Grand jury declines to indict woman who miscarried
abcnews.go.com
A grand jury on Thursday declined to indict an Ohio woman who was facing charges after she miscarried in the bathroom in September 2022.

Brittany Watts, 34, miscarried at nearly 22 weeks.

A grand jury decided Thursday not to indict an Ohio woman on allegations that she mishandled the remains of a fetus after miscarrying her pregnancy at home.

The case had alarmed reproductive rights groups and legal experts who said there is no clear guidance on how to handle an at-home miscarriage and that police and local prosecutors overreached by charging the woman, who is Black, with “abuse of a corpse.”

Brittany Watts, 34, of Warren, was arrested last October and pleaded not guilty to the charge. If convicted, she would have faced up to a year in prison. Because the grand jury decided not to indict, the case has been dropped.

…

A subsequent autopsy showed that the baby had died before being born due to a spontaneous miscarriage and that no illicit drugs were present. Watts was arrested two weeks later on accusations of “abusing a corpse.”

            • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              1·
              1 year ago

              While I didn’t downvote nor did it bother me much, making jokes on topics that enrage or trigger people is bound to have at least some negative reaction. This is about a woman arrested and almost sent to prison because something that has a percentage of always occurring happened to her, and terrible people want to punish her. It’s scary.

              Ahmad Arbery case scared me because I’m black, live in GA (literally lived in White GA at the time, down the street from a lumbermill with Confederate and MAGA flags), and do like exploring, especially if walking. I had seen people with Confederate flags on trucks giving me what appeared to be hard looks (but who knows, maybe just resting bitchface).

              I know some people use humor around hard topics to cope, but it can easily feel like our quite concrete fears are being joked away dismissively.