What Ohio’s proposed abortion amendment really does: Dan Kobil
Published: Oct. 04, 2023, 5:17 a.m.
Ohio
Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers addresses the Ohio Supreme Court
Sept. 27 in a case challenging the temporary stay on Ohio's fetal
"heartbeat" abortion law. On the bench, from left: Justices Jennifer
Brunner, Michael Donnelly, Patrick Fisher, Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy,
and Justices Patrick DeWine and Melody Stewart. Judge Matthew Byrne of
the 12th Ohio District Court of Appeals is sitting in, far right, for
Justice Joe Deters, who recused himself.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, it
said that each state should decide the scope of abortion rights. This
November, Ohio will vote on exactly that: whether to amend our
constitution to restore the reproductive freedoms that the court took
away in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
Following
Dobbs, Ohio implemented one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion
laws. It now bans all abortions after cardiac activity can be detected
in the fetus — as early as six weeks. This is well before many women
even know they are pregnant.
Ohio’s
radical prohibition also contains no exceptions for rape or incest.
Prior to being temporarily stayed by an Ohio court, these restrictions
forced a 10-year-old girl who had been raped to travel to Indiana to terminate her pregnancy so that she was not forced to bear the rapist’s child.
Confronted by a legislature impervious to the hardships imposed on women, the proposed amendment seeks to restore all
of the rights cast into doubt when the high court overturned Roe. Dobbs
undercut not just a right to abortion, but it also questioned the
freedom to obtain contraception, to resist compelled sterilization, and
even to engage in consensual sexual activity.
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File photo of early voters at the Franklin County Board of Elections. (Photo by Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal.)
Voters in Democratic-stronghold
counties are showing up in mass to vote early for the November election
on abortion and marijuana, exceeding the already unexpectedly large
turnout from the August special election.
“For these things that are on the ballot right now, which are very
important, I just wanted to make sure my vote is in and counted,” voter
Ellen Rosenblatt said.
Rosenblatt wanted to decide if abortion and recreational marijuana
should be legal. She is one of the tens of thousands of early voters in
Cuyahoga County.
Mike West, with the county board of elections, is excited that so many people are interested and showing up for this election.
“We’re gonna have a pretty healthy turnout for this election,” he said.
The best way to compare this typically-municipal-year election is with the recent special election on August 8.
Analysis
Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau reached out to a dozen counties with
different political leanings all across the state. She got data and
calculated from the 11th day of early voting — which Ohio has data for
now. This means that the data comes up to July 25 for the August
election and Oct. 25 for the November election.
The reason they are both the 25th is due to the fact that November
voters lost a day due to the federal holiday, so a day was removed from
July.
Cuyahoga County is seeing about the same for in-person ballots cast but has a large increase in absentee ballots.
“We are way ahead, by around 10,000 vote-by-mail ballot applications,” West said.
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I love to see unpopular opinions like abortion (and gay marriage about 15 years ago) bring the opposition to the polls.
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin 2024 Napa, Wrigley, Wrigley
I love to see unpopular opinions like abortion (and gay marriage about 15 years ago) bring the opposition to the polls.
we smacked down an effort to raise the threshhold for amending our state constitution by a wide margin in the August special election after the gop here outlawed special elections last dec or jan... was still a lot of room for participation too.
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File photo of early voters at the Franklin County Board of Elections. (Photo by Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal.)
Voters in Democratic-stronghold
counties are showing up in mass to vote early for the November election
on abortion and marijuana, exceeding the already unexpectedly large
turnout from the August special election.
“For these things that are on the ballot right now, which are very
important, I just wanted to make sure my vote is in and counted,” voter
Ellen Rosenblatt said.
Rosenblatt wanted to decide if abortion and recreational marijuana
should be legal. She is one of the tens of thousands of early voters in
Cuyahoga County.
Mike West, with the county board of elections, is excited that so many people are interested and showing up for this election.
“We’re gonna have a pretty healthy turnout for this election,” he said.
The best way to compare this typically-municipal-year election is with the recent special election on August 8.
Analysis
Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau reached out to a dozen counties with
different political leanings all across the state. She got data and
calculated from the 11th day of early voting — which Ohio has data for
now. This means that the data comes up to July 25 for the August
election and Oct. 25 for the November election.
The reason they are both the 25th is due to the fact that November
voters lost a day due to the federal holiday, so a day was removed from
July.
Cuyahoga County is seeing about the same for in-person ballots cast but has a large increase in absentee ballots.
“We are way ahead, by around 10,000 vote-by-mail ballot applications,” West said.
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Ohio voters enshrine abortion access in constitution in latest statewide win for reproductive rights
By JULIE CARR SMYTH
1 minute ago
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care, the latest victory for abortion rights supporters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
Ohio became the seventh state where voters decided to protect abortion access after the landmark ruling and was the only state to consider a statewide abortion rights question this year.
The outcome of the intense, off-year election could be a bellwether for 2024, when Democrats hope the issue will energize their voters and help President Joe Biden keep the White House. Voters in Arizona, Missouri and elsewhere are expected to vote on similar protections next year.
Ohio’s constitutional amendment, on the ballot as Issue 1, included some of the most protective language for abortion access of any statewide ballot initiative since the Supreme Court’s ruling. Opponents had argued that the amendment would threaten parental rights, allow unrestricted gender surgeries for minors and revive “partial birth” abortions, which are federally banned.
Public polling shows about two-thirds of Americans say abortion should generally be legal in the earliest stages of pregnancy, a sentiment that has been underscored in both Democratic and deeply Republican states since the justices overturned Roe in June 2022.
Before the Ohio vote, statewide initiatives in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont had either affirmed abortion access or turned back attempts to undermine the right.
Voter turnout for Ohio’s constitutional amendment, including early voting, was robust for an off-year election. Issue 1’s approval will all but certainly undo a 2019 state law passed by Republicans that bans most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, with no exceptions for rape and incest. That law, currently on hold because of court challenges, is one of roughly two dozen restrictions on abortion the Ohio Legislature has passed in recent years.
Issue 1 specifically declared an individual’s right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including birth control, fertility treatments, miscarriage and abortion.
It allowed the state to regulate the procedure after fetal viability, as long as exceptions were provided for cases in which a doctor determined the “life or health” of the woman was at risk. Viability was defined as the point when the fetus had “a significant likelihood of survival” outside the womb, with reasonable interventions.
Anti-abortion groups, with the help of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, tested a variety of messages to try to defeat the amendment, primarily focusing on the idea that the proposal was too extreme for the state. The supporters’ campaign centered on a message of keeping government out of families’ private affairs.
The latest vote followed an August special election called by the Republican-controlled Legislature that was aimed at making future constitutional changes harder to pass by increasing the threshold from a simple majority vote to 60%. That proposal was aimed in part at undermining the abortion-rights measure decided Tuesday.
Voters overwhelmingly defeated that special election question, setting the stage for the high-stakes fall abortion campaign.
___
Associated Press writer Samantha Hendrickson in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, contributed to this report.
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Attorney General who opposed Issue 1 will likely argue in court it erases six-week abortion ban
The Statehouse News Bureau |
By
Karen Kasler
Published November 17, 2023 at 3:29 PM EST
Karen Kasler
/
Statehouse News Bureau
Attorney
General Dave Yost speaking at a "get out the vote" event at Ohio
Republican Party headquarters on Oct. 7, 2023, the weekend before early
voting began for the Nov. 7 election on a constitutional amendment on
abortion access and reproductive rights.
The Ohio Supreme Court is
asking the parties involved in a lawsuit over Ohio’s law banning
abortion after six weeks to submit arguments on what effect, if any, the
abortion and reproductive rights amendment approved in Issue 1 has on
that case. And it’s looking like the attorney for the state is going to
have to make an argument he said he personally disagrees with.
Attorney
General Dave Yost hasn’t filed those arguments yet, but said this to a
group at Ohio Republican Party headquarters just before early voting
started.
"Somebody actually said this – "I’m not really worried
about Issue 1 because we’ll still have the ‘heartbeat bill’." No, we
won’t," he told the GOP volunteers.
That goes along with his office’s legal analysis
of Issue 1. That analysis said approval of Issue 1 would invalidate the
six-week ban. That ban does not include any exceptions for rape or
incest.
The analysis, ordered by Yost and written by attorneys and
staff, detailed some of the laws that would be affected if Issue 1 is
approved. Of the so-called "Heartbeat Act", the analysis said: “Some of
Ohio’s laws may be defensible, but the Heartbeat Act would not exist if
Issue 1 passes. Ohio would no longer have the ability to limit abortions
at any time before a fetus is viable. Viability is generally thought to
be around 21 or 22 weeks. Passage of Issue 1 would invalidate the
Heartbeat Act, which restricts abortions (with health and other
exceptions) after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually at
about six weeks. No other pre-viability limit would be allowed.”
Yost’s
office said in an email: “We have been ordered to brief these
questions, and will do so. We will speak through the brief.” The office
also pointed to language in the legal analysis on Issue 1 regarding the
six-week ban.
Yost also posted on social media
this week: “Having thoroughly scoured the Constitution, I find no
exception for matters in which the outcome of an election is contrary to
the preferences of those in power.”
The amendment approved by 57% of voters guarantees abortion access, but says it can be prohibited after fetal viability.
Ohio
Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis also said Issue 1 will mean the
six-week ban is unconstitutional: “I believe, yes, it will, because the
Constitution trumps state law.”
And in that interview for "The
State of Ohio", Gonidakis also said he believes the current ban on
abortion after viability, the so-called "Pain Capable" Act which he
helped draft in 2016, will stand—and he said he thinks that's what
voters want.
"I think we can find some common ground, and I
believe it would be our 20-week ban," Gonidakis said. "Our mission is to
protect life from conception to natural death. But if that's what we
can live with presently, and we'll have to continue to change hearts and
minds."
Nearly all abortions happen before 20 weeks. The 2022 Ohio Abortion Report shows 89% of abortions were conducted before the 13th week of pregnancy. Only 0.6% of abortions were performed between 21 and 24 weeks, and there were none after that point.
"I
firmly believe if we would have stopped at the 'Pain Capable' law, we
would we would have been successful last week," Gonidakis said.
As Ohio's Supreme Court asks
the parties in a lawsuit over the six-week abortion ban how it’s
affected by the newly passed amendment, the head of Ohio Right to Life
said he thinks Issue 1 makes the ban unconstitutional.
Senate President Matt
Huffman (R-Lima) says he doesn't think it is a good idea to put another
abortion issue before Ohio voters next year, and he doesn't think it's
necessary to pass policy changes because of the passage of the November
amendment either.
House Speaker Jason Stephens
(R-Kitts Hill) said he doesn't agree with an idea floated by some
Republicans suggesting Ohio lawmakers take power from courts when it
comes to the new constitutional amendment on abortion.
Rep. Jennifer Gross’s draft
bill would give the legislature the power to decide the
constitutionality of abortion access laws, stripping power from the
judiciary. Experts say it's unconstitutional.
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Ohio voters just passed abortion protections. Whether they take effect is now up to the courts
By JULIE CARR SMYTH
Today
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s new constitutional projections for abortion access and other reproductive rights are supposed to take effect Dec. 7, a month after voters resoundingly passed them. That prospect seems increasingly uncertain.
Existing abortion-related lawsuits are moving again through the courts now that voters have decided the issue, raising questions about how and when the amendment will be implemented.
The amendment declared an individual’s right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” and passed with a strong 57% majority. It was the seventh straight victory in statewide votes for supporters of abortion access nationally since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned constitutional protections.
But the amendment did not repeal any existing Ohio laws, providing an opening for Republican elected officials and anti-abortion groups to renew their efforts to halt, delay or significantly water it down.
“A lot of that hard work of figuring out what state laws are inconsistent with the amendment and what state laws can remain, does tend to devolve to the courts,” said Laura Hermer, a professor of law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, who studies access to health coverage and care in the U.S. "It’s difficult to imagine that the Legislature will say, ‘All right, you win. We’re going to repeal the heartbeat ban' and so forth.”
The state Legislature is controlled by Republicans whose leaders opposed the November ballot amendment, which was known as Issue 1. The Ohio Supreme Court also is controlled by Republicans, who have a 4-3 majority, and will be the final judge of constitutional questions. Several of the Republican justices have taken actions or made statements that have caused abortion rights organizations and ethics attorneys to question their objectivity on the subject.
Minority Democrats in the Ohio House announced legislation two days after the election aimed at avoiding a piecemeal approach to implementing the amendment. Among other steps, they called for repealing the state’s ban on most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks, and a 24-hour waiting period.
“There are over 30 different restrictions in place," said state Rep. Beth Liston, a physician and co-author of the Reproductive Care Act. "And I think that it is important that we don't require citizens to go to court for every restriction, and, quite frankly, that we don't let harm occur in the interim.”
House Minority Leader Allison Russo was careful not to criticize the high court, which holds sway over the fate of those laws.
“My hope is they will uphold the rule of law and the constitution,” she said.
Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy last week ordered lawyers for the state and a group of abortion clinics to tell the court how they believe the measure’s passage has affected a case involving Ohio’s ban on most abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, which has been on hold since October 2022.
A day after voters approved the amendment, U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett made a similar request of the parties in a long-running federal lawsuit challenging a set of state restrictions imposed on abortion providers’ operations. They included a requirement that clinics obtain agreements with a nearby hospital for emergency patient transfers, as well as a prohibition against public hospitals entering into those agreements.
At least three other Ohio abortion laws also have been on hold in the courts.
Passing legislation to bring Ohio law in line with the new constitutional amendment has been a non-starter with Republican lawmakers, who mostly opposed it and took extraordinary steps to defeat it.
With a primary election in their GOP-heavy districts only months away, they are facing fierce pressure from anti-abortion groups to go in the other direction and either pass laws countering the amendment or using their supermajorities to strip courts of their power to interpret it.
“The (Ohio) Constitution specifically says reigning in out-of-control courts is the legislators' job," the anti-abortion group Faith2Action argues in a recently released video. “So let's call on the legislators to do their job, to use their constitutionally granted right to represent us and to keep pro-abortion judges from repealing Ohio laws based on an amendment that doesn't even mention a single Ohio law.”
The video argues that the “right to life” created in Ohio's constitution is inalienable and that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade punted the abortion issue to “the people's elected representatives.”
But in his concurring opinion in that ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote that constitutional amendments were among the avenues for deciding the future of abortion access.
“Moreover, the Constitution authorizes the creation of new rights — state and federal, statutory and constitutional," Kavanaugh wrote. "But when it comes to creating new rights, the Constitution directs the people to the various processes of democratic self-government contemplated by the Constitution — state legislation, state constitutional amendments, federal legislation, and federal constitutional amendments.”
For now, Republican Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens has said legislation targeting the power of state courts will not be considered. GOP Senate President Matt Huffman has ruled out lawmakers pushing for an immediate repeal of Issue 1, as had once been suggested, saying nothing like that should be tried, at least in 2024.
How Attorney General Dave Yost will proceed also is being closely watched.
In a legal analysis of Issue 1 that the Republican published before the election, Yost said the amendment created a new standard for protecting abortion access that “goes beyond” the law of the land under Roe v. Wade.
“That means that many Ohio laws would probably be invalidated ... and others might be at risk to varying degrees,” he wrote.
Hermer, the law professor, said that statement is convenient for lawyers fighting to implement the constitutional amendment but such an analysis isn't legally binding for Yost.
“He doesn’t necessarily have to stand down, but, of course, having already said that, it’s going to make it a bit more difficult to hold those sorts of positions,” she said.
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Texas judge grants pregnant woman permission to get an abortion despite state’s ban
By PAUL J. WEBER
41 mins ago
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas judge on Thursday gave a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis permission to get an abortion in an unprecedented challenge over bans that more than a dozen states have enacted since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The lawsuit by Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area, is believed to be the first time since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that a woman anywhere in the country has asked a court to approve an immediate abortion.
It was unclear how quickly or whether Cox will receive the procedure. State District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, an elected Democrat, said she would grant a temporary restraining order that would allow Cox to have an abortion under what are narrow exceptions to Texas' ban. That decision is likely to be appealed by the state, which argued that Cox does not meet the criteria for a medical exception.
In a brief hearing Thursday, her attorneys told Gamble that Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, went to an emergency room this week for a fourth time during her pregnancy.
Cox and her husband both attended the hearing via Zoom but did not address the court. Doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
“The idea that Ms. Cox wants so desperately to be a parent and this law may have her lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice," Gamble said.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox, has said this lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Since that landmark ruling, Texas and 12 other states rushed to ban abortion at nearly all stages of pregnancy. Opponents have sought to weaken those bans, including an ongoing Texas challenge over whether the state's law is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications.
“I do not want to continue the pain and suffering that has plagued this pregnancy or continue to put my body or my mental health through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” Cox wrote in an editorial published in The Dallas Morning News. “I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer.”
Although Texas allows exceptions under the ban, doctors and women have argued that the requirements are so vaguely worded that physicians still won't risk providing abortions, lest they face potential criminal charges or lawsuits.
State officials had asked Gamble to deny the request, arguing that Cox has not shown her life is in imminent danger and that she is therefore unable to qualify for an exception to the ban.
“There are no facts pled which demonstrate that Ms. Cox is at any more of a risk, let alone life-threatening, than the countless women who give birth every day with similar medical histories,” the state wrote in court filings ahead of Thursday's hearing.
Spokespersons for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately return messages addressing whether the state will appeal. Cox's attorneys have argued that the risks to her health will worsen unless courts acts swiftly.
The decision was handed down just two days after Cox filed the lawsuit, which says doctors told her the baby will likely be stillborn or live for a week at most.
Cox had cesarean sections with her previous pregnancies. She learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed a week after the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments about whether the ban is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications. That case is among the biggest ongoing challenges to abortion bans in the U.S., although a ruling from the all-Republican court may not come for months.
In July, several Texas women gave emotional testimony about carrying babies they knew would not survive and doctors unable to offer abortions despite their spiraling conditions. A judge later ruled that Texas’ ban was too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications, but that decision was swiftly put on hold after the state appealed.
More than 40 woman have received abortions in Texas since the ban took effect, according to state health figures, none of which have resulted in criminal charges. There were more than 16,000 abortions in Texas in the five months prior to the ban taking effect last year.
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Texas judge grants pregnant woman permission to get an abortion despite state’s ban
By PAUL J. WEBER
41 mins ago
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas judge on Thursday gave a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis permission to get an abortion in an unprecedented challenge over bans that more than a dozen states have enacted since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The lawsuit by Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area, is believed to be the first time since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that a woman anywhere in the country has asked a court to approve an immediate abortion.
It was unclear how quickly or whether Cox will receive the procedure. State District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, an elected Democrat, said she would grant a temporary restraining order that would allow Cox to have an abortion under what are narrow exceptions to Texas' ban. That decision is likely to be appealed by the state, which argued that Cox does not meet the criteria for a medical exception.
In a brief hearing Thursday, her attorneys told Gamble that Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, went to an emergency room this week for a fourth time during her pregnancy.
Cox and her husband both attended the hearing via Zoom but did not address the court. Doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
“The idea that Ms. Cox wants so desperately to be a parent and this law may have her lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice," Gamble said.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox, has said this lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Since that landmark ruling, Texas and 12 other states rushed to ban abortion at nearly all stages of pregnancy. Opponents have sought to weaken those bans, including an ongoing Texas challenge over whether the state's law is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications.
“I do not want to continue the pain and suffering that has plagued this pregnancy or continue to put my body or my mental health through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” Cox wrote in an editorial published in The Dallas Morning News. “I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer.”
Although Texas allows exceptions under the ban, doctors and women have argued that the requirements are so vaguely worded that physicians still won't risk providing abortions, lest they face potential criminal charges or lawsuits.
State officials had asked Gamble to deny the request, arguing that Cox has not shown her life is in imminent danger and that she is therefore unable to qualify for an exception to the ban.
“There are no facts pled which demonstrate that Ms. Cox is at any more of a risk, let alone life-threatening, than the countless women who give birth every day with similar medical histories,” the state wrote in court filings ahead of Thursday's hearing.
Spokespersons for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately return messages addressing whether the state will appeal. Cox's attorneys have argued that the risks to her health will worsen unless courts acts swiftly.
The decision was handed down just two days after Cox filed the lawsuit, which says doctors told her the baby will likely be stillborn or live for a week at most.
Cox had cesarean sections with her previous pregnancies. She learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed a week after the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments about whether the ban is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications. That case is among the biggest ongoing challenges to abortion bans in the U.S., although a ruling from the all-Republican court may not come for months.
In July, several Texas women gave emotional testimony about carrying babies they knew would not survive and doctors unable to offer abortions despite their spiraling conditions. A judge later ruled that Texas’ ban was too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications, but that decision was swiftly put on hold after the state appealed.
More than 40 woman have received abortions in Texas since the ban took effect, according to state health figures, none of which have resulted in criminal charges. There were more than 16,000 abortions in Texas in the five months prior to the ban taking effect last year.
last night texas supreme court stepped in and blocked this.
what now?
seems the cruelty of the texas government is the issue here.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Texas judge grants pregnant woman permission to get an abortion despite state’s ban
By PAUL J. WEBER
41 mins ago
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas judge on Thursday gave a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis permission to get an abortion in an unprecedented challenge over bans that more than a dozen states have enacted since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The lawsuit by Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area, is believed to be the first time since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that a woman anywhere in the country has asked a court to approve an immediate abortion.
It was unclear how quickly or whether Cox will receive the procedure. State District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, an elected Democrat, said she would grant a temporary restraining order that would allow Cox to have an abortion under what are narrow exceptions to Texas' ban. That decision is likely to be appealed by the state, which argued that Cox does not meet the criteria for a medical exception.
In a brief hearing Thursday, her attorneys told Gamble that Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, went to an emergency room this week for a fourth time during her pregnancy.
Cox and her husband both attended the hearing via Zoom but did not address the court. Doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
“The idea that Ms. Cox wants so desperately to be a parent and this law may have her lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice," Gamble said.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox, has said this lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Since that landmark ruling, Texas and 12 other states rushed to ban abortion at nearly all stages of pregnancy. Opponents have sought to weaken those bans, including an ongoing Texas challenge over whether the state's law is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications.
“I do not want to continue the pain and suffering that has plagued this pregnancy or continue to put my body or my mental health through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” Cox wrote in an editorial published in The Dallas Morning News. “I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer.”
Although Texas allows exceptions under the ban, doctors and women have argued that the requirements are so vaguely worded that physicians still won't risk providing abortions, lest they face potential criminal charges or lawsuits.
State officials had asked Gamble to deny the request, arguing that Cox has not shown her life is in imminent danger and that she is therefore unable to qualify for an exception to the ban.
“There are no facts pled which demonstrate that Ms. Cox is at any more of a risk, let alone life-threatening, than the countless women who give birth every day with similar medical histories,” the state wrote in court filings ahead of Thursday's hearing.
Spokespersons for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately return messages addressing whether the state will appeal. Cox's attorneys have argued that the risks to her health will worsen unless courts acts swiftly.
The decision was handed down just two days after Cox filed the lawsuit, which says doctors told her the baby will likely be stillborn or live for a week at most.
Cox had cesarean sections with her previous pregnancies. She learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed a week after the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments about whether the ban is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications. That case is among the biggest ongoing challenges to abortion bans in the U.S., although a ruling from the all-Republican court may not come for months.
In July, several Texas women gave emotional testimony about carrying babies they knew would not survive and doctors unable to offer abortions despite their spiraling conditions. A judge later ruled that Texas’ ban was too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications, but that decision was swiftly put on hold after the state appealed.
More than 40 woman have received abortions in Texas since the ban took effect, according to state health figures, none of which have resulted in criminal charges. There were more than 16,000 abortions in Texas in the five months prior to the ban taking effect last year.
last night texas supreme court stepped in and blocked this.
what now?
seems the cruelty of the texas government is the issue here.
yep. going to make it so its guaranteed she can never get pregnant again. how very pro-life...
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Texas Supreme Court pauses lower court's order allowing pregnant woman to have an abortion
By PAUL J. WEBER
Today
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas Supreme Court on Friday night put on hold a judge's ruling that approved an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis, throwing into limbo an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S.
The order by the all-Republican court came more than 30 hours after Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area, received a temporary restraining order from a lower court judge that prevents Texas from enforcing the state's ban in her case.
In a one-page order, the court said it was temporarily staying Thursday's ruling “without regard to the merits." The case is still pending.
“While we still hope that the Court ultimately rejects the state’s request and does so quickly, in this case we fear that justice delayed will be justice denied,” said Molly Duane, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox.
Cox's attorneys have said they will not share her abortion plans, citing concerns for her safety. In a filing with the Texas Supreme Court on Friday, her attorneys indicated she was still pregnant.
Cox was 20 weeks pregnant this week when she filed what is believed to be the first lawsuit of its kind since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that overturned Roe v. Wade. The order issued Thursday only applied to Cox and no other pregnant Texas women.
Cox learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to her lawsuit.
Furthermore, doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her two prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that Cox does not meet the criteria for a medical exception to the state's abortion ban, and he urged the state's highest court to act swiftly.
“Future criminal and civil proceedings cannot restore the life that is lost if Plaintiffs or their agents proceed to perform and procure an abortion in violation of Texas law,” Paxton's office told the court.
He also warned three hospitals in Houston that they could face legal consequences if they allowed Cox's physician to provide the abortion, despite the ruling from state District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, who Paxton called an “activist” judge.
On Friday, a pregnant Kentucky woman also filed a lawsuit demanding the right to an abortion. The plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, is about eight weeks pregnant and she wants to have an abortion in Kentucky but cannot legally do so because of the state’s ban, the suit said.
Unlike Cox's lawsuit, the Kentucky challenge seeks class-action status to include other Kentuckians who are or will become pregnant and want to have an abortion.
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The Supreme Court will rule on limits on a commonly used abortion medication
By MARK SHERMAN
Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to take up a dispute over a medication used in the most common method of abortion in the United States, its first abortion case since it overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
The justices will hear appeals from the Biden administration and the maker of the drug mifepristone asking the high court to reverse an appellate ruling that would cut off access to the drug through the mail and impose other restrictions, even in states where abortion remains legal. The restrictions include shortening from the current 10 weeks to seven weeks the time during which mifepristone can be used in pregnancy.
The nine justices rejected a separate appeal from abortion opponents who challenged the Food and Drug Administration's initial approval of mifepristone as safe and effective in 2000.
Mifepristone, made by New York-based Danco Laboratories, is one of two drugs used in medication abortions, which account for more than half of all abortions in the United States. More than 5 million people have used it since 2000.
The Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in June 2022. That ruling has led to bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in 14 states, with some exceptions, and once cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks, in two others.
Abortion opponents filed their challenge to mifepristone the following November and initially won a sweeping ruling six months later revoking the drug’s approval entirely. The appeals court left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.
The justices blocked that ruling from taking effect while the case played out, though Justices Samuel Alito, the author of last year’s decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas said they would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while the case proceeded.
Women seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with misoprostol. The FDA has eased the terms of mifepristone’s use over the years, including allowing it to be sent through the mail in states that allow access.
In its appeal, the Democratic administration said the appeals court, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, ignored the FDA’s scientific judgment about mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness since its approval in 2000.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday that the appellate ruling “threatens to undermine the FDA’s scientific, independent judgment and would reimpose outdated restrictions on access to safe and effective medication abortion.”
Lawyers for the anti-abortion medical groups and individual physicians who have challenged the use of mifepristone had urged the Supreme Court to turn away the appeals.
“The modest decision below merely restores the common-sense safeguards under which millions of women have taken chemical abortion drugs,” wrote lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes itself as a Christian law firm. The lead attorney on the Supreme Court filing is Erin Hawley, wife of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Responding to a quick appeal, two more Trump appointees on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FDA’s original approval would stand for now. But Judges Andrew Oldham and Kurt Engelhardt said most of the rest of Kacsmaryk’s ruling could take effect while the case winds through federal courts.
Besides reducing the time during which the drug can be taken and halting distribution through the mail, patients who are seeking medication abortions would have had to make three in-person visits with a doctor. Women also might have been required to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.
Health care providers have said that if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain, they would switch to using only misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.
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Welcome to the Dark Ages, ladies. “I am your retribution.”
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 Dobbsdecision 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.”
Demonized’ for an everyday occurrence
Two weeks later, on Oct. 5, Detective Carney drove to Watts’s home and placed her under arrest. Watts said that, until then, she didn’t even realize she had been charged with “abuse of a corpse.” The law, which outlines that “No person, except as authorized by law, shall treat a human corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable community sensibilities,” has been used before in Ohio in relation to women’s reproductive health.
In 2019, a Warren County, Ohio, woman was found guilty of abuse of a corpse in connection with the death of her newborn daughter; her defense lawyer said the baby was stillborn. A judge put the woman on probation for three years, but her probation was terminated after roughly a year, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
According to Olwyn Conway, a professor of law at Ohio State University, “abuse of a corpse” historically falls under a broader law against grave robbing. Given the statute’s history, she questions whether prosecutors are applying the law as it was intended.
Prosecutions stemming from pregnancy loss occurred in the Roe v. Wade era, but post-Dobbs,“prosecutors feel they have more leeway” to pursue such cases under statutes such as abuse of a corpse or concealment of a birth, said Kylee Sunderlin, legal support director of If/When/How, a nonprofit network of reproductive justice lawyers.
Those statues, Sunderlin said, tend to be ambiguous, archaic and never intended to be used against someone who experiences a pregnancy loss.
Timko said that Watts is being punished because police and prosecutors do not understand the natural and common process of a miscarriage.
Watts, who has no criminal record, is being “demonized for something that goes on every day,” Timko said at the hearing in Warren Municipal Court on Nov. 2, according to WKBN. The city of Warren is part of Trumbull County.
George Sterbenz, a forensic pathologist, testified that an autopsy found no injury to the fetus and that the fetus had died before passing through the birth canal. “This fetus was going to be nonviable … and the fetus was too young to be delivered,” Sterbenz said.
Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri, who did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment, said in court that the case is about what happened after the miscarriage.
“The issue isn’t how the child died, when the child died — it’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet, large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet, and she went on [with] her day,” he said.
Sunderlin and others who criticize Watts’s arrest question the public safety value of her prosecution.
“This is a prosecutor believing that they’re the arbiters of what’s in the public interest,” Sunderlin said. “But they’re prosecuting someone over a pregnancy outcome. Who are they actually protecting?”
Timko said the case is now about defining the term “corpse.” Ohio’s laws do not define corpse, and without a definition, the public is left to argue the issue, she said.
“In most cases, criminal law applies to persons who are defined as humans who are viable,” Timko said. “In Brittany’s case, she knew the fetus was not viable.”
No clear guidance
Before police began to investigate Watts, the medical office receptionist had spent the three previous days in and out of the hospital as her pregnancy faltered.
By the time she first visited the hospital on Sept. 19, Watts already suspected she was miscarrying. She was passing large clots of blood and describing her pain as intense, according to her medical records. Doctors confirmed her suspicions, telling her that although there was fetal cardiac activity, the pregnancy was not viable. Watts left the hospital that day against medical advice, telling the doctor she could “better process what was happening to her at home.”
The next morning, Watts returned, expecting to be induced to deliver her preterm pregnancy. Abortion is currently legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy in Ohio. For the next eight hours, doctors and officials determined the ethics of inducing labor for a woman who had been diagnosed with preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM), had no detectable amniotic fluid, was bleeding vaginally and had advanced cervical dilation.
One doctor was particularly blunt about the urgency of inducing Watts’s delivery: “My recommendation instead of waiting until mom is on death’s door before proceeding with treatment, [is] to deliver this baby” by inducing, the doctor wrote.
Seven hours later, Watts still had not been induced. She wanted to leave, according to medical records. Finally, when the doctor returned to the hospital room to discuss the induction plan, records state, Watts’s bed was empty and her IV bag was draped over the railing.
At home, the pain and bleeding wouldn’t let up, prompting Watts to briefly return to the hospital the next day, but she again left against medical advice after not being able to see her OB/GYN soon enough.
It was during Watts’s next visit to the hospital, on Sept. 22, that her status would change from patient to potential criminal suspect.
Although miscarriage is common, it is nonetheless an isolating experience, doctors say. When it comes to fetal remains, the guidance outside a health-care setting is murky.
“As to the disposal of fetal remains after abortion or miscarriage at home, I know of nothing,” Fox, the University of San Diego School of Law bioethics expert, said of guidelines. “This is not an area where you’re going to find best practices from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” or the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists.
Cassing Hammond, an OB/GYN and associate professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, said that an outcome such as Watts’s — a second-trimester rupture of membranes — is not uncommon.
“While her process for the disposal of remains may be unusual, the actual clinical scenario the patient faced is not unusual and is something any pregnant person could confront,” Hammond said. And although OB/GYNs would prefer people be in a health-care setting during a second-trimester pregnancy loss, “anyone experiencing a miscarriage has the possibility of passing that at home.”
“The right person for the patient to call is the doctor, not the police,” Hammond added. “Calling the police on a patient going through this kind of traumatic experience is not therapeutic.”
For Watts, the trauma of miscarrying could stretch well into next year as she awaits the decision of a grand jury tasked with poring over one of her most life-altering moments. Apart from the emotional upheaval, Watts is struggling to pay the medical and legal bills that have mounted in the past few months.
Although she is filled with anxiety waiting for the grand jury to decide whether she should be indicted for alleged “abuse of corpse,” she said she is grateful for support from her community and people across the world.
“I pray that my story makes a difference, and no other woman ever faces this reality,” she said. “However, if it comes to that, she has my support.”
Comments
What Ohio’s proposed abortion amendment really does: Dan Kobil
Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers addresses the Ohio Supreme Court Sept. 27 in a case challenging the temporary stay on Ohio's fetal "heartbeat" abortion law. On the bench, from left: Justices Jennifer Brunner, Michael Donnelly, Patrick Fisher, Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy, and Justices Patrick DeWine and Melody Stewart. Judge Matthew Byrne of the 12th Ohio District Court of Appeals is sitting in, far right, for Justice Joe Deters, who recused himself.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, it said that each state should decide the scope of abortion rights. This November, Ohio will vote on exactly that: whether to amend our constitution to restore the reproductive freedoms that the court took away in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
Following Dobbs, Ohio implemented one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws. It now bans all abortions after cardiac activity can be detected in the fetus — as early as six weeks. This is well before many women even know they are pregnant.
Ohio’s radical prohibition also contains no exceptions for rape or incest. Prior to being temporarily stayed by an Ohio court, these restrictions forced a 10-year-old girl who had been raped to travel to Indiana to terminate her pregnancy so that she was not forced to bear the rapist’s child.
Confronted by a legislature impervious to the hardships imposed on women, the proposed amendment seeks to restore all of the rights cast into doubt when the high court overturned Roe. Dobbs undercut not just a right to abortion, but it also questioned the freedom to obtain contraception, to resist compelled sterilization, and even to engage in consensual sexual activity.
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Ohio Democratic-stronghold counties exceeding early voting expectations for November election
By: Morgan Trau - October 27, 2023 4:40 am
File photo of early voters at the Franklin County Board of Elections. (Photo by Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal.)
Voters in Democratic-stronghold counties are showing up in mass to vote early for the November election on abortion and marijuana, exceeding the already unexpectedly large turnout from the August special election.
“For these things that are on the ballot right now, which are very important, I just wanted to make sure my vote is in and counted,” voter Ellen Rosenblatt said.
Rosenblatt wanted to decide if abortion and recreational marijuana should be legal. She is one of the tens of thousands of early voters in Cuyahoga County.
Mike West, with the county board of elections, is excited that so many people are interested and showing up for this election.
“We’re gonna have a pretty healthy turnout for this election,” he said.
The best way to compare this typically-municipal-year election is with the recent special election on August 8.
Analysis
Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau reached out to a dozen counties with different political leanings all across the state. She got data and calculated from the 11th day of early voting — which Ohio has data for now. This means that the data comes up to July 25 for the August election and Oct. 25 for the November election.
The reason they are both the 25th is due to the fact that November voters lost a day due to the federal holiday, so a day was removed from July.
Cuyahoga County is seeing about the same for in-person ballots cast but has a large increase in absentee ballots.
“We are way ahead, by around 10,000 vote-by-mail ballot applications,” West said.
continues.....
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we smacked down an effort to raise the threshhold for amending our state constitution by a wide margin in the August special election after the gop here outlawed special elections last dec or jan... was still a lot of room for participation too.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care, the latest victory for abortion rights supporters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
Ohio became the seventh state where voters decided to protect abortion access after the landmark ruling and was the only state to consider a statewide abortion rights question this year.
The outcome of the intense, off-year election could be a bellwether for 2024, when Democrats hope the issue will energize their voters and help President Joe Biden keep the White House. Voters in Arizona, Missouri and elsewhere are expected to vote on similar protections next year.
Ohio’s constitutional amendment, on the ballot as Issue 1, included some of the most protective language for abortion access of any statewide ballot initiative since the Supreme Court’s ruling. Opponents had argued that the amendment would threaten parental rights, allow unrestricted gender surgeries for minors and revive “partial birth” abortions, which are federally banned.
Public polling shows about two-thirds of Americans say abortion should generally be legal in the earliest stages of pregnancy, a sentiment that has been underscored in both Democratic and deeply Republican states since the justices overturned Roe in June 2022.
Before the Ohio vote, statewide initiatives in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont had either affirmed abortion access or turned back attempts to undermine the right.
Voter turnout for Ohio’s constitutional amendment, including early voting, was robust for an off-year election. Issue 1’s approval will all but certainly undo a 2019 state law passed by Republicans that bans most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, with no exceptions for rape and incest. That law, currently on hold because of court challenges, is one of roughly two dozen restrictions on abortion the Ohio Legislature has passed in recent years.
Issue 1 specifically declared an individual’s right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including birth control, fertility treatments, miscarriage and abortion.
It allowed the state to regulate the procedure after fetal viability, as long as exceptions were provided for cases in which a doctor determined the “life or health” of the woman was at risk. Viability was defined as the point when the fetus had “a significant likelihood of survival” outside the womb, with reasonable interventions.
Anti-abortion groups, with the help of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, tested a variety of messages to try to defeat the amendment, primarily focusing on the idea that the proposal was too extreme for the state. The supporters’ campaign centered on a message of keeping government out of families’ private affairs.
The latest vote followed an August special election called by the Republican-controlled Legislature that was aimed at making future constitutional changes harder to pass by increasing the threshold from a simple majority vote to 60%. That proposal was aimed in part at undermining the abortion-rights measure decided Tuesday.
Voters overwhelmingly defeated that special election question, setting the stage for the high-stakes fall abortion campaign.
___
Associated Press writer Samantha Hendrickson in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, contributed to this report.
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The Ohio Supreme Court is asking the parties involved in a lawsuit over Ohio’s law banning abortion after six weeks to submit arguments on what effect, if any, the abortion and reproductive rights amendment approved in Issue 1 has on that case. And it’s looking like the attorney for the state is going to have to make an argument he said he personally disagrees with.
Attorney General Dave Yost hasn’t filed those arguments yet, but said this to a group at Ohio Republican Party headquarters just before early voting started.
"Somebody actually said this – "I’m not really worried about Issue 1 because we’ll still have the ‘heartbeat bill’." No, we won’t," he told the GOP volunteers.
That goes along with his office’s legal analysis of Issue 1. That analysis said approval of Issue 1 would invalidate the six-week ban. That ban does not include any exceptions for rape or incest.
The analysis, ordered by Yost and written by attorneys and staff, detailed some of the laws that would be affected if Issue 1 is approved. Of the so-called "Heartbeat Act", the analysis said: “Some of Ohio’s laws may be defensible, but the Heartbeat Act would not exist if Issue 1 passes. Ohio would no longer have the ability to limit abortions at any time before a fetus is viable. Viability is generally thought to be around 21 or 22 weeks. Passage of Issue 1 would invalidate the Heartbeat Act, which restricts abortions (with health and other exceptions) after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually at about six weeks. No other pre-viability limit would be allowed.”
Yost’s office said in an email: “We have been ordered to brief these questions, and will do so. We will speak through the brief.” The office also pointed to language in the legal analysis on Issue 1 regarding the six-week ban.
Yost also posted on social media this week: “Having thoroughly scoured the Constitution, I find no exception for matters in which the outcome of an election is contrary to the preferences of those in power.”
The amendment approved by 57% of voters guarantees abortion access, but says it can be prohibited after fetal viability.
Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis also said Issue 1 will mean the six-week ban is unconstitutional: “I believe, yes, it will, because the Constitution trumps state law.”
And in that interview for "The State of Ohio", Gonidakis also said he believes the current ban on abortion after viability, the so-called "Pain Capable" Act which he helped draft in 2016, will stand—and he said he thinks that's what voters want.
"I think we can find some common ground, and I believe it would be our 20-week ban," Gonidakis said. "Our mission is to protect life from conception to natural death. But if that's what we can live with presently, and we'll have to continue to change hearts and minds."
Nearly all abortions happen before 20 weeks. The 2022 Ohio Abortion Report shows 89% of abortions were conducted before the 13th week of pregnancy. Only 0.6% of abortions were performed between 21 and 24 weeks, and there were none after that point.
"I firmly believe if we would have stopped at the 'Pain Capable' law, we would we would have been successful last week," Gonidakis said.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s new constitutional projections for abortion access and other reproductive rights are supposed to take effect Dec. 7, a month after voters resoundingly passed them. That prospect seems increasingly uncertain.
Existing abortion-related lawsuits are moving again through the courts now that voters have decided the issue, raising questions about how and when the amendment will be implemented.
The amendment declared an individual’s right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” and passed with a strong 57% majority. It was the seventh straight victory in statewide votes for supporters of abortion access nationally since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned constitutional protections.
But the amendment did not repeal any existing Ohio laws, providing an opening for Republican elected officials and anti-abortion groups to renew their efforts to halt, delay or significantly water it down.
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“A lot of that hard work of figuring out what state laws are inconsistent with the amendment and what state laws can remain, does tend to devolve to the courts,” said Laura Hermer, a professor of law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, who studies access to health coverage and care in the U.S. "It’s difficult to imagine that the Legislature will say, ‘All right, you win. We’re going to repeal the heartbeat ban' and so forth.”
The state Legislature is controlled by Republicans whose leaders opposed the November ballot amendment, which was known as Issue 1. The Ohio Supreme Court also is controlled by Republicans, who have a 4-3 majority, and will be the final judge of constitutional questions. Several of the Republican justices have taken actions or made statements that have caused abortion rights organizations and ethics attorneys to question their objectivity on the subject.
Minority Democrats in the Ohio House announced legislation two days after the election aimed at avoiding a piecemeal approach to implementing the amendment. Among other steps, they called for repealing the state’s ban on most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks, and a 24-hour waiting period.
“There are over 30 different restrictions in place," said state Rep. Beth Liston, a physician and co-author of the Reproductive Care Act. "And I think that it is important that we don't require citizens to go to court for every restriction, and, quite frankly, that we don't let harm occur in the interim.”
House Minority Leader Allison Russo was careful not to criticize the high court, which holds sway over the fate of those laws.
“My hope is they will uphold the rule of law and the constitution,” she said.
Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy last week ordered lawyers for the state and a group of abortion clinics to tell the court how they believe the measure’s passage has affected a case involving Ohio’s ban on most abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, which has been on hold since October 2022.
A day after voters approved the amendment, U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett made a similar request of the parties in a long-running federal lawsuit challenging a set of state restrictions imposed on abortion providers’ operations. They included a requirement that clinics obtain agreements with a nearby hospital for emergency patient transfers, as well as a prohibition against public hospitals entering into those agreements.
At least three other Ohio abortion laws also have been on hold in the courts.
Passing legislation to bring Ohio law in line with the new constitutional amendment has been a non-starter with Republican lawmakers, who mostly opposed it and took extraordinary steps to defeat it.
With a primary election in their GOP-heavy districts only months away, they are facing fierce pressure from anti-abortion groups to go in the other direction and either pass laws countering the amendment or using their supermajorities to strip courts of their power to interpret it.
“The (Ohio) Constitution specifically says reigning in out-of-control courts is the legislators' job," the anti-abortion group Faith2Action argues in a recently released video. “So let's call on the legislators to do their job, to use their constitutionally granted right to represent us and to keep pro-abortion judges from repealing Ohio laws based on an amendment that doesn't even mention a single Ohio law.”
The video argues that the “right to life” created in Ohio's constitution is inalienable and that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade punted the abortion issue to “the people's elected representatives.”
But in his concurring opinion in that ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote that constitutional amendments were among the avenues for deciding the future of abortion access.
“Moreover, the Constitution authorizes the creation of new rights — state and federal, statutory and constitutional," Kavanaugh wrote. "But when it comes to creating new rights, the Constitution directs the people to the various processes of democratic self-government contemplated by the Constitution — state legislation, state constitutional amendments, federal legislation, and federal constitutional amendments.”
For now, Republican Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens has said legislation targeting the power of state courts will not be considered. GOP Senate President Matt Huffman has ruled out lawmakers pushing for an immediate repeal of Issue 1, as had once been suggested, saying nothing like that should be tried, at least in 2024.
How Attorney General Dave Yost will proceed also is being closely watched.
In a legal analysis of Issue 1 that the Republican published before the election, Yost said the amendment created a new standard for protecting abortion access that “goes beyond” the law of the land under Roe v. Wade.
“That means that many Ohio laws would probably be invalidated ... and others might be at risk to varying degrees,” he wrote.
Hermer, the law professor, said that statement is convenient for lawyers fighting to implement the constitutional amendment but such an analysis isn't legally binding for Yost.
“He doesn’t necessarily have to stand down, but, of course, having already said that, it’s going to make it a bit more difficult to hold those sorts of positions,” she said.
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas judge on Thursday gave a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis permission to get an abortion in an unprecedented challenge over bans that more than a dozen states have enacted since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The lawsuit by Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area, is believed to be the first time since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that a woman anywhere in the country has asked a court to approve an immediate abortion.
It was unclear how quickly or whether Cox will receive the procedure. State District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, an elected Democrat, said she would grant a temporary restraining order that would allow Cox to have an abortion under what are narrow exceptions to Texas' ban. That decision is likely to be appealed by the state, which argued that Cox does not meet the criteria for a medical exception.
In a brief hearing Thursday, her attorneys told Gamble that Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, went to an emergency room this week for a fourth time during her pregnancy.
Cox and her husband both attended the hearing via Zoom but did not address the court. Doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
“The idea that Ms. Cox wants so desperately to be a parent and this law may have her lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice," Gamble said.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox, has said this lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned. Since that landmark ruling, Texas and 12 other states rushed to ban abortion at nearly all stages of pregnancy. Opponents have sought to weaken those bans, including an ongoing Texas challenge over whether the state's law is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications.
“I do not want to continue the pain and suffering that has plagued this pregnancy or continue to put my body or my mental health through the risks of continuing this pregnancy,” Cox wrote in an editorial published in The Dallas Morning News. “I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer.”
Although Texas allows exceptions under the ban, doctors and women have argued that the requirements are so vaguely worded that physicians still won't risk providing abortions, lest they face potential criminal charges or lawsuits.
State officials had asked Gamble to deny the request, arguing that Cox has not shown her life is in imminent danger and that she is therefore unable to qualify for an exception to the ban.
“There are no facts pled which demonstrate that Ms. Cox is at any more of a risk, let alone life-threatening, than the countless women who give birth every day with similar medical histories,” the state wrote in court filings ahead of Thursday's hearing.
Spokespersons for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not immediately return messages addressing whether the state will appeal. Cox's attorneys have argued that the risks to her health will worsen unless courts acts swiftly.
The decision was handed down just two days after Cox filed the lawsuit, which says doctors told her the baby will likely be stillborn or live for a week at most.
Cox had cesarean sections with her previous pregnancies. She learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed a week after the Texas Supreme Court heard arguments about whether the ban is too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications. That case is among the biggest ongoing challenges to abortion bans in the U.S., although a ruling from the all-Republican court may not come for months.
In July, several Texas women gave emotional testimony about carrying babies they knew would not survive and doctors unable to offer abortions despite their spiraling conditions. A judge later ruled that Texas’ ban was too restrictive for women with pregnancy complications, but that decision was swiftly put on hold after the state appealed.
More than 40 woman have received abortions in Texas since the ban took effect, according to state health figures, none of which have resulted in criminal charges. There were more than 16,000 abortions in Texas in the five months prior to the ban taking effect last year.
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what now?
seems the cruelty of the texas government is the issue here.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
yep. going to make it so its guaranteed she can never get pregnant again. how very pro-life...
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas Supreme Court on Friday night put on hold a judge's ruling that approved an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis, throwing into limbo an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S.
The order by the all-Republican court came more than 30 hours after Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two from the Dallas area, received a temporary restraining order from a lower court judge that prevents Texas from enforcing the state's ban in her case.
In a one-page order, the court said it was temporarily staying Thursday's ruling “without regard to the merits." The case is still pending.
“While we still hope that the Court ultimately rejects the state’s request and does so quickly, in this case we fear that justice delayed will be justice denied,” said Molly Duane, an attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Cox.
Cox's attorneys have said they will not share her abortion plans, citing concerns for her safety. In a filing with the Texas Supreme Court on Friday, her attorneys indicated she was still pregnant.
Cox was 20 weeks pregnant this week when she filed what is believed to be the first lawsuit of its kind since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that overturned Roe v. Wade. The order issued Thursday only applied to Cox and no other pregnant Texas women.
Cox learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to her lawsuit.
Furthermore, doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her two prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that Cox does not meet the criteria for a medical exception to the state's abortion ban, and he urged the state's highest court to act swiftly.
“Future criminal and civil proceedings cannot restore the life that is lost if Plaintiffs or their agents proceed to perform and procure an abortion in violation of Texas law,” Paxton's office told the court.
He also warned three hospitals in Houston that they could face legal consequences if they allowed Cox's physician to provide the abortion, despite the ruling from state District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, who Paxton called an “activist” judge.
On Friday, a pregnant Kentucky woman also filed a lawsuit demanding the right to an abortion. The plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, is about eight weeks pregnant and she wants to have an abortion in Kentucky but cannot legally do so because of the state’s ban, the suit said.
Unlike Cox's lawsuit, the Kentucky challenge seeks class-action status to include other Kentuckians who are or will become pregnant and want to have an abortion.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to take up a dispute over a medication used in the most common method of abortion in the United States, its first abortion case since it overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
The justices will hear appeals from the Biden administration and the maker of the drug mifepristone asking the high court to reverse an appellate ruling that would cut off access to the drug through the mail and impose other restrictions, even in states where abortion remains legal. The restrictions include shortening from the current 10 weeks to seven weeks the time during which mifepristone can be used in pregnancy.
The nine justices rejected a separate appeal from abortion opponents who challenged the Food and Drug Administration's initial approval of mifepristone as safe and effective in 2000.
The case will be argued in the spring, with a decision likely by late June, in the middle of the 2024 presidential and congressional campaigns.
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Mifepristone, made by New York-based Danco Laboratories, is one of two drugs used in medication abortions, which account for more than half of all abortions in the United States. More than 5 million people have used it since 2000.
The Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in June 2022. That ruling has led to bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in 14 states, with some exceptions, and once cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks, in two others.
Abortion opponents filed their challenge to mifepristone the following November and initially won a sweeping ruling six months later revoking the drug’s approval entirely. The appeals court left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.
The justices blocked that ruling from taking effect while the case played out, though Justices Samuel Alito, the author of last year’s decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas said they would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while the case proceeded.
Women seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with misoprostol. The FDA has eased the terms of mifepristone’s use over the years, including allowing it to be sent through the mail in states that allow access.
In its appeal, the Democratic administration said the appeals court, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, ignored the FDA’s scientific judgment about mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness since its approval in 2000.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday that the appellate ruling “threatens to undermine the FDA’s scientific, independent judgment and would reimpose outdated restrictions on access to safe and effective medication abortion.”
Lawyers for the anti-abortion medical groups and individual physicians who have challenged the use of mifepristone had urged the Supreme Court to turn away the appeals.
“The modest decision below merely restores the common-sense safeguards under which millions of women have taken chemical abortion drugs,” wrote lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes itself as a Christian law firm. The lead attorney on the Supreme Court filing is Erin Hawley, wife of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of President Donald Trump in Texas, initially revoked FDA approval of mifepristone.
Responding to a quick appeal, two more Trump appointees on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FDA’s original approval would stand for now. But Judges Andrew Oldham and Kurt Engelhardt said most of the rest of Kacsmaryk’s ruling could take effect while the case winds through federal courts.
Besides reducing the time during which the drug can be taken and halting distribution through the mail, patients who are seeking medication abortions would have had to make three in-person visits with a doctor. Women also might have been required to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.
Health care providers have said that if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain, they would switch to using only misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.
___
Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
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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 Dobbsdecision 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.”
Demonized’ for an everyday occurrence
Two weeks later, on Oct. 5, Detective Carney drove to Watts’s home and placed her under arrest. Watts said that, until then, she didn’t even realize she had been charged with “abuse of a corpse.” The law, which outlines that “No person, except as authorized by law, shall treat a human corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable community sensibilities,” has been used before in Ohio in relation to women’s reproductive health.
In 2019, a Warren County, Ohio, woman was found guilty of abuse of a corpse in connection with the death of her newborn daughter; her defense lawyer said the baby was stillborn. A judge put the woman on probation for three years, but her probation was terminated after roughly a year, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
According to Olwyn Conway, a professor of law at Ohio State University, “abuse of a corpse” historically falls under a broader law against grave robbing. Given the statute’s history, she questions whether prosecutors are applying the law as it was intended.
Prosecutions stemming from pregnancy loss occurred in the Roe v. Wade era, but post-Dobbs,“prosecutors feel they have more leeway” to pursue such cases under statutes such as abuse of a corpse or concealment of a birth, said Kylee Sunderlin, legal support director of If/When/How, a nonprofit network of reproductive justice lawyers.
Those statues, Sunderlin said, tend to be ambiguous, archaic and never intended to be used against someone who experiences a pregnancy loss.
Timko said that Watts is being punished because police and prosecutors do not understand the natural and common process of a miscarriage.
Watts, who has no criminal record, is being “demonized for something that goes on every day,” Timko said at the hearing in Warren Municipal Court on Nov. 2, according to WKBN. The city of Warren is part of Trumbull County.
George Sterbenz, a forensic pathologist, testified that an autopsy found no injury to the fetus and that the fetus had died before passing through the birth canal. “This fetus was going to be nonviable … and the fetus was too young to be delivered,” Sterbenz said.
Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri, who did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment, said in court that the case is about what happened after the miscarriage.
“The issue isn’t how the child died, when the child died — it’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet, large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet, and she went on [with] her day,” he said.
Sunderlin and others who criticize Watts’s arrest question the public safety value of her prosecution.
“This is a prosecutor believing that they’re the arbiters of what’s in the public interest,” Sunderlin said. “But they’re prosecuting someone over a pregnancy outcome. Who are they actually protecting?”
Timko said the case is now about defining the term “corpse.” Ohio’s laws do not define corpse, and without a definition, the public is left to argue the issue, she said.
“In most cases, criminal law applies to persons who are defined as humans who are viable,” Timko said. “In Brittany’s case, she knew the fetus was not viable.”
No clear guidance
Before police began to investigate Watts, the medical office receptionist had spent the three previous days in and out of the hospital as her pregnancy faltered.
By the time she first visited the hospital on Sept. 19, Watts already suspected she was miscarrying. She was passing large clots of blood and describing her pain as intense, according to her medical records. Doctors confirmed her suspicions, telling her that although there was fetal cardiac activity, the pregnancy was not viable. Watts left the hospital that day against medical advice, telling the doctor she could “better process what was happening to her at home.”
The next morning, Watts returned, expecting to be induced to deliver her preterm pregnancy. Abortion is currently legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy in Ohio. For the next eight hours, doctors and officials determined the ethics of inducing labor for a woman who had been diagnosed with preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM), had no detectable amniotic fluid, was bleeding vaginally and had advanced cervical dilation.
One doctor was particularly blunt about the urgency of inducing Watts’s delivery: “My recommendation instead of waiting until mom is on death’s door before proceeding with treatment, [is] to deliver this baby” by inducing, the doctor wrote.
Seven hours later, Watts still had not been induced. She wanted to leave, according to medical records. Finally, when the doctor returned to the hospital room to discuss the induction plan, records state, Watts’s bed was empty and her IV bag was draped over the railing.
At home, the pain and bleeding wouldn’t let up, prompting Watts to briefly return to the hospital the next day, but she again left against medical advice after not being able to see her OB/GYN soon enough.
It was during Watts’s next visit to the hospital, on Sept. 22, that her status would change from patient to potential criminal suspect.
Although miscarriage is common, it is nonetheless an isolating experience, doctors say. When it comes to fetal remains, the guidance outside a health-care setting is murky.
“As to the disposal of fetal remains after abortion or miscarriage at home, I know of nothing,” Fox, the University of San Diego School of Law bioethics expert, said of guidelines. “This is not an area where you’re going to find best practices from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” or the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists.
Cassing Hammond, an OB/GYN and associate professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, said that an outcome such as Watts’s — a second-trimester rupture of membranes — is not uncommon.
“While her process for the disposal of remains may be unusual, the actual clinical scenario the patient faced is not unusual and is something any pregnant person could confront,” Hammond said. And although OB/GYNs would prefer people be in a health-care setting during a second-trimester pregnancy loss, “anyone experiencing a miscarriage has the possibility of passing that at home.”
“The right person for the patient to call is the doctor, not the police,” Hammond added. “Calling the police on a patient going through this kind of traumatic experience is not therapeutic.”
For Watts, the trauma of miscarrying could stretch well into next year as she awaits the decision of a grand jury tasked with poring over one of her most life-altering moments. Apart from the emotional upheaval, Watts is struggling to pay the medical and legal bills that have mounted in the past few months.
Although she is filled with anxiety waiting for the grand jury to decide whether she should be indicted for alleged “abuse of corpse,” she said she is grateful for support from her community and people across the world.
“I pray that my story makes a difference, and no other woman ever faces this reality,” she said. “However, if it comes to that, she has my support.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/12/15/ohio-woman-miscarriage-abuse-of-corpse-grand-jury/
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