited her home later that day, where they found the fetus in the toilet.

According to the New York Times, the coroner’s report said Watts alerted police of the remains from the miscarriage which, in an effort to unclog the toilet, she’d disposed of in a bucket in her backyard. Police removed the toilet from Watts’s home, broke it open at a morgue and took the fetus as evidence.

What happened next?

On Oct. 5, Watts was arrested and released on bond the same day after she pleaded not guilty to felony abuse of a corpse.

Her case was then sent to a grand jury in Trumbull County in November, which deliberated whether or not to indict Watts under a section of Ohio law that states that a person cannot “treat a human corpse in a way that the person knows would outrage reasonable” family and community sensibilities. She faced a $2,500 fine and up to a year in prison if indicted and convicted.

The Associated Press reported that testimony and an autopsy both revealed that the fetus died before passing through the birth canal. An examination also found “no recent injuries” to the fetus.

What does this mean for abortion rights?

The details of Watts's case gained widespread attention among reproductive rights activists who have been navigating the fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — the 1973 landmark ruling that legalized abortion nationwide — in June 2022. At the time of Watts’s miscarriage, abortions could be performed in Ohio through 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. Watts’s charges came a month before Ohio residents decided to pass new constitutional protections for the right to an abortion up to 22 weeks, the point of fetal viability, effective Dec. 7, 2023.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, over a dozen states have restricted access to abortions post-Roe, leaving many people in life-or-death situations to weigh drastic measures to access abortion care, and some health care providers in fear of being prosecuted for administering those procedures.

Advocates for reproductive rights, such as MomsRising — a network of women and mothers who promote women’s rights — argue that cases like Watts’s “set a dangerous precedent” for how miscarriages are prosecuted.

“The harsh impacts of limited access to reproductive care, the closure of maternity wards, strict or prohibited abortion laws, racial and socioeconomic injustices, and the consequences on pregnant women and their babies collectively form a complex and nuanced crisis in our healthcare system that leaves vulnerable populations at high risk,” MomsRising said in a statement on its website regarding Watts’s case.