An Ohio grand jury declined to charge a woman who miscarried at home with a crime Thursday after prosecutors claimed she violated the state’s laws over handling a corpse.
Prosecutors said the grand jury would not charge Brittany Watts with abuse of a corpse, ending a legal drama that has garnered attention as a battleground for abortion rights.
A municipal judge previously ruled that Watts could be held liable for the charge. Prosecutors said Watts miscarried, attempted to flush the fetus down the toilet, and then left it there. Police were alerted after she was taken to the hospital by her family.
Watts’s attorney said she was being “demonized for something that goes on every day.” An autopsy determined that the fetus had already died before the miscarriage.
“It’s a lot of pain, it’s a lot of emotion, and she was terrified,“ attorney Traci Timko told WJW last month. “There were so many things going on that she was trying to handle at one time.”
The attorney said that Watts was told by doctors in two previous visits that she was carrying a nonviable fetus and needed induced labor, or else she would be at a “significant risk” of death, according to court records.
City prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri told Judge Terry Ivanchak the issue wasn’t “how the child died, when the child died,” but “the fact the baby was put into a toilet, was large enough to clog up the toilet, left in the toilet, and she went on [with] her day,” The Associated Press reported.
Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights lauded the grand jury’s decision in a statement Thursday.
“The grand jury’s decision is a firm step against the dangerous trend of criminalizing reproductive outcomes,” president Dr. Marcela Azevedo said. “This practice must be unequivocally halted. It not only undermines women’s rights but also threatens public health by instilling fear and hesitation in women seeking necessary medical care during their most vulnerable moments.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.