OT Roe V Wade In Trouble

Texas woman who sought court permission for abortion leaves state for the procedure, attorneys say

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A pregnant Texas woman who was seeking court permission for an abortion in an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S. could not wait any longer and went to another state, her attorneys said Monday.

The announcement came as Kate Cox, whose fetus has a fatal condition, was waiting for the Texas Supreme Court to rule whether she could legally receive an abortion. Her baby’s diagnosis has low survival rates and her attorneys said continuing the pregnancy jeopardized both her health and ability to have more children.

“Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox.

The organization did not disclose where Cox went. On Monday, she would have been 20 weeks and six days pregnant.

The court, which is made up of nine Republican justices, had given no timetable for a ruling. On Friday night, the court had paused a lower a judge’s order that gave Cox permission for an abortion.

Roe v. Wade was overturned last year. Her lawsuit quickly became a high-profile test of bans in Texas and a dozen other GOP-controlled states, where abortion is prohibited at nearly all stages of pregnancy.

Days after Cox filed her lawsuit, a pregnant woman in Kentucky also asked a court to allow an abortion. There has been no ruling yet in that case.

Earlier Monday, two medical groups in the U.S. urged the Texas Supreme Court to rule in favor of Cox. Her attorneys said she had been to the emergency room at least four times since becoming pregnant again in August.

Texas’ abortion ban makes narrow exceptions when the life of the mother is in danger but not for fetal anomalies.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has defended the state’s strict anti-abortion laws for nearly a decade, argued that Cox did not demonstrate that the pregnancy had put her life in danger.

“The Texas Legislature did not intend for courts to become revolving doors of permission slips to obtain abortions,” Paxton’s office wrote in a filing to the state Supreme Court last week.

Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal fetal medicine specialist in Colorado and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, said when lethal fetal anomalies are diagnosed “there’s only risk to that pregnant person and no benefit unfortunately for that innocent child.”

“You are putting your body through risks without any benefit because prolonging the pregnancy doesn’t change the survival rate,” Zahedi-Spung said.

Doctors told Cox that her fetus has a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth, and low survival rates, according to her lawsuit filed last week in Austin. They also told Cox that inducing labor or carrying the baby to term could jeopardize her ability to have another child.

Trisomy 18 occurs in approximately 1 in 2,500 diagnosed pregnancies, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. There is no live birth in about 70% of pregnancies involving the diagnosis that proceed past 12 weeks gestational age, according to a legal filing that the two groups submitted to the court.

The termination of pregnancies because of fetal anomalies or other often-fatal medical problems is seldom discussed in national debates over abortion. There are no recent statistics on the frequency of terminations for fetal anomalies in the U.S. but experts say it’s a small percentage of total procedures.

https://apnews.com/article/abortion-texas-ban-7d865cdfd75bdc6b2f4186f4d1e6e8bd

 

Supreme Court to decide whether to restrict abortion drug nationwide

The Supreme Court said Wednesday it will consider whether to restrict access to a widely used abortion drug — even in states where the procedure is still allowed.

The case concerns the drug mifepristone that — when coupled with another drug — is one of the most common abortion methods in the United States.

The decision means the conservative-leaning court will again wade into the abortion debate after overturning Roe v. Wade last year, altering the landscape of abortion rights nationwide and triggering more than half the states to outlaw or severely restrict the procedure.

The new case could be decided by July, inserting the Supreme Court into the middle of the presidential election, where abortion access is once again a key issue.

...

The legal volleying jumpstarted this spring, when US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, issued a ruling that would have a halted the FDA’s 2000 approval of the drug.

The judge said that the FDA failed to consider “the intense psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress women often experience from chemical abortion.” The term “chemical abortion,” which is preferred by abortion opponents, was repeatedly invoked by the judge in his ruling, as was “abortionist” and “unborn human.”

Kacsmaryk also suggested that the FDA’s data was downplaying the frequency with which the drug was being mistakenly administered to someone who had an ectopic pregnancy, i.e. a pregnancy outside the cavity of the uterus. He repeated the challengers’ accusations that the FDA’s approval process had been the subject of improper political pressure.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/poli...-restrict-abortion-drug-nationwide/index.html

 

She miscarried in her bathroom. Now she’s charged with abuse of a corpse.

Brittany Watts was still hooked to an IV, sick for almost a week from a potentially fatal miscarriage, when a detective from the Warren Police Department in Ohio stepped into her hospital room. He assured her that she wasn’t in any trouble.

For more than an hour, Detective Nick Carney interviewed Watts, 33, about the details of that morning and the whereabouts of the nearly 22-week-old fetus that was declared nonviable two days earlier. As Watts described miscarrying in her bathroom, a nurse at Mercy Health — St. Joseph Warren Hospital rubbed her shoulders and told her everything would be okay, Watts told The Washington Post in a series of text messages.

Two weeks later, Carney arrested Watts on charges of felony abuse of a corpse for how she handled the remains from her pregnancy. If indicted and found guilty, she faces up to a year in prison along with a fine of up to $2,500, her lawyer said.

To describe Watts’s experience, The Washington Post reviewed police reports, call recordings and more than 600 pages of medical records, interviewed her lawyer, and spoke to Watts via text message.

The arrest has outraged health-care professionals and reproductive rights activists — many of whom fear that the stigmatization and criminalization of women’s reproductive-related outcomes is expanding in the 18 months since the Supreme Court reversed a nearly 50-year precedent that gave women the constitutional right to an abortion. Even before restrictions from the Dobbs decision took hold, low-income women and women of color, particularly Black women, were disproportionately criminalized while pregnant.

As many as 30 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriages, usually in the first trimester and often before a woman knows she is pregnant. Late miscarriages, such as Watts’s, are relatively rare, and doctors say that there’s no clear guidance for how fetal remains should be handled. In the past seven years, Ohio is among several states that enacted laws mandating that products of pregnancy be buried or cremated, although these rules typically apply to a health-care setting such as a clinic or doctor’s office rather than individuals who experience a pregnancy loss at home or elsewhere. A judge last year blocked Ohio’s law from being enforced pending a legal battle.

“Moving this over to the individual after a miscarriage just heightens the question, ‘What are they supposed to do?’ ” said Dov Fox, a national health law and bioethics expert at the University of San Diego School of Law. “If it’s already difficult for hospitals, for individuals facing difficult circumstances and navigating pregnancy loss to undertake the medical system is not just a tall order but a prohibitive one.”

Watts later learned through her lawyer that the nurse who had reassured her had reported her to the police.

Neither health-care workers nor law enforcement officials dispute that Watts’s pregnancy loss was natural, and the coroner’s report determined that the fetus was uninjured, but a Trumbull County grand jury is now investigating her case.

Watts said that along with mourning her loss, she is also dealing with how her “life was turned upside down” the day law enforcement was asked to intervene.

“I am grieving the loss of my baby,” she told The Post this week. “I feel anger, frustration and, at times, shameful.”

Watts, a medical receptionist at a different hospital, had woken in pain on the morning of Sept. 22. At her home in Warren, Ohio, about an hour east of Cleveland, she tried walking around indoors, but it didn’t lessen the pressure she felt in her abdomen.

Watts was in her bathroom when she delivered a roughly 15-ounce fetus over the toilet. At the time, she said, she “didn’t know that at 5:48 a.m. [her] life would change forever.” The delivery left a mess of blood, stool, tissue and other bodily fluid, clogging the toilet. Watts scooped out what she believed was stopping the toilet and placed it outdoors, near the garage, cleaned the bathroom and showered, records show.

To maintain appearances to her mother, whom she had not told about the pregnancy, Watts drove to a hair appointment, said Traci Timko, Watts’s attorney. The hairdresser noticed Watts’s pale face and immediately called her mother to take her to the hospital. It was Watts’s fourth pregnancy-related trip to the hospital that week.

When a hospital nurse asked Watts where the fetus was, Watts told her, and later the police, that the fetus was outdoors, near the garage; Watts added that she didn’t look inside the toilet to make sure. A hospital note written and signed by the nurse said, “Advised by risk management to contact Warren City Police to investigate the possibility of the infant being in a bucket at the patient’s residence.” The next record shows that the nurse called the police.

“I had a mother who had a delivery at home and came in without the baby and she says the baby’s in her backyard in a bucket,” the nurse said, according to a call recording obtained by The Post. “I need to have someone go find this baby, or direct me on what I need to do.”

A spokesperson for Mercy Health, Maureen Richmond, declined to comment “out of respect for patient privacy.”

Read the rest of the article here:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/othe...-s-charged-with-abuse-of-a-corpse/ar-AA1lxOeB

 

A woman who had a miscarriage is now charged with abusing a corpse as stricter abortion laws play out nationwide

An Ohio woman who had sought treatment at a hospital before suffering a miscarriage and passing her nonviable fetus in her bathroom now faces a criminal charge, her attorney told CNN.

Brittany Watts, 33, of Warren, has been charged with felony abuse of a corpse, Trumbull County court records show.

“Ms. Watts suffered a tragic and dangerous miscarriage that jeopardized her own life. Rather than focusing on healing physically and emotionally, she was arrested and charged with a felony,” her attorney, Traci Timko, told CNN in an email.



“Ms. Watts’ case is pending before the Trumbull County Grand Jury. I have advised her not to speak publicly until the criminal matter has resolved.”

Though a coroner’s office report said the fetus was not viable and had died in the womb, Watts’ case highlights the extent to which prosecutors can charge a woman whose pregnancy has ended – whether by abortion or miscarriage.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/us/brittany-watts-miscarriage-criminal-charge/index.html