The 33-year-old Watts, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor’s office behind Mercy Health-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland.
The doctor said that, while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts’ water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised heading to the hospital to have her labor induced, so she could have what amounted to an abortion to deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face “significant risk” of death, according to records of her case.
That was a Tuesday in September. What followed was a harrowing three days entailing: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarrying into, and then flushing and plunging, a toilet at her home; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is Black, being charged with abuse of a corpse. That’s a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
So what? Products of miscarriage end up in the toilet sometimes, it’s just facts of life here. It’s kind of a natural place to go when fluids and blood are rushing out of you. Law enforcement discovers it was the product of a miscarriage, and that should have been the end of it. There’s not even a law dictating this, and for good reason. But they decide to stretch some other law to an extreme that shouldn’t apply here, to harass a poor women who suffered a tragedy, exacerbated by a system that failed her multiple times and could have easily resulted in her death. She’s the victim here.