Give birth, die trying, or go to jail.
To the anti-abortion politicians and lobbyists who got their wish when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, these have always been the only acceptable pregnancy outcomes. Ideally, they’d like a country full of meek, compliant (and mostly white) women whose sole mission in life is to have children. But since pregnancy is dangerous, it’s unavoidable that a number of those women will die in the process — especially in the United States, where our maternal mortality rates (particularly for Black and brown people) are already exceptionally high, and rising. That’s too bad, of course, but for anti-abortion forces it’s better than the alternative: Women who think we have the right to make our own decisions about when, where and whether to carry a pregnancy to term.
Those women will have to be taught a lesson. That’s what’s happening to Brittany Watts, a Black woman from Warren, Ohio, who is facing felony charges not for seeking or having an abortion, but for having a complicated pregnancy and experiencing a miscarriage in her bathroom at home in October.
If convicted, Watts faces up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Aware that, at just over 21 weeks’ gestation, her pregnancy and potentially her life were in danger, Watts sought medical care at a local Catholic hospital multiple times and was told her only option was to induce labor. The day she finally miscarried, Watts waited for eight hours, allegedly because hospital officials were deliberating over whether Ohio law even permitted them to provide the very care they recommended. It’s no wonder Watts felt more comfortable handling the end of her pregnancy at home.
After delivering the nonviable fetus over her toilet, Watts ended up back at the hospital. She “was still hooked to an IV, sick for almost a week from a potentially fatal miscarriage, when a detective from the Warren Police Department in Ohio stepped into her hospital room,” The…
Read the full article here