An Ohio woman who faced a felony charge after she miscarried at home will not be charged, a grand jury decided Thursday.
Brittany Watts, 34, had been charged with abuse of a corpse after she miscarried into a toilet on Sept. 22 at her home in Warren, some 60 miles south of Cleveland. Her case has drawn international attention and fears among reproductive rights experts who see it as a dangerous precedent in post-Roe America.
A Trumbull County grand jury decided against indicting Watts on the abuse of corpse charge on Thursday afternoon, the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement to NBC News.
Watts, who is Black, was charged under a section of Ohio law that penalizes treatment of a human corpse in a “way that the person knows would outrage reasonable family sensibilities” or “community sensibilities.”
The charge is a felony in the fifth degree and, if convicted, Watts faced up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
The grand jury had been deciding if there was enough evidence for the felony indictment after Judge Terry Ivanchak ruled there was “probable cause” to find her guilty, according to the Trumbull County prosecutor.
“The issue isn’t how the child died or when the child died. It’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet large enough to clog up the toilet, left in that toilet, and she went on her day,” Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri said during a preliminary hearing.
A statement on a GoFundMe set up for Watts said “she did the same thing that many women who miscarry at home do. Brittany went into her bathroom, miscarried into her toilet, and flushed.”
Watts’ attorney, Traci Timko, had argued that there is no law in the state that requires a woman who has a miscarriage to bury or cremate those remains.
“This miscarriage took place in her home, on the toilet. Ms. Watts learned days before this that a miscarriage was inevitable and that the fetus could not survive outside the womb due to gestational age,”…
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