Some Things You Might Not Know About Brittany Watts

A couple of notes: This post covers pregnancy loss, reproductive injustice, and racism in some detail. Please take care of yourself.

I’ve been hyperfixated on the first print issue of Croning, so that’s what I’ve been substacking about. This post is probably not the kind of content you’ve come to expect. If you stick around, though, you will be seeing more of this kind of content. Activism, community organizing, and public service are a pretty big part of my life and are, for me, an important part of becoming a crone. As an elder, I want to use my wisdom, my skills, and my power to make the world a better place. I want to be a good ancestor. Thanks for reading.

Here are some facts about Brittany Watts

• She lives in Warren, Ohio
• She had a miscarriage
• She was sitting on a toilet when the product of that miscarriage passed out of her body
• She has been charged with abusing a corpse, a fifth-degree felony
• She is a Black woman

Here are some things I assumed about Brittany Watts

• That the end of her miscarriage happened while she was using a public toilet
• That her miscarriage came as a surprise
• That the fact that she is a Black woman has shaped her case and how her case has been reported in the media.

The last of my assumptions was almost certainly right, and that is almost certainly why I made other assumptions that are entirely wrong.

Meg Conley has done the hard work of digging into this story and you can read what she’s written here. But there are some things that I would like to say.

I don’t remember where I first read about Brittany Watts, but it was definitely in national news. When I went looking for local coverage, I found a November 4 story in the Tribune Chronicle saying that “Watts miscarried the baby while using the restroom.” Given that nothing I found in this article or the first article I’d read offered any further detail about where this miscarriage took place, I took the word “restroom” to mean that this was a public toilet. While I am grateful that local reporting still exists in Warren, and while I understand that local journalists have to cover a lot of ground, this squeamish—and, frankly, weird—turn of a phrase is, I think, misleading for most people. I know that national news orgs are also under-resourced, but they should have gone deeper.

This image of Brittany Watts in a public toilet was what led me to believe that this miscarriage was a surprise. I’m not going to tell anybody how to manage pregnancy loss, but it was difficult for me to imagine that anyone knowing that they were going to miscarry would, say, take a trip to Target. Miscarriage is painful. At this stage in a pregnancy, miscarriage is likely to be extremely painful and potentially dangerous for the pregnant woman.

What I’m saying is that the first stories I read about Brittany Watts shaped how I understood her experience, and that nothing that I’ve read since then—until I read Meg Conley’s piece—has changed my understanding. Again, I will invite you to read the piece itself but, again, I would like to highlight a few things:

• Brittany Watts knew that she was carrying a nonviable fetus
• Brittany Watts knew that she was going to miscarry
• Brittany Watts had had her miscarriage at home, in her own toilet
• Brittany Watts went to the hospital after her miscarriage because she was bleeding heavily after her miscarriage

It’s only because she went to the hospital because she was bleeding heavily after her miscarriage that police descended on her home and tore up her plumbing in search of a fetus.

Credit where credit is due: It seems like most of these details come from follow-up reporting by the Tribune Chronicle journalist whois covering this story. But I’m still seeing the word “restroom” used in coverage of this case, and I’m not seeing any mainstream news coverage that has pulled together the details like Meg Conley has. In fact, the most comprehensive story I’ve seen elsewhere is on a GoFundMe page for Brittany Watts. What seems to be missing from national coverage are details about the viability of the fetus, about Brittany Watts’s prenatal care, about where she was when she miscarried, about her health and wellbeing after the miscarriage. These details should be nobody’s fucking business but, now that Brittany Watts has been charged with a crime related to her pregnancy loss, and now that she has become national news, these details fucking matter.

Please read “A Pocket Observatory Abortion Primer.” It includes so much beyond this vital reporting about Brittany Watts.

This next part is not about individual people, at least not entirely. It’s about systems. Please keep that in mind.

Maybe you’ve been following the Kate Cox story in the news? It’s another terrible story. In some ways, it’s very similar to Brittany Watts’s story. In other ways, very different. Or it might make more sense to say that the coverage of their stories has been very different.

I just googled “Kate Cox” and the top stories are from The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NPR, Newsweek, The Nation… I could go on, but I assume you get where I’m going with this.

Some very lovely posed photos of Kate Cox also turn up in the search results. I thought about juxtaposing one of these photos with a low-res image of Brittany Watts in the courtroom—which is the only type of photo of her that I’ve seen—but I decided that this would be a disservice to both women. They are not in competition. They are both being victimized by patriarchy.

But it’s their sameness that makes the difference in how their stories are being told that is noteworthy. It’s the same difference we see between how the murder of a white woman is reported differently than the murder of a BIPOC woman. My heart goes out to Kate Cox. I’m grateful that she had the resources to travel out of state to get the healthcare she needed. I’m grateful that she is using her privilege to draw attention to the inhumanity of forced-birthers.

What I want is for Brittany Watts’s story to matter as much as Kate Cox’s does. I want this because Black women already face obstacles to getting their healthcare needs met, and because one time I miscarried into a toilet in Ohio and was able to deal with that loss without being charged with a felony. It breaks my heart into a million pieces—and fills me with white hot fury—that what I want for another woman is the freedom to experience a terrible loss in private, and without being charged with a felony.

I work with Reproductive Freedom for All. This organization was instrumental in getting Prop 3 passed in Michigan, which is where I live. While we still have a lot of work to do to ensure access to abortion, abortion care is now enshrined in our state constitution.

If you need help getting an abortion or want to support an organization that will help others get the care they need, check out the National Network of Abortion Funds.

The National Abortion Hotline is available 24/7 via phone and chat.

And here’s that link to the GoFundMe page for Brittany Watts again.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking with me. This is a free post. Please share if you feel so moved.