Staff photo / R. Michael Semple Hours after a Trumbull County grand jury decided against indicting Brittany Watts of Warren, center, with charges related to a miscarriage, she appeared at a support rally in Courthouse Square on Thursday. She appears here waving to her supporters alongside the Rev. Jeffrey Stanford, left, and Pastor Todd Johnson, who helped organize the rally.

WARREN — When Brittany Watts addressed a large crowd of people in Courthouse Square on Thursday, she had a simple message.

“We are not done fighting,” she said.

The message came after a Trumbull County grand jury declined to indict Watts for abuse of a corpse. The Warren woman, 34, became the center of national attention after she suffered a miscarriage in her bathroom and flushed the remains. Her case was bound over to a Trumbull County grand jury in November.

Enduring the cold weather, Watts stood alongside her attorney, Traci Timko, and spoke briefly.

“I am truly thankful for each and every one of you that have come out,” she said. “All my family, all of my friends, those of you that I don’t know, and I am truly honored and grateful that you all have come to support me, and we are not done fighting.”

The Rally of Support was organized by ACTION (Alliance for Congregational Transformation Influencing Our Neighborhoods), iVote Black and If / When / How, a national advocacy group that specializes in reproductive justice, ahead of the grand jury’s decision.

“We had intentions of coming here and asking God for a whole lot of things,” the Rev. Neil Heller of New Jerusalem Fellowship Church said. “But some of us have been praying ahead of time and he already answered those prayers.”

Warren 5th Ward Councilwoman Tiffany Stanford also spoke in support of Watts.

“Brittany (Watts) did nothing to cause her miscarriage,” she said. “Her doctor told her that her 21-week pregnancy could not survive and she would miscarry. When the bleeding and the pain from the impending miscarriage got severe. She went into her bathroom and miscarried into her toilet and flushed.”

Timko said she was incredibly grateful for the grand jury’s decision to dismiss the charges against Watts and gave thanks to “hundreds probably thousands” of women that Timko said had reached out to her since the story gained national attention. She said some of them even shared graphic details of their own pregnancy losses in solidarity with Watts’ story.

“We have said from Day 1 of all of this that Ohio did not, does not, never supported these charges,” Timko said.

Dr. Arthur Lavin, a member of the Ohio Physicians of Reproductive Rights, the organization that led the push for the recently passed Issue 1 amendment that enshrined reproductive rights into Ohio’s Constitution, said that Trumbull County “is now known across Ohio, across the United States and, yes, across the road (referring to the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office), as a place that sought to criminalize miscarriage — to send women who suffer miscarriage to jail.”

Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins has come under fire since now-retired municipal court Judge Terry Ivanchak made the decision to bind over the case to the grand jury following a preliminary hearing in November.

In a statement, the prosecutor said his office did its “due diligence as ministers of justice, allowing the Ohio criminal justice system to do its job and make a decision through fairness and due process of law.”

Ivanchak had found probable cause to do so after city prosecutors said Watts had miscarried — clogging the toilet and removing some of its contents to an outdoor trash area — before leaving the house and the 22-week-old fetus lodged in the pipes.

Watts visited St. Joseph Warren Hospital twice in the days leading up to her miscarriage. Her doctor had told her she was carrying a nonviable fetus and to have her labor induced or face “significant risk” of death, according to records of her case.

Due to delays and other complications, Timko said, Watts left the hospital each time without being treated.

After Watts miscarried, she went back to the hospital. A nurse called 911 to report a previously pregnant patient had returned reporting “the baby’s in her backyard in a bucket.”

That call launched a police investigation.