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, 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 Thursday afternoon, the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
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 fifth-degree felony, and, had she been convicted, Watts would have faced up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins said in a statement Thursday that after a “careful evaluation of both sides’ positions,” the prosecutor’s office believed that Watts did not violate the Ohio criminal statute.
“We respectfully disagree with the lower court’s application of the law,” he said.
The grand jury had been deciding whether there was enough evidence for the felony indictment after Warren Municipal Court Judge Terry Ivanchak ruled there was “probable cause” to find her guilty, Watkins said.
Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri said at a preliminary hearing: “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.”
A statement on a GoFundMe page 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 no law in…
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