I have a handful of news podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis and several of them have talked about the Kate Cox case in Texas regarding abortions for lethal fetal anomalies.  I’m glad that case got national news coverage.  It should.  The debate surrounding “late term abortions” is not about people who carry a pregnancy for two terms and then all the sudden decide they don’t want the baby, it’s about couples who find out that something is terribly wrong with their baby well into the pregnancy and then must make the impossible decision about whether to continue the pregnancy to probable stillbirth or neonatal death or terminate for medical reasons.

However, there is another story tangential to the abortion debate that didn’t get national coverage (at least on my podcasts).  I only recently learned about it, and it has me completely enraged.  It is the case of Brittany Watts. 

For those of you who have not heard about this, a 33-year-old woman in Ohio has been charged with felony “abuse of a corpse” because she delivered her baby at 22 weeks in her bathroom and it clogged the toilet.  The baby had died before delivery and was considered non-viable.  We know this because she had been to the hospital two times already that week because her water had broken early and she had be told her pregnancy was nonviable. So basically, the Ohio courts are prosecuting a woman because she did not behave properly after her traumatic stillbirth experience.

I Googled the specific law. It says, “no person, except as authorized by law, shall treat a human corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable community sensibilities.”

I want to know whose sensibilities are outraged by this story.

If you are sitting there thinking, “Oh, how horrible.  How could someone leave their baby in the toilet?  She must not have cared about it at all.” Check yourself. You do not get to judge someone else’s trauma. 

Because when I saw that big clot of blood in the bottom of my toilet bowl, my first thought wasn’t, “Oh, maybe I should fish that out so I can hold my dead fetus.” And I certainly wasn’t, “Huh, I wonder what the law says I should do here?”  It was, “Oh, f**k!  What just happened?!  Am I ok?!  What do I do now?!”

And I know some of you may be wondering if the gestational age of the pregnancy should make a difference. No. I follow MANY stillbirth advocates on social media.  Not all parents want to see or hold their stillborn baby.

There may be many reasons for this.  But what I will say for me and my own experience is that losing a pregnancy came with a significant amount of shame, guilt and feelings of failure. I don’t imagine I’m unique in this. I also imagine that some people may not want to be confronted with those feelings in the immediate aftermath of a trauma or in a state of profound grief.  I couldn’t even hold my cat after she was put to sleep. I quite literally went into a fit of hysterical crying and ran screaming out of the vet office.

The prosecutor in this case questioned how Brittany could have the baby and then “go on with her day.” What should she have done? I flushed a miscarriage, took a shower, and then drove directly to work.  I had a miscarriage, stuck a pad in my underwear and got on a plane to Europe.  Before one of my D&C procedures, the hospital asked what I would like done with my remains, and I declared, “Dispose of them.”

Where is the compassion for this woman?  This woman, whose doctors had already told her she would lose the baby, but who clearly didn’t prepare her for what she would face when they discharged her from the hospital.  This woman, who in my opinion should have been admitted to the hospital and kept in antepartum to try and get her to the point of fetal viability after her water broke.  This woman, who had to give birth to her dead baby in a bathroom without any medical support and subsequently was admitted to the hospital because of serious post-partum hemorrhaging.  This is the woman we are choosing to judge.

There are no “reasonable sensibilities” for moments like these. Take your judgment and shove it.  Better yet, flush it.