Argentina – We Are All Belén

by Michelle Young
December 15, 2025

Belén (2025) is Argentina’s International Feature Film entry for the upcoming Oscars. The story is a true one, and it follows Belén, a pseudonym for a real woman who is falsely imprisoned for having an abortion, when she really had a miscarriage. Belén is held for over two years in Tucumán, Argentina, before being released in 2016. By telling her story, the film shows us a society that’s happy to predetermine a woman’s guilt when it comes to questions around abortion.

Unaware she’s pregnant, Belén goes to the hospital presenting with severe abdominal pain. The doctor determines she’s having a miscarriage at 22 weeks, which is considered the second trimester. It’s important to know that it’s entirely possible to be pregnant for this long and not know it – there’s even a term for it – a cryptic pregnancy.

Continued: https://latinamedia.co/belen/

USA – What Would It Mean to Defend All Abortions?

Democrats love to avoid it, and Republicans love to lie about it. But later-abortion care has never been more important.

Amy Littlefield
May 13, 2025

Ayana, 28 years old and 28 weeks pregnant, eases herself onto the procedure table at Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland. She is a Black woman with the tiny bearing and erect posture of a bird. Above her head, a flock of pink and blue butterflies decorates the ceiling. In a few minutes, a doctor will perform an injection to the fetal heart to end her pregnancy.

Ayana had spent months in turmoil over this abortion. As she chased after her two older kids while lugging her 1-year-old on family outings to the arcade and the movies, she tried to imagine hauling two car seats instead of one. While she changed her baby’s diapers, she thought about what a newborn would subtract from him. The family was already stretched thin.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/defending-all-abortions/

Abortion Bans Criminalize People — and Not Just Those Who Are Pregnant

Post-“Roe,” pregnancy outcomes — and even actions taken to help pregnant people — face escalating criminalization.

By Lauren Rankin , Truthout
April 18, 2025

On March 20, 2025, emergency responders found Selena Maria Chandler-Scott bleeding uncontrollably after miscarrying at 19 weeks in her Tifton, Georgia, home. Chandler-Scott was immediately taken to the hospital for further treatment. The next day, while still recovering in the hospital, she was charged for her own miscarriage under the state’s 2019 “fetal personhood” law. She faced up to 13 years in prison.

The charges drew widespread condemnation, enough that they were eventually dropped. But Chandler-Scott’s traumatic ordeal reveals the ultimate endpoint of abortion bans — criminalizing pregnant people, whether they have an abortion or not.

Continued: https://truthout.org/articles/abortion-bans-criminalize-people-and-not-just-those-who-are-pregnant/

18.04.2025

Commentary

arresting women for miscarriage

Brittany Watts

criminalizing women for abortion

criminalizing women for miscarriage

Ken Paxton

Maria Margarita Rojas

Selena Maria Chandler-Scott

Woman’s arrest after miscarriage in Georgia draws fear and anger

Experts say the arrest is part of a pattern of criminalizing pregnancy that has accelerated since the fall of Roe v. Wade.

April 5, 2025
By Bracey Harris

On March 20 in rural Georgia, an ambulance responded to an early morning 911 call about an unconscious, bleeding woman at an apartment. When first responders arrived, they determined that she’d had a miscarriage. That was only the start of her ordeal.

Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was transported to a hospital, but a witness reported that she had placed the fetal remains in a dumpster. When police investigated, they recovered the remains and Chandler-Scott was charged with concealing the death of another person and abandoning a dead body. The charges were ultimately dropped; an autopsy determined Chandler-Scott had had a “natural miscarriage“ at around 19 weeks and the fetus was nonviable.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-arrest-miscarriage-fetal-personhood-rcna199400

USA – What It Takes to Claw Back Abortion Rights in Court

Feb 19, 2024
By Andrea González-Ramírez, the Cut

Any day now, the Texas Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling on Zurawski v. State of Texas, the first-of-its-kind legal challenge brought forward last year by 20 women who say that they were denied abortion care in the face of severe and dangerous pregnancy complications. The case seeks to clarify what circumstances qualify as medical emergencies under the state’s three overlapping abortion bans, which threaten providers with up to life in prison, in addition to a civil penalty of no less than $100,000.

Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, came up with the case’s legal strategy and has since filed similar lawsuits in Idaho and Tennessee. … “Brittany Watts, Kate Cox — these are not isolated incidents,” she says. “The cruelty, the confusion, the absolute terror that is pervasive throughout the medical community and is impacting patients every single day, all that was by design.” I talked to Duane about the reasoning behind this focus on medical exceptions and the long game that is trying to claw back some abortion rights through the courts.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/article/zurawski-v-texas-and-clawing-back-abortion-rights-in-court.html

Brittany Watts, Ohio woman charged with felony after miscarriage at home, describes shock of her arrest

by Jericka Duncan, Rachel Bailey, Cassandra Gauthier and Hilary Cook
January 26, 2024
Video interview: 10 minutes

When Brittany Watts woke up at her Warren, Ohio, home on Sept. 22, 2023, she knew she was miscarrying.

Her 22-week-old fetus had been declared nonviable by doctors several days prior. Bleeding and in pain, she spent a total of 19 hours in the hospital over a span of two days, begging to be induced.
But an ethics group at Mercy Health - St. Joseph Warren Hospital had concerns about Ohio's abortion laws and how they applied to Watts' case, ultimately resulting in hours of delayed care.

Continued: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brittany-watts-the-ohio-woman-charged-with-a-felony-after-a-miscarriage-talks-shock-of-her-arrest/

Republicans Need to Answer for Women’s Suffering

By Laura Bassett
Jan 12, 2024

This is what passes for good news in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade: An Ohio grand jury decided Thursday not to indict a woman on felony charges after she miscarried in her home toilet in September, at nearly 22 weeks of pregnancy. A nurse had reported Brittany Watts, who is Black, for “abuse of a corpse” over how she’d handled the fetal remains, despite medical experts having determined her fetus wasn’t viable.

The relief for Watts — in a case no woman should have to endure in the first place — came after The New Yorker reported that Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, a 27-year-old immigrant from Mexico, had died from life-threatening pregnancy complications two weeks after the Dobbs decision.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/2024/01/republicans-must-answer-for-suffering-under-abortion-bans.html

12.01.2024

Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick

NO INDICTMENT for Brittany Watts

Grand jury dismisses charges against Ohio woman arrested for miscarriage

JESSICA VALENTI
JAN 11, 2024

It’s rare to be able to bring you good news, so I’m thrilled to tell you that a grand jury has declined to indict Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’ for flushing her miscarriage.

Brittany’s lawyer, Traci Timko, told The New York Times that when Brittany heard the news, she began to cry:

“It’s just been an emotional roller coaster that she has been on. I’m happy Brittany is able to now begin to heal through all of this and I hope and believe that her story is going to be an impetus for change.”

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/no-indictment-for-brittany-watts

11.01.2024

Prosecuted for a miscarriage: Ohio demonstrates the ghoulishness of post-Roe America

Post-Roe politics are turning every pregnancy into a potential crime scene

Dec. 21, 2023
By Andrea Grimes

Give birth, die trying, or go to jail.

To the anti-abortion politicians and lobbyists who got their wish when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, these have always been the only acceptable pregnancy outcomes. Ideally, they’d like a country full of meek, compliant (and mostly white) women whose sole mission in life is to have children. But since pregnancy is dangerous, it’s unavoidable that a number of those women will die in the process — especially in the United States, where our maternal mortality rates (particularly for Black and brown people) are already exceptionally high, and rising. That’s too bad, of course, but for anti-abortion forces it’s better than the alternative: Women who think we have the right to make our own decisions about when, where and whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

Continued: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ohio-woman-miscarriage-case-brittany-watts-rcna130511

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

By Maria Sole Campinoti, Holly Yan and Zenebou Sylla, CNN
Tue December 19, 2023

An Ohio woman who had sought treatment at a hospital before suffering a miscarriage and passing her nonviable fetus in her bathroom now faces a criminal charge, her attorney told CNN.
Brittany Watts, 33, of Warren, has been charged with felony abuse of a corpse, Trumbull County court records show.

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

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

19.12.2023