Ohio Woman Who Suffered Miscarriage at Home Will Not Be Criminally Charged, Grand Jury
Says
CNN, January 11, 2024
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. It was up to the county grand jury to determine whether Watts should be indicted and stand trial, the release said. 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.
The Supreme Court Will Decide if States Can Force Hospitals to Let Women Die
Rolling Stone, January 12, 2024
The Supreme Court will decide this term whether states can force doctors to turn away patients suffering serious, life-threatening medical complications, or if doctors will be allowed to provide standard medical care to those patients: abortions. The court announced last week it will hear arguments over the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA, in April. EMTALA is a more than three-decade-old federal law that says hospitals that accept Medicare (most hospitals in this country) cannot turn away anyone with an emergency medical condition; they are required to provide stabilizing treatment to prevent that person from suffering serious medical complications. After Roe v. Wade was overruled in 2022, the Biden administration issued guidance clarifying that if a pregnant patient arrives at a hospital with an emergency condition that could only be stabilized with an abortion, the hospital is required to provide that care — regardless of state law. To the Supreme Court, Idaho has argued that states — not doctors, and not the federal government — should be permitted to decide what kind of emergency medical care women can receive. “The federal government cannot use EMTALA to override in the emergency room state laws about abortion any more than it can use it to override state law on organ transplants or marijuana use,” the state’s attorney general wrote in its petition to the high court. Lawyers for the Department of Justice sued the state of Idaho last year over the criminal abortion ban passed by the GOP-controlled legislature, which only allows for abortions to prevent a patient’s death — language one Idaho doctor said ‘is not useful to medical providers because this is not a dichotomous variable.
A Trump White House Could Ban Abortion Pills. Start Your Stockpile Today.
MSNBC News, January 13, 2024
If you are someone who can get pregnant, I am begging you now: Obtain abortion pills. Get them because you may need them. Also get them because someone else you know might need them, too. The forced-birth movement has, quite cannily, made banning mifepristone one of its highest priorities. If a “national abortion ban” sounds scary to you, well, social conservatives have been scared off of it as well. Reproductive choice has triumphed at the ballot box since Dobbs and national Republicans are aware of the unpopularity of total restriction rhetoric. Their recognition that banning abortion is extremely unpopular is where the assault on mifepristone comes in. National Republicans are aware of the unpopularity of total restriction rhetoric. Over 50% of all abortions are pill-induced “medical abortions,” as opposed to “procedural abortions.” If crusaders against reproductive care can use the regulatory state — pause to inhale the stinging scent of hypocrisy wafting over from those “small-government” folks — to ban or even just further complicate access to medical abortion on a national level, it could hand the forced-birth movement an even bigger victory than Dobbs.
Missouri Abortion Rights Groups Launch Effort to Place Constitutional Amendment on the 2024 Ballot
NBC News, January 18, 2024
A coalition of reproductive and civil rights groups formally launched an effort Thursday to advance an amendment that would enshrine abortion rights in the Missouri Constitution. Missourians for Constitutional Freedom began collecting signatures throughout the state after they selected one proposed constitutional amendment to attempt to place on the 2024 ballot from an original field of 11 possible options. The campaign makes Missouri the latest state where abortion-rights groups have sought to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. In the 19 months since that ruling, abortion-rights advocates have won every race in which the issue has appeared directly on the ballot. The proposed amendment in Missouri would enshrine language in the state constitution that protects abortion rights, as well as other reproductive rights up until fetal viability, or around the 24th week of pregnancy, with exceptions after that point for the life and health of the woman. The proposed amendment states that the government “shall not deny or infringe upon a person’s fundamental right to reproductive freedom” — which is defined as all decisions related to reproductive health care (explicitly including “birth control,” “abortion care” and “miscarriage care”) — up until fetal viability.
Why ‘Viability’ Is Dividing the Abortion Rights Movement
The Associated Press, January 17, 2024
Reproductive rights activists in Missouri agree they want to get a ballot measure before voters this fall to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country and ensure access. The sticking point is how far they should go. The groups have been at odds over whether to include a provision that would allow the state to regulate abortions after the fetus is viable, a concession supporters of the language say will be needed to persuade voters in the conservative state. It’s a divide that’s not limited to Missouri. Advocates say the disagreements there and in other states where activists are planning abortion-rights measures this year have resurfaced long-brewing ruptures among reproductive rights advocates. The divisions are most acute in Republican-leaning or closely divided states, where some worry that failing to include limits related to viability will sink the measures. The conflict has been especially sharp in Missouri, where dueling strategies have complicated efforts to push ahead with a ballot measure seeking to reinstate the right to abortion. “The movement is grappling with its value system,” said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, the Kansas City-based vice president of communications for the National Institute for Reproductive Health, which opposes viability clauses.
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