Brittany Watts had been sick for days when a police officer entered her Warren, Ohio, hospital room and asked about her miscarriage. The detective, Nick Carney, interviewed her for over an hour while a nurse rubbed Watts’s shoulders and assured her all would be well, the Washington Post reported. “Two weeks later, Carney arrested Watts on charges of felony abuse of a corpse for how she handled the remains from her pregnancy,” the Post reported. Watts would eventually learn that the nurse who comforted her had turned her in to the police.
Prosecutors have presented her case to a grand jury, which will decide whether to indict her for abuse of a corpse. Watts, who is Black, “faces up to a year in prison along with a fine of up to $2,500,” her attorney told the Post. Her case highlights the precarity of the post-Dobbs landscape, which leaves women vulnerable to this form of prosecution. A pernicious ideology is on display. Those who assail Watts — the nurse who turned her in, the prosecutor who pursued the case — presume the fetus is a person. Watts’s own personhood is under attack.
Though experts concluded that Watts’s nearly 22-week fetus was not viable and had died in utero, prosecutors have charged her for her behavior after the miscarriage. After miscarrying into her toilet at home, Watts tried to scoop out the remains and left them near her garage outdoors. She cleaned her bathroom, showered, and went to a hair appointment to “maintain appearances” with her mother, who did not know about the pregnancy, the Post reported. But she didn’t look well, and the hairdresser called her mother and told her to take Watts to Mercy Health–St. Joseph Warren Hospital, a Catholic facility. Watts had already visited the hospital several times over the preceding days, where doctors told her the pregnancy was nonviable. Her last trip to the hospital would upend her life.
Police reports, recordings, medical records, and interviews obtained by the Post paint a revealing picture. “Advised by risk management to contact Warren City Police to investigate the possibility of the infant being in a bucket at the patient’s residence,” reads a hospital note signed by the nurse, who later called police. In a call recording, the same nurse says, “I had a mother who had a delivery at home and came in without the baby and she says the baby’s in her backyard in a bucket. I need to have someone go find this baby or direct me on what I need to do.” To the nurse, the nonviable fetus was an infant or a baby. The prosecuting attorney seems to agree. “The issue isn’t how the child died, when the child died — it’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet, large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet, and she went on [with] her day,” Lewis Guarnieri said in court.
Watts, then, has been prosecuted for her emotional response. In the eyes of the nurse and, eventually, the law, she failed to show appropriate grief. Her fetus was a person; she was not. Stigmatized twice over because of her gender and her race, she fell prey to people who never had her interests in mind. After Dobbs, the inadequacies and outright prejudices that plague our health-care system may easily be weaponized. “Roe was a clear legal roadblock to charging felonies for unintentionally harming pregnancies, when women were legally allowed to end their pregnancies through abortion,” Grace Howard, assistant professor of justice studies at San José State University, told the Associated Press. “Now that Roe is gone, that roadblock is entirely gone.”
Black women are uniquely vulnerable to such forms of prosecution. Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Policing the Womb, told the AP that, according to studies, “Black women who visited hospitals for prenatal care were ten times more likely than white women to have child protective services and law enforcement called on them, even when their cases were similar.” Now, post-Dobbs, Black women like Watts are “canaries in the coal mine” for a “hyper-vigilant type of policing” that may arise in the absence of Roe’s protections for women, Goodwin said.
Fetal personhood also haunts the Watts case. When agents of the law treat the fetus as a person — an infant or a child, in the words of the nurse and the prosecutor — the woman bearing it becomes something else. She is not quite human; she is a mere vessel. The prosecutor has thus stripped Watts of her humanity in her time of need. “I am grieving the loss of my baby,” she told the Post. “I feel anger, frustration and, at times, shameful.” In pursuing the case, prosecutors deny Watts the full expression of her grief. They deny her the right to feel pain and shock at her miscarriage, to act like a traumatized human being. Even if the grand jury does not indict her, she has experienced hell. A woman “with no criminal record is demonized for something that goes on every day,” her attorney, Traci Timko, said in court. Watts, of course, is no demon but a human being. It should not be radical to insist on her personhood, but her case says it is necessary all the same.
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Who Gets to Be a Person?
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05.01.2024
Brittany Watts had been sick for days when a police officer entered her Warren, Ohio, hospital room and asked about her miscarriage. The detective, Nick Carney, interviewed her for over an hour while a nurse rubbed Watts’s shoulders and assured her all would be well, the Washington Post reported. “Two weeks later, Carney arrested Watts on charges of felony abuse of a corpse for how she handled the remains from her pregnancy,” the Post reported. Watts would eventually learn that the nurse who comforted her had turned her in to the police.
Prosecutors have presented her case to a grand jury, which will decide whether to indict her for abuse of a corpse. Watts, who is Black, “faces up to a year in prison along with a fine of up to $2,500,” her attorney told the Post. Her case highlights the precarity of the post-Dobbs landscape, which leaves women vulnerable to this form of prosecution. A pernicious ideology is on display. Those who assail Watts — the nurse who turned her in, the prosecutor who pursued the case — presume the fetus is a person. Watts’s own personhood is under attack.
Though experts concluded that Watts’s nearly 22-week fetus was not viable and had died in utero, prosecutors have charged her for her behavior after the miscarriage. After miscarrying into her toilet at........
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