In 1853, Queen Victoria of England was pregnant with her eighth child. Anesthetic agents had been developed in the United States and were being used occasionally to avoid the pain women experienced during childbirth. Having suffered considerable pain during the seven deliveries she had already undergone, the Queen asked her physicians if she might receive the ‘ether’ that had minimized the discomfort of numerous women in England and America. Her physicians were willing to use the anesthetic agent, but the Queen faced opposition from the [Anglican] Church of England. As monarch she was the titular head of the church, but the church was run by men.
The bishops of the Anglican church told the Queen that she could not use an anesthetic during the impending birth because it would violate the mandate of the Bible that women should bear children in pain. The Bible was unambiguous about what women would experience. After that episode with the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, God was quoted as saying to Eve, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.” After much thought and discussion with her religious advisers, the Queen allegedly announced, “I am having the child, and I shall have the Ether.” Dr. John Snow, Queen Victoria’s private physician, delivered the anesthetic agent, and the Queen survived the birth of Prince Leopold George Duncan Albert on April 7, 1853. The Church of England survived her heresy.
Over the centuries, men in various positions of power have advised, instructed, or mandated what women must do in connection with reproduction. In recent years, mostly male legislators in the United States have decided that women cannot be trusted to make their own decisions regarding reproduction. As a consequence of the ever more diligent surveillance of women, laws and actions applying only to women have gone from intrusive to irrational.
Brittany Watts, an Ohio resident, had a miscarriage in or about the 22nd week of her pregnancy. This would have been nothing more than a personal tragedy if it were not for the intervention of America’s morality police. Ms. Watts had not sought medical attention for her pregnancy until she started passing “thick blood clots” from her vagina about 21 weeks after becoming pregnant. Her doctor determined that her ‘water had broken,’ that the amniotic fluid necessary for the survival of so premature a fetus had drained out of her uterus, and that the fetus could not be saved. Her doctor advised her to go to the hospital to have the nonviable fetus delivered and any residual tissue from the failed pregnancy removed. Without these interventions, she faced numerous possible complications, some of which would result in her death.
When a physician gives medicine or performs a surgical procedure to empty a pregnant uterus [womb], it is called an induced abortion. When the pregnancy ends in the absence of medical intervention before the fetus can survive outside the uterus it is called a spontaneous abortion or miscarriage. Legislators had made it virtually impossible for a woman to get an induced abortion in Ohio after the 21st week of her pregnancy.
Miss Watts followed her doctor’s advice and went to a nearby hospital three times over the next 4 days seeking the treatment that would reduce her risk of death. Each time she went to the hospital, there were inordinate delays in getting her any type of treatment, apparently because the hospital staff feared that their assistance so close to the 22 week deadline might be construed as an ‘illegal’ or induced abortion under Ohio law, rather than standard maternal care necessary for removal of a nonviable fetus.
Mother Nature was less inhibited by the law and forced Miss Watts to undergo a spontaneous abortion [miscarriage] without the benefit of medical oversight in the privacy of her home bathroom. The doomed fetus passed out of her uterus as Miss Watts struggled with painful contractions while seated on her toilet. She tried to flush the fetus, but it and the tissue [placenta] accompanying it was just large enough to clog her toilet.
Although Miss Watts, a 33 year old Black woman, could not get timely medical attention before she miscarried, she received considerable attention after the miscarriage. She returned to the hospital after her miscarriage to have her vaginal bleeding managed and to clear out any residual placenta that had not passed with the fetus. Someone at the hospital alerted the police to her no longer being pregnant, and an investigation of her apartment revealed evidence of a spontaneous abortion with bloody tissue filling her toilet up to its brim.
Accompanying the police was an investigator from the coroner’s office who claimed that on reaching into the bloody mess obscuring the contents in the toilet, he could feel the toes of a fetus. The police seized Miss Watts’s toilet, broke it apart, and found the premature, nonviable fetus clogging it. An autopsy established that the fetus had died before it left the uterus. There was no evidence of foul play. In a final irony, when the hospital administration was asked why they had contacted the police to search Miss Watts’s apartment and toilet, they declined comment “out of respect for patient privacy.”
This was just one of thousands of spontaneous abortions occurring daily in America, but this was Ohio and the politicians needed to prove they would not tolerate even the appearance of an induced abortion. Miss Watts was charged with “abuse of a corpse,” a felony punishable in Ohio by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. At her trial, the state of Ohio will need to argue that a dead fetus that has never taken a breath or lived outside the uterus qualifies as a corpse. The state will also need to establish after what time in pregnancies that end in miscarriages [spontaneous abortions] the mothers must present tissue from the dead fetus or the entire dead fetus for review by a medical expert. Since spontaneous abortions in the early weeks of pregnancy may appear as little more than bloody discharge, the state may be obliged to examine menstrual pads from millions of women every month to look for signs of ‘foul play.’
On or about the 22nd week of her pregnancy, Brittany Watts suffered the miscarriage of a fetus and a miscarriage of justice. The powers that be in Ohio served notice on her and all women of childbearing age in Ohio that they are monitoring their reproductive activities and choices closely. This intrusion into the most intimate facets of a woman’s life is spreading throughout our country. The morality police have decided that fertile women do not have a right to privacy.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
