We deserve to build our families safely
No one should be criminalized for their pregnancy outcome, ever
I know everything’s on fire. But we have to keep going, so today I want to talk about the danger of criminalizing pregnancy outcomes, and the needless suffering these laws inflict on people and their families.
I’ll start with Brittany Watts. I first wrote about what happened to her in December 2023:
Brittany, a Black woman in Ohio, is currently waiting for a grand jury’s decision on whether she’ll be forced to stand trial on a felony charge for having a miscarriage. Yes, you heard me correctly - for having a miscarriage. But, having a miscarriage is not illegal in Ohio. So they’re prosecuting her for it by twisting a different law (abuse of a corpse) that is *clearly* not intended for this purpose. It’s the same garbage strategy being used to criminalize pregnancy outcomes in other states, particularly in the Midwest and South.
Like Brittany and many, many others, I’ve had a miscarriage at home. And like Brittany and many, many others, that involved passing tissue into my toilet. But it’s worth noting that depending on who you are, the state treats some of our losses as tragedies while treating others as crimes.
You might be wondering who called the cops on her. It was a nurse at the hospital. Someone who was supposed to be providing compassionate care instead decided to involve the police, knowing that the police play a substantial role in reinforcing the state’s mechanisms of control over pregnant people. The lack of regard for and active sabotage of her wellbeing is repulsive.
Anti-abortion laws (and other, often unrelated laws that are applied to punish people for their pregnancy outcomes), specifically target poor people, BIPOC, and immigrants. These groups of people are the most criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, by far.
No one should ever, ever be criminalized for their pregnancy outcome.
In January 2024, the grand jury ultimately decided that Brittany wouldn’t be charged with a crime. But this was after she had already gone through the trauma of being interrogated at the hospital, arrested for having a miscarriage, and then forced to wait and see if she’d be indicted for it. You might be wondering, how the fuck did this even happen in the first place? Let’s talk it through. There are no laws in Ohio that criminalize having a miscarriage. So, they charged Brittany with an unrelated law - abuse of a corpse - because they were determined to criminalize her for her pregnancy outcome, no matter what the law said. But how did the police even know about it?
From The Guardian:
Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who was charged with abuse of a corpse after having a miscarriage, has filed a federal lawsuit accusing some of the medical professionals who treated her of conspiring with a police officer to fabricate the criminal case against her.
Yes, you read that correctly - Brittany went to the hospital for treatment for a miscarriage, and then multiple medical professionals who were supposed to be caring for her actively participated in trying to criminalize her. That’s terrifying. Medical professionals are absolutely not required to report anyone’s pregnancy outcome to the police. They are not agents of the state1.
So, if 10% to 20% of clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, what happens when it’s treated like a crime?
Well, it becomes infinitely less safe to be pregnant. When providers are threatened with extreme legal consequences for providing care, that care gets much worse.
Here’s some things that have happened and will continue to happen:
Delayed care.
Say you’re at the hospital - you’re bleeding heavily, but you’re forced to wait for some arbitrary anti-abortion benchmark before the hospital will provide care. The benchmark is often that you’re dying. Literally, these laws say that you must be actively at risk of dying - like at that moment - before you are allowed standard medical care. Other laws require the absence of fetal cardiac activity to provide care. Here’s an example of what that looks like in practice - what happened to Josseli Barnica - from ProPublica.
A miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.
But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”
For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.
Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.
Substandard quality of care
Porsha Ngumezi was a 35-year old mother who was denied the standard medical procedure she needed - a D&C - after experiencing pregnancy loss at 11 weeks.
Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.
Hope dialed his mother, a former physician, who was unequivocal. “You need a D&C,” she told them, referring to dilation and curettage, a common procedure for first-trimester miscarriages and abortions. If a doctor could remove the remaining tissue from her uterus, the bleeding would end.
But when Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, the obstetrician on duty, finally arrived, he said it was the hospital’s “routine” to give a drug called misoprostol to help the body pass the tissue, Hope recalled. Hope trusted the doctor. Porsha took the pills, according to records, and the bleeding continued.
Three hours later, her heart stopped.
Porsha’s death was completely preventable. She received an incompatible treatment for her condition because the state (in this case, Texas) has effectively criminalized routine reproductive care. From Dr. Alison Goulding, an OB-GYN in Houston:
Stigma and fear are there for D&Cs in a way that they are not for misoprostol. Doctors assume that a D&C is not standard in Texas anymore, even in cases where it should be recommended. People are afraid: They see D&C as abortion and abortion as illegal.
Being turned away/sent home.
18-year-old Nevaeh Crain went to 3 different emergency rooms trying to get help after she started experiencing bleeding and other symptoms on the day of her baby shower.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Nevaeh was subjected to multiple rounds of unnecessary ultrasounds before being admitted to the ICU. These providers risked her life in an effort to comply with unjust laws, and the worst case scenario happened. There are lots of stories like these - including many we’ll probably never know about.
We deserve to build our families safely and with support. To state the obvious: anti-abortion policies don’t protect families - they sabotage them.
It’s not possible to separate miscarriage care from abortion care. Miscarriage care is abortion care. It doesn’t matter whether you want to be pregnant or not, restrictions on care make pregnancy more dangerous for all pregnant people.
If you want to help people who are criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, consider contributing to Pregnancy Justice or Repro Legal Defense Fund .
Becca
I was listening to this playlist the entire time I wrote this post and maybe somehow the mid 2010s-ness of it makes sense to you too? (I start at song #12)
*Check out this carousel post from Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi on ways for healthcare workers to protect patients from ICE and the carceral state (click through)