Grieving mothers are not criminals. Brittany Watts, Kate Cox cases show cruelty to women.

Ray Marcano is a long-time journalist with writing and editing experience at some of the country’s largest media brands. He is a frequent Columbus Dispatch contributor.

Historically, men have used power and place to subjugate people of color and women.

But the recent shameful and cruel patriarchal behavior should be enough for all decent people to scream, enough.

Ohio, Texas, Missouri, and Florida all highlight some of the most egregious examples that show the abuse of male power results in cruelty to women.

Right here in Ohio, Brittany Watts, 33, has been charged with felony abuse of a corpse in Trumbull County because she had a stillborn baby at home.

Watts was 22 weeks pregnant when she went to the bathroom and delivered the stillborn baby. A forensic pathologist testified the autopsy showed no injury to the fetus and it would not have lived.

But authorities allege that after the miscarriage, Watts tried to plunge the toilet with the fetus in it. That gave the law all it needed to arrest and charge a grieving woman who just lost a child.

It’s just as bad in Texas, where the state attorney general tried to force a Dallas women, Kate Cox, to carry and bear a child that has a rare and almost certainly fatal disorder.

Doctors diagnosed Cox’s fetus with trisomy 18, a rare chromosomal disorder. Some 90 to 95% of all children die within the first year.

Most die within a couple of days or weeks.

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Women shouldn't be forced to give birth to dead fetuses

In the very small number of cases that these babies survive, they need a lifetime of round the clock care because of the damage the disorder causes to internal organs, especially the heart.

These powerful Texas men wanted Cox to endure even more pain by forcing her to have a baby that will likely die during delivery or be dead shortly thereafter.

Who believes a woman should carry a dead fetus to term? Raise your hand. Defend it.

I want to hear this one.

And don’t give me the, well, there’s a small chance. We don’t force people who have a “small chance” of overcoming life-threatening cancer to get treatment if they don’t want to.

Cox had enough and left Texas to have her procedure in a place not nearly as unfeeling as the Longhorn State and the men who run it.

The Texas cases mirrors the horror that a pregnant Florida woman when, 24 weeks into her pregnancy, learned her fetus had no kidneys and would not survive. She couldn’t get an abortion in Florida, so she gave birth and watched helplessly as her baby died within a day.

That’s cruel.

Grieving mothers should not be treated like criminals

In Missouri, some lawmakers want to charge women who have an abortion with homicide.

Let that sink in for a second. If a woman, late in pregnancy, finds out her child will die at birth, she would have to choose between the agony of carrying a dead fetus in her body or potentially ending up in jail.

These are just a few of the efforts across the country to treat women like things and not people. It’s a conscious effort by men — the vast of majority of them who are white —to do more than place their anti-abortion values on a segment of society.

It’s an effort to keep women in their place by denying them domain over their own bodies and stripping them of the ability to make decisions in their best physical and emotional interest.

Now, they’re gleefully adding a psychological torture component by forcing these women to give birth to a dead child.

None of this is about abortion. It’s about patriarchy and doing whatever it takes to keep women under the thumb of powerful men.

Patriarchy means, in part, “a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.” The definition should say “white men,” but maybe that goes without saying.

The definition matters less than the actions these men perpetuate. We need to be on the side of women who find themselves under attack by men who pleasure themselves with obscene powerplays.

It needs to stop.

Ray Marcano is a long-time journalist with writing and editing experience at some of the country’s largest media brands. He is a frequent Columbus Dispatch contributor.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Texas' Kate Cox, Ohio's Brittany Watts cases show abuse of male power