Women who miscarry in West Virginia should be prepared to face potential criminal charges, a county prosecutor warned a local news outlet last week, saying other law enforcers have raised the possibility with him.
Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman told WVNS 59News on Friday that while he would not take any such action, a number of other prosecuting attorneys in West Virginia have discussed with him their willingness to charge women who miscarry and dispose of their own fetal remains, such as by flushing or burying them.
The charges would be under a state law related to the disposal of human remains. Though abortion is highly restricted in West Virginia, state law says women cannot face criminal charges for their own abortions.
“The kind of criminal jeopardy you face is going to depend on a lot of factors,” Truman told the news outlet. “What was your intent? What did you do? How late were you in your pregnancy? Were you trying to hide something, were you just so emotionally distraught you couldn’t do anything else?”
A miscarriage is often just heavier-than-normal bleeding. It sometimes involves passed tissue that looks like blood clots or a fluid-filled sac.
Women should also be wary of what they share with others before miscarrying, Truman advised.
“If you were relieved, and you had been telling people, ‘I’d rather get ran over by a bus than have this baby,’ that may play into law enforcement’s thinking, too,” he warned.
While there’s no state law requiring women to notify authorities about a miscarriage, it may be best practice to do so anyway, Truman added.
“Call your doctor. Call law enforcement, or 911, and just say, ‘I miscarried. I want you to know,’” he suggested.
There is precedent for a woman facing criminal charges related to how she handles her miscarriage. In 2023, an Ohio woman named Brittany Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse after she flushed the fetal remains from her miscarriage at 21 weeks of pregnancy.
“This 33-year-old girl with no criminal record is demonized for something that goes on every day,” Watts’ attorney Traci Timko said at one of her court hearings.
A grand jury ultimately decided last year that Watts should not be charged.
In April, a Georgia woman was arrested for allegedly throwing away fetal remains from her miscarriage and spent two nights in jail before being released on bail.
Her case “impacts every single woman out there of reproductive age, who knows she can get pregnant, who knows she can miscarry,” Georgia state Sen. Sally Harrell told HuffPost at the time. “It makes every woman of reproductive age afraid.”