Kelda Roys is on a mission to stop a Republican bill that could criminalize miscarriage

This story first appeared in Up North News

Kelda Roys is determined that no woman in Wisconsin who loses a baby through a miscarriage or stillbirth will ever be put through the additional emotional trauma of being charged with a crime because of her loss.

That’s why the Wisconsin senator recently introduced the first bill of its kind in the state—the Pregnancy Loss Protection Act. The goal is to prevent any zealous anti-abortion prosecutor or law enforcement officer from targeting a person who suffers from a miscarriage or stillbirth.

Why would a woman be charges with a crime after a miscarriage?

In the first year alone after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, over 200 women—mostly low income and many who had miscarried—were charged with crimes like “abuse of a corpse,” “concealment of a death” and “abandonment of a corpse.” Winning the case, in these situations, would open up the argument that a fetus, even in the earliest moments of pregnancy when it’s technically a bundle of cells, is a person with all associated rights. 

Other women were charged with child neglect, child endangerment, and homicide by child abuse—since winning the case could redefine the word “child.” In so doing, it would open up the argument that abortion, miscarriage, and stillbirth could amount to homicide. This suggests that something the women did during their pregnancies endangered, neglected, or abused the pregnancy enough to cause death. 

There is no medical or scientific basis for any of these arguments. Natural miscarriages occur in roughly 20% of pregnancies, with some estimates putting that figure at 30%.

Roys suggested that to a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.  

“When you have the view that abortion is a crime or should be a crime, then naturally you’re going to suspect that someone who has had a miscarriage has taken abortion medication or done something to have caused it,” Roys told UpNorthNews in an exclusive interview.

“This is of course an incredibly traumatic, physically and psychologically, very painful event for anyone to experience. But then to, on top of that, be treated like a criminal and have your body treated as a crime scene, is just horrific,” she said.

The senator, who is running to clinch the Democratic nomination for governor in the Aug. 11 primary, introduced the bill. Roys is confident it will pass if the Democrats are successful in winning majorities in the state Senate and Assembly in November 2026.

Until then, “I don’t anticipate that Republicans in the legislature are going to support this, because of course, they are the reason that we’re seeing the criminalization of miscarriage and stillbirth across this country,” she said.

While prosecutions of women who have miscarried or suffered from stillbirths have occurred in both red and blue states, the majority have taken place in red states—with Alabama charging more than 20 women in 2022 alone.

It happened to Brittany

The case of Brittany Watts is exactly the sort of nightmare that Roys is trying to prevent.

In 2023, 34-year-old Brittany Watts rushed to St. Joseph Warren Hospital in Youngstown, Ohio, when she began bleeding heavily. She was in her 21st week of a wanted pregnancy.

At the hospital, Watts was told that she had experienced a “placental abruption”—her placenta had detached from the wall of her uterus, depriving her fetus of oxygen and nutrients. She waited at the hospital for eight hours, but was provided with no treatment.

The next day, she returned to the hospital and learned that her water had broken. She was suffering from a dangerous condition called PPROM—the premature rupture of the membranes, i.e., the amniotic sac—and she already had an infection invading her uterus.

Watts was given the devastating news that her pregnancy was doomed. She was also informed that she was at risk of hemorrhaging, sepsis, and even death if the fetus wasn’t removed. This time she waited for 10 hours, and again received no meaningful treatment.

Watts went home and miscarried in agony on her own. Her bathroom floor and toilet were covered with blood, blood clots, and tissue. She cleaned up and returned to the hospital, hoping for treatment for the infection and the miscarriage.

Instead, a nurse called police and falsely reported that the patient may have given birth to a live baby and dumped it.

Police raided her home, then interrogated her while she was still in her hospital bed. Once released, she was handcuffed outside her home, arraigned at a police station, charged by police with “abuse of a corpse,” and faced a year in prison for the charge.

An autopsy of the fetal remains that were found in Watts’ toilet revealed that her fetus had died in utero. Months later, a grand jury refused to indict her. Now, Watts is suing both medical and law enforcement members who pursued her, as well as the hospital.

Roys will not accept this for women

Appalled by what happened to Watts and hundreds of other women, Roys told UpNorthNews that “as someone who has experienced a miscarriage myself and given birth to three children, I find it totally unacceptable that our society is targeting pregnant women at the worst moment of their lives.”

Even though Wisconsin women are no longer living under an 1849 abortion ban from conception, Roys said there are still legal threats to pregnant women in the state.

Wisconsin Senate Republicans just passed SB553, which confers “legal personhood” on embryos from the moment of fertilization, therefore giving them rights that are equal to those of their mothers—and effectively giving law enforcement the right to treat Wisconsin women the way Watts was treated.

While Gov. Evers, a Democrat, is expected to veto the bill, Roys said that the bill’s Senate passage demonstrates the intent of Wisconsin Republican lawmakers to once again deprive Wisconsin women of their rights.

“None of us are really safe,” she said. “The anti-choice movement, I’ve always believed, is really motivated not by a concern for fetal life or the well-being of children and women, but by just a deep contempt for women.”

Roys said she will fight to pass the Pregnancy Loss Protection Act in 2026 to save the state’s women from the ongoing effort by Republicans to “police women’s behavior and police women’s bodies.”