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.
This was the body of a fetus large enough to clog a toilet. If she had managed to get it flushed down the toilet, it would likely be found by a sanitation worker cleaning out the equipment at a sewage treatment plant. That worker would be expected to inform law enforcement upon discovering any human remains, and law enforcement would be expected to conduct an investigation.
The sewer is not an acceptable method of disposing of intact human remains.
Burying it in her back yard would not have been unreasonable. Burning it in a bonfire would not have been unreasonable. Contacting the doctor’s office or hospital for advice would have been preferable. Flushing it, or throwing it in the trash is not.
The only mitigation is that the laws were shit. A suspended sentence is plenty enough leniency for the piss-poor state of the laws at the time.
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.