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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Repro Rights Are Human Rights: Brittany Watts Shouldn’t Have to Be This Brave

Repro Rights Are Human Rights: Brittany Watts Shouldn’t Have to Be This Brave

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I’m deeply annoyed that I ever had to know Brittany Watts’ name, and I’m sure she’s even less happy about that fact than I am. Her personal tragedy was weaponized by forced-birth advocates, with a major assist from bad laws (and, I suspect, local law enforcement that hoped for brownie points & turned tail when exposed). This was the best summary of Watts’ case that I’d seen before last weekend — from CNN, “Ohio woman who suffered miscarriage at home will not be criminally charged, grand jury says”:

An Ohio woman who suffered a miscarriage and left the nonviable fetus at home will not be criminally charged, a grand jury decided Thursday, dismissing a case that highlighted the extent to which women can be prosecuted when their pregnancy ends – whether by abortion or miscarriage.

The felony charge was filed by the Warren Police Department upon advice from the Warren City Prosecutor’s Office, according to a news release from Trumbull County Prosecuting Attorney Dennis Watkins. A municipal court then bound the case over to a Trumbull County grand jury, Watkins said. He noted his office “never assessed the evidence or advised as to charging” Watts.

Brittany Watts, 34, of Warren, was charged last year with felony abuse of a corpse, Trumbull County court records show. In the days before her September miscarriage, Watts went to a hospital with severe bleeding and was told her fetus was not viable, a coroner’s office report states. The hospital staff notified the Warren Police Department, which responded to Watts’ home, the coroner’s office report says.

On Thursday, that grand jury returned a “no bill” for the charge, concluding insufficient evidence for an indictment against Watts, according to the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office.

Watkins said his office did not believe Watts violated the law, adding, “We respectfully disagree with the lower court’s application of the law.” …

Watts’ attorney, Traci Timko, told CNN on Thursday the charge was not supported by Ohio law and that Watts was “demonized for something that takes place in the privacy of (women’s) homes regularly.”

“While the last three months have been agonizing, we are incredibly grateful and relieved that Justice was handed down by the grand jury today,” Timko said. “To the countless women who reached out to share their own devastating stories of pregnancy loss- Brittany read every one of them and felt a sisterhood to each of you. The emails, letters, calls, donations and prayers- they all played a part in empowering and getting her through each day.” …

When asked whether the charge against Watts may have been influenced by the repeal of Roe v. Wade, her attorney previously told CNN ignorance is the main factor.

“I believe that this charge stems from the lack of knowledge and/or insight that men have regarding the realities of miscarriage and women’s health in general,” Timko told CNN previously…

Reader Interactions

86Comments

  2. 2.

    wjca

    I wonder if suing the police (or city attorney) for false arrest would be possible.  IANAL, but that looks like the only way to give them a badly needed smack up side the head with a 2×4.

  3. 3.

    Scout211

    First, there still is Ms. Magazine? I had no idea.  I had a subscription for many years way back when.

    Second, the author of that  article in Ms. magazine linked in one of the Xitter posts is writing a book and it sounds good.

    Some may find the facts surrounding this miscarriage disturbing. Maybe we expect more reverence for fetal remains, or demand a particular emotional response from people who have experienced a miscarriage. It is telling that we often use the words “suffered a miscarriage,” to describe their occurrence, when indeed, it is normal to experience a broad range of emotions in response to a miscarriage from deep sorrow to relief or even happiness.

    Ohio law does not dictate what people must do with the products of conception after having a miscarriage. According to vagueness doctrine, people should only be charged with crimes that are clearly stated in the criminal code. To do otherwise is considered unconstitutional. If having a miscarriage, or improperly disposing of the products of conception, are going to be considered crimes, they need to be explicitly spelled out as crimes.

    As I explore in my book, forthcoming with University of California Press, The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood,  prosecutors and judges in criminal cases sometimes use their power to interpret the law in dramatic and extreme ways, essentially creating a separate and lesser legal standard for pregnant people, independent of the legislatures. They often target already marginalized people who lack the resources to fight back, instead pleading guilty to charges that were never applicable in the first place. The Ohio case may be shocking, but it is not anomalous.

    Bold added

  4. 4.

    brendancalling

    I fervently wish that every single person involved in the persecution of this woman  gets some horrible form of cancer and is denied care. I hope they die suffering and screaming for mercy. I know that’s not nice but the sheer hatred I have for these Torquemadas knows know bounds. I hope they all lose the use of their genitals due to cancer and have to have them removed surgically. Without anesthesia.

    I honestly don’t give a fuck if this comment is too ugly and is deleted. These people aren’t even fucking humans. I hope they suffer as they die. If possible, I’d like to be there to tell them they’re suffering because God hates them for their evil. Just to make it worse.

    I’m not a nice person, in case there was any question.

  5. 5.

    Jackie

    I’m pretty sure I had a spontaneous abortion at around 7 or 8 weeks. I wasn’t even sure I was pregnant. In 1977 you couldn’t have a pregnancy test until you’d missed two periods. I just remember having the worst cramps I’d ever had and assumed because I’d missed one period I was having an extra painful period. I was on the toilet, cramping as I’d never experienced before then felt a gush and heard a plop into the toilet. I looked down and saw what appeared to be a large blood clot – which is what I assumed it was and had caused the extremely painful cramping. Over the course of night, my cramps subsided and my period was pretty much normal. It wasn’t until years later I realized I’d miscarriaged a pregnancy my husband and I didn’t even know about.

    And, yes, I flushed the clot, blissfully unaware it was probably an embryo.

    Today women are charged with murder for passing a clot into the toilet.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    @wjca: Also NAL, but my understanding is that the bar is set very high for that sort of thing, pretty much needing a recording of some DA saying ‘I know she didn’t commit any crimes, but we’re going to charge her anyway, just because we can’.

  7. 7.

    Alison Rose

    Absolutely horrendous what they did to her, and to countless others in a similar situation. And yet the people doing it will insist they are the moral ones.

  8. 8.

    leeleeFL

    This makes me so furious, because I have a Daughter and three GrandDaughters, and I am a woman, who works with women and I know a few women besides!  AARGH!  How in the hell does this BS start, and how do we stop it!

    I wonder how many women will bleed out rather than go to an ER for bleeding after miscarriage?   Or die from infection?! It has to stop!  Second class status would be a step-up in some of these benighted hell-holes.

  10. 10.

    piratedan

    I just have a very difficult time reconciling the actions of the nurse with my own understanding of HIPAA rights.  The issue that the nurse chose to see what happened as a crime and knew who to report it to is also deeply troubling.

  11. 11.

    Jay

    My Mom had 3 kids, 9 miscarriages, my older brother was a C-section because of medical issues, I was a 9 week preemi who spent the first 2 months of his life in an incubator, my sister was the only “natural, healthy” birth. A year later, my Mom almost died from septis from another failed pregnancy.

  12. 12.

    Alison Rose

    This shit always gives me flashbacks to when I was a clinic escort at PP and the protestors would call patients babykillers and shit. A few times, the women were in tears already because these were wanted pregnancies that had gone wrong and had to be terminated, and getting screamed at and called a murderer was like getting a pound of salt poured in the wound. It made me see red every time.

  15. 15.

    Tony G

    At least 10% (probably higher) of pregnancies end in miscarriages.  The next step for these “pro life” assholes will probably be to arrest every woman who has a miscarriage — at least for women with the wrong skin color in the wrong states — so that the police can “investigate” whether the spontaneous abortion was, in fact, spontaneous.  The “pro life” movement has always been a war on women, and now they’re no longer pretending otherwise.

  16. 16.

    cain

    @piratedan:

    I strongly suspect that the Ms Watt’s race was a consideration for this ‘do-gooder nurse’. As a woman and a nurse, she must have been exposed to many women who miscarried over the years and sometimes maybe in a toilet. Given that Watts had come to the hospital multiple times – shows clear intent that she wasn’t looking to ‘self abort’. She’s caused this woman serious pain.

    I hope Biden invites her to the State of the Union too like the woman from Texas.

  17. 17.

    cain

    @BellyCat:

    And there will be more and more instances of it in Texas, Ohio, and Idaho and any other state that is taking it up.

    Eventually, every pregnancy related death will have so many govt eyeballs on it – it will be more regulated than anything else we have and the punishment will ever increase as their fervor rises.

  19. 19.

    cain

    @Tony G:

    You can count on “whistleblower” laws to tattle on women who might be pregnant and thinking of ending their pregnancies – borders would be watched.. shit it’ll be like East and West Germany.

  20. 20.

    p.a.

    We all know cops & prosecutors are virtually immune from criminal conviction, but civil maybe?  Cities try to hide the amount of money their cops cost them annually in civil actions.

  21. 21.

    SpaceUnit

    @cain:

    I hope she gets that invitation too.  She seems very likable, and I think she could really help lead the charge against this nonsense.

    ETA:  And it sounded as though she’s up for the fight.

  23. 23.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @piratedan: I just have a very difficult time reconciling the actions of the nurse with my own understanding of HIPAA rights.

    HIPPA isn’t the only law out there with respect to confidentiality.  I don’t know the law in Ohio, but in North Carolina there are 12 pages of conditions that require medical workers to break confidentiality and report to various authorities.  Many of these conditions are public health related, but some include the result of criminal activity.  You should not assume that every encounter with a health care professional is protected.

  24. 24.

    TS

    @Jackie:

    I’m pretty sure I had a spontaneous abortion at around 7 or 8 weeks.

    My mum had 3 miscarriages at about 12 weeks & I had one slightly earlier. In all cases we went to the doc  (being the days when your general practitioner would do everything including deliver babes) who immediately put us in hospital for a D&C – seems today the doc would be too scared to do this in many places.

  25. 25.

    Anonymous At Work

    What are Ohio and federal laws like for non-mandated reporters filing police reports?  What do medical and nursing ethical codes of conduct say?  What is the hospital’s policy and the Catholic Church’s policy?

  27. 27.

    sab

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I agree. She went to the hospital three times. I think I have read that in one of the first two timea a doctor told her that with the water broken the fetus couldn’t survive. So of course she asked for an abortion (i.e. a D& C.) So apparently they denied a necessary medical procedure, and then flagged her to police.

  28. 28.

    Chetan Murthy

    @geg6: word.  I can only hope that she sues the city and county and po-po and the fucking *prosecutor personally* for millions of dollars, and wins.  That prosecutor needs to be reduced to living in a cardboard box under an overpass.

  29. 29.

    sab

    @piratedan: HIPPAA has an exception for suspected crimes. It’s why they can report you to police if you turn up in the ER with a gunshot wound. The exception also protects abused children.

  33. 33.

    Scout211

    @satby: nurses are mandates reporters. Most health care workers are.

    Of course, but the issue here is what is the crime that the law in Ohio mandated this nurse to report? Linked above to the author in Ms, Magazine: (comment #3)

    Ohio law does not dictate what people must do with the products of conception after having a miscarriage. According to vagueness doctrine, people should only be charged with crimes that are clearly stated in the criminal code. To do otherwise is considered unconstitutional. If having a miscarriage, or improperly disposing of the products of conception, are going to be considered crimes, they need to be explicitly spelled out as crimes.

    ETA: In my career as a mandated reporter, the laws were specific and well-defined, which protects the patient as well as the healthcare worker

    These new abortion laws are written purposely vague and ill-defined.

    Edited for clarity.

  34. 34.

    satby

    @sab: Exactly. Lost my edit window, but with a diagnosis of a non-viable fetus, presumably they still could pick up beats from the nerve cells that would have grown into a heart in the future, and that’s what nurse Karen ratted her out on. That’s the insidious thing about “heartbeat” bills, there is no heart yet at 6 weeks. They’re risking women’s lives for nerve cells. < @Scout, this one

    Edit: and then when she spontaneously aborted anyway, they tried to recover forensic evidence that she did something to cause it, and after arresting her and wrecking her plumbing, the CYAed with the abusing a corpse charge.

  38. 38.

    satby

    @Kent: Well, not to excuse her, but we don’t know her circumstances and the law states this as a penalty she may have faced (so, it was having the planned effect):

    The law, called the “Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Act,” makes it illegal for a health care provider to perform or induce an abortion if the embryo or fetus has cardiac activity. A health care provider who violates the law faces up to one year in prison and a fine of $2,500.

  39. 39.

    Scout211

    @Kent: Do we know who this nurse is?

    Or is she being granted the anonymity that Brittany Watts was denied?

    Good question. I had to google it.

    NBC  Upon arriving at the hospital a third time in the middle of her miscarriage, Watts said a nurse reassured her that “everything’s going to be OK.” Meanwhile, that nurse, whom the hospital has not identified, called the police, Watts said. In a call with a 911 dispatcher shared by CBS News, the nurse said Watts “didn’t want to look” at the fetus. She also alleged Watts “didn’t want the baby and she didn’t look,” according to the 911 audio. Watts said, however, this was not true.

    “I said I did not want to look,” Watts said Friday. “I have never said I didn’t want my baby. I would have never said something like that. It just makes me angry that somebody would put those type of words in my mouth to make me seem so callous and so — so hateful.”

  40. 40.

    eclare

    @piratedan:

    Yes.  What the fuck up is up with that nurse?  Is she or he still on the job?  I would be terrified to be treated by them because obviously their moral judgment supersedes everything.

    There need to be boycotts.

  41. 41.

    wjca

    @Scout211: If having a miscarriage, or improperly disposing of the products of conception, are going to be considered crimes, they need to be explicitly spelled out as crimes.

    Given the demonstrated level of ignorance (massive!) of the scum writing these laws, they would be utterly incapable of giving specifics.

    My guess is that they will go with something like “If you had sex, and failed to deliver a baby roughly 9 months later (and are not a blood relative of someone who voted for this law), you are presumed guilty.  Previous hysterectomy will not be considered an excuse.”

    That sound like what they’re aiming for?

  42. 42.

    Another Scott

    @Jackie: My mom had a spontaneous abortion (probably caused by Rubella) in the early ’70s.  She had gone to nursing school (but hadn’t finished by that point) and explicitly told me that that was what happened (she never called it a “miscarriage”).

    I was curious about the words and did some looking and found this:

    Abstract

    Clinical language applied to early pregnancy loss changed in late twentieth century Britain when doctors consciously began using the term ‘miscarriage’ instead of ‘abortion’ to refer to this subject. Medical professionals at the time and since have claimed this change as an intuitive empathic response to women’s experiences. However, a reading of medical journals and textbooks from the era reveals how the change in clinical language reflected legal, technological, professional and social developments. The shift in language is better understood in the context of these historical developments, rather than as the consequence of more empathic medical care for women who experience miscarriage.

    It was kicked off by a (male) doctor writing a letter to the Lancet in 1985.

    The words we use are tied up with the way we think (and vice versa, as Orwell said). Making the word “abortion” always mean something terrible and unnatural (as opposed to a quite common natural event) makes it easier to outlaw it.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  43. 43.

    Dan B

    As a gay  who will never cause a pregnancy this story is enraging.  The people who torment women like this loathe compassion.  Their definition of morality is inflicting pain so the “immoral” will behave.

  44. 44.

    satby

    @eclare: No doubt there was some racist element involved. These laws are bad laws and designed to let bad people abuse others under them.

    I suspect eventually who the nurse was will come out.

  45. 45.

    FelonyGovt

    Even back in the dark ages, pre-Roe, women who miscarried weren’t treated like this. Completely infuriating. I feel so awful for this lovely young lady and others like her.

  48. 48.

    anitamargarita

    @brendancalling: right there with you, especially in the case of the nurse – what a monstrous thing to do, oh and the risk mgmt board etc., all the way to the top.

  52. 52.

    Quadrillipede

    @piratedan: The issue that the nurse chose to see what happened as a crime and knew who to report it to is also deeply troubling.

    I don’t know enough about the nurse’s motivations to know for sure this isn’t the case. But I can’t at the moment discount the possibility that she was acting out of fear for losing her job, which is a different personal weakness than ideological hypocrisy…

  54. 54.

    Kay

    Just a couple of things. Abortion to 22 weeks was legal in Ohio at the time Watts wento the hospital for care – the leg had passed a 6 week ban but it never went into effect – it was stayed by a federal court. The hospital denied Watts care because it’s a Catholic hospital- instead of treating her they sent it to an “ethics committee” (they did not tell Watts it went to the ethics committee). Watts waited 11 hours for this decision on whether to treat her to be made, it didn’t come, so she went home and miscarried. She came back to the hospital and that’s when she encountered the nurse who called police.

    I think she might have an action against the hospital, not because of the nurse reporting (the nurse will say she was concerned Watts had delivered a live baby) but because they could have killed her when they refused to treat her without permission from the “ethics committee”. I also think they probably have to get her consent to send her case to an ethics committee – it’s outrageous that they didn’t inform her this was going on.

  55. 55.

    TriassicSands

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: ​
     –

    There are some things going badly wrong with “health care” in this country. Red State attorney’s general are now practicing medicine — women’s health care. The DEA has once again called for cuts in the production of opioids. All the previous cuts have done nothing to decrease the number of overdoses and deaths, because legitimately prescribed and taken opioids are not the problem. Now, there is a shortage of opioids in the U.S. and patients are having an increasingly difficult time getting their medication. Why? Because the DEA is now effectively practicing medicine.

    The problem for women is generally more serious since they may have serious and even fatal repercussions from this idiocy. Opioid patients will simply go into withdrawal, though after the CDC came out with their 2017 grossly irresponsible opioid prescribing guidelines for chronic pain patients there were patients who killed themselves because they could no longer get the medication they needed.

    In 2023, the CDC apologized for those guidelines; apparently, living on another planet, they were surprised when clinics and doctors took the guidelines as rules chiseled in stone. Anyone who has seen first hand how many doctors refuse to treat patients as individuals, but insist on a one-size-fits-all brain-dead plan wasn’t surprised at all.

    I’ve contacted both my senators about this, but I’ve never gotten a response. Both are Democrats. The last time I checked, the DEA was part of the Biden administration. Why is Biden allowing the DEA to interfere in medical care. Is he really that misinformed?

  57. 57.

    Quadrillipede

    Having witnessed my wife’s pregnancy and the birth of my son, I am fully persuaded that forcing someone to endure an unwanted pregnancy is a really quite serious intrusion into someone else’s health and well-being, and probably should be considered at least a misdemeanor, or even a felony.

  58. 58.

    TriassicSands

    @Ksmiami:

    As usual, I’ve been on and off B-J. I responded to your question in the other thread about eggs and cheese, but I assume you’d already moved on.

    I can’t eat any solid food. I asked the nutritionist I’m working with if I could eat cooked eggs. The general rule is that I can eat anything that is liquid at room temperature. That actually describes eggs. The whites are liquid and the yolk, held together by surface tension, is too. But cooked, eggs are solid. So, no eggs. Cheese? Not even close.-

  61. 61.

    TriassicSands

    @brendancalling: ​
      I fervently wish that every single person involved in the persecution of this woman gets some horrible form of cancer and is denied care.

    I don’t hope that, but if they do get cancer, depending on the type, they may not be able to get their chemotherapy medication — there is a serious shortage of some of that, too.

    Our profit-driven health care system is just humming along.

  63. 63.

    TriassicSands

    @different-church-lady:

    I have Crohn’s disease, the more serious form of inflammatory bowel disease¹. The medications are all immunosuppressants and most cost an extraordinary amount of money. I’m now on my seventh — six have failed to help. The one I’m on now, comes with black box warnings for death from blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, lymphoma, and (drum roll) lung cancer (but, supposedly, that is a problem for smokers, so I should be OK there).

    The reason for the liquid diet is that the disease causes strictures, narrowings of the intestine, which can easily be blocked by solid food intake. I’ve had two total blockages since July and the second one was while I was on a liquid diet.

    ¹Ulcerative colitis is the other form of IBD. It only attacks the colon and can be “cured” by removing the colon. Crohn’s can develop anywhere from the mouth to the anus. Surgery to remove part of the intestine is common, but the disease frequently returns within five years.

  64. 64.

    TriassicSands

    @brendancalling:

    I don’t know who’s “fault” it is or if Biden is even aware of the problem. He has a few things — one or two — to deal with and some are even very important. (Understatement) However, the DEA has no business being involved in the manufacture of medications. That responsibility falls to the FDA. As I said, I contacted my senators about it, and got no response.

  66. 66.

    Redshift

    @Kay: Early in my time as an activist, we Deaniacs were learning how to track bills in the Virginia legislature (Republican-controlled at the time.) My friend Maura found that a downstate rep had filed a bill to require miscarriages to be reported to the police within 48 hours.

    She blogged about it in outrage, word spread to others, it hit mom blogger groups, and she ended up getting interviewed by the WaPo. There was a major shit storm, weasely excuses from the GOPer, and it got withdrawn.

    But if not? If it ended up as a standalone measure, Tim Kaine would have vetoed it, but if it got rolled up in bigger legislation?

  67. 67.

    Kay

    @Redshift:

    The criminal charges are important, but Watts wouldn’t have been in a position to go home, untreated, to miscarry if they had simply treated her when she arrived at the ER. The bigger issue to me is they put her life at risk. Charging her with abuse of a corpse was the final error in a series of errors, all of which put Watts at risk.

  69. 69.

    Quadrillipede

    @Citizen Alan: While I don’t know that I’d draw the same conclusion myself, I can certainly see where you are coming from. It occurred to me after posting that the criminal sanctions for falsely incarcerating someone for 40 weeks could serve as a minimum guideline for a compelled pregnancy (and there are lots of other crimes we can consider here as well…)

  71. 71.

    artem1s

    @Kay:

    if they had simply treated her when she arrived at the ER.

    leaving her untreated for 8.5 hrs one day and then 11 more the next day is criminal negligence. it’s also mental abuse and criminal negligence for the ER docs to tell her the fetus was non-viable and then leave her untreated even though there was a perfectly legal, easy, outpatient procedure available than would have taken all of an hour to perform. instead they left her for 20+ hours, hoping she’d miscarry in the ER and then they wouldn’t have to make a decision. it pisses me off that catholic hospitals that are getting federal funding are refusing treatment based on their religious beliefs and the fact they don’t believe women are human beings.

  72. 72.

    Rose Weiss

    @TriassicSands: My son developed Crohn’s at 35. Fortunately he’s in remission since last year. It’s a terrible problem to deal with. Sorry you’re going through this.

  73. 73.

    Gretchen

    I think it’s notable that, although she was obviously going to inevitably miscarry, nobody told her what to do when that happened. They didn’t give her a box and tell her to collect what she passed and bring it back in. They didn’t tell her what to do when that happened. They just sent her home to deal with it as she could.

    When I was having my third, I had the strong feeling that I needed to empty my bowels and headed for the bathroom. A nurse wouldn’t let me, and I was furiously angry. The urge to push feels exactly like the urge to poop. My last thought, before I pushed my daughter out, was “it will serve this stupid b*tch right to have to clean up the mess when I sh*t the bed”. I’m still angry 35 years later, and my baby was ok

    The kicker was that I’d kept asking if they were sure it wasn’t twins, and the elderly guy who was my doctor kept dismissing my concerns, saying it was just another 10 pound boy like my second. It was two 5 pound girls, which wasn’t at all the same thing. They were so dismissive and disrespectful, which put me and my babies in danger. We all ended up ok, but that was just lucky.

  74. 74.

    columbusqueen

    Really tempted to drive up to Warren, find the @#$% prosecutor, & kick his balls so hard they hit the roof of his mouth. God knows he deserves it.

  75. 75.

    Gretchen

    @Gretchen: next day the doc came in and said what a surprise! It wouldn’t have been a surprise if he’d listened to me and set up for a twin birth instead of doing an oh shit we’ve got a situation delivery.

  76. 76.

    sab

    @anitamargarita: So it looks like there are two prosecutors involved. City of Warren has an elected city prosecutor and Trumbull County has an elected county prosecutor.

    Apparently this case went from the police to the city prosecutor and then to the county prosecutor who took it to the grand jury.

    So the city to refer it for prosecution was made at the city prosecutor level not the coumty prosecutor.

  77. 77.

    hitchhiker

    So … they made her wait for 11 hours in the ER so that their ethics committee could gather and figure out whether or not to help her, after a doctor had told her the pregnancy was OVER? And then a nurse called the cops on her and said she didn’t seem to want her baby? And then they arrested her for abusing the corpse?

    What the living fuck.

  78. 78.

    Ruckus

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I can’t even get pregnant (wrong side of the aisle) and this makes me boiling furious.

    Pregnancy does not always go as planned – we should ALL know that. And a miscarriage is, if not always a probability, it is more often than many think – a possibility.

    This is not just needlessly cruel it is massively insane. We have the ability to learn more today than ever in the time of human existence and there seems to be a segment of the population that wants to go back in time to when we lived in caves and had no idea really what the sun, the moon and the stars, and every other damn thing were all about and had zero concept of ever finding out. Dumb fucks.

  79. 79.

    ColoradoGuy

    She needs some really good attorneys, and that hospital should have their license revoked … the whole damn hospital, because they are clearly not practicing medicine, but a weird religious cult masquerading as medicine.

  80. 80.

    Anne Laurie

    @Gretchen: The kicker was that I’d kept asking if they were sure it wasn’t twins, and the elderly guy who was my doctor kept dismissing my concerns, saying it was just another 10 pound boy like my second.

    Yeah, during her final pregnancy (at 37, in the midst of the last massive rubella epidemic) my mom was convinced she would have twins (they ran in the family).  The HMO doctors were sure she would just have another 10lb boy, like her previous two — and this was pre-fetal ultrasounds.  She was so ‘disruptive’ about this, when she went into labor a few weeks early, that they gave her general sedation…

    It wasn’t twins — it was triplets.  An approximately full-term girl, and  identical twin boys, probably conceived a month *after* her, weighing only 3.2lbs and 2.7lbs.  (They both survived, which was considered mildly newsworthy at the time.)  Mom was so heavily under, she was the last in the family to know she’d been right all along!

  82. 82.

    Msb

    Watts should sue the hospital for denial of care.
    And all women should avoid Catholic hospitals for any kind of reproductive care. They have an agenda that places women’s health second, if not lower, on the priorities list.

  83. 83.

    RevRick

    @Alison Rose: The abuse heaped on the women going to PP is the inevitable consequence of misogyny, which heaps contempt on women in the first place. In misogyny’s narrative, women are untrustworthy, manipulative, hysterical, dishonest, which means they can easily be dismissed and told to shut up and behave.
    In this particular case, we also obviously have the extra layer of contempt that arises from our nation’s caste system — black people are tainted with suspicions of criminality, low morals, and insensitivity to pain (and hence the greater demands to punish).
    The thing is these narratives are deeply embedded in our culture— and in all of us —- such that we all need to be vigilant and work hard to eradicate these narratives.
    There are a lot of bad actors in this story: the nurse, who betrayed her confidence, the police, the D.A., the Ohio legislators and governor, who enacted the anti abortion law, the voters who supported them, the institutions that pass these narratives along as givens ( that’s especially churches). They deserve our criticism.

    But rounding up these bad actors won’t solve the problem as long as the beliefs that motivated them remain intact.

  84. 84.

    AM in NC

    @Quadrillipede:   Interesting read – thanks.  I’m from NO, and my 85 year old aunt who still lives there (and previously voted Republican all of her life) just CANNOT with Landry and today’s MAGAs.  She was very sad Bel Edwards couldn’t run again for Governor, and was very worried about Landry’s ascent.  She wants noting to do with Trump either.

  85. 85.

    AM in NC

    @Msb:    I sure wish the plague of non-care that is the Catholic Hospital would get a lot more coverage.  The hospital-system mergers that have been allowed leave entire regions without full reproductive health care, which, of course, falls more heavily on women.  But if you’re a dood who wants a vasectomy, Catholic practice groups won’t grant you one.  For women, the consequences are far more dire.  These people want us pregnant, always birthing new souls for the church, and suffering as their version of God demands.

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