Ohio woman sues hospital and police after she was arrested over miscarriage

Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who was charged with abuse of a corpse after having a miscarriage, has filed a federal lawsuit accusing some of the medical professionals who treated her of conspiring with a police officer to fabricate the criminal case against her.

The lawsuit, which was filed last week and names the professionals, the officer, the hospital where Watts was treated and the city of Warren, Ohio, as defendants, is the latest development in a case that first made national headlines in late 2023 when Watts was first charged. Although a grand jury ultimately declined to move forward with the charge against Watts, the case sparked fears about how the fall of Roe v Wade and subsequent wave of abortion bans could endanger pregnant women and lead to police treating miscarriages as crimes.

Related: Ohio woman won’t be indicted for abuse of corpse after miscarriage, grand jury decides

“This case is a perfect example of the broader implications of the overruling of Roe v Wade in the Dobbs case. Brittany was not seeking an abortion,” said Julia Rickert, one of Watts’s attorneys and a partner at the civil rights law firm Loevy and Loevy. “But the repercussions of the Dobbs decision meant that her pregnancy and her choices and her medical crisis were viewed in a different way.”

On 19 September 2023, when Watts was about 21 weeks into a wanted pregnancy, she went to the hospital after she started experiencing pain and bleeding, according to the lawsuit. Although she was showing signs of potential miscarriage, the lawsuit alleges that Watts “received no meaningful treatment or guidance”. She left the hospital after several hours, only to return the following day. Although a doctor told her that her pregnancy was in effect over and that she was at risk of hemorrhaging and sepsis, the lawsuit alleges that Watts once again did not receive adequate treatment for hours and left the hospital.

“Her womb was a death trap, essentially,” Rickert said.

In the early morning of 22 September 2023, Watts miscarried into her toilet (which is common in miscarriages). According to the lawsuit, she delivered an “already-deceased, under-one-pound fetus”, which she did not see. Watts attempted to flush and clean out the toilet, then went back to the hospital as she continued to bleed.

A nurse at the hospital contacted the hospital’s risk management department and called police, according to the lawsuit. She allegedly told the police that Watts had given birth at home, did not want the baby and did not know if the baby was alive. Another nurse also wrote a medical note that falsely suggested that Watts had seen and touched the fetus, the lawsuit alleged.

Reproductive justice groups have found that, in cases where pregnant people faced criminal charges for conduct related to their pregnancies, it is medical professionals who often tip off the police. Between 2006 and 2022, one in three pregnancy-related criminal cases were instigated by a medical professional, according to an analysis by the organization Pregnancy Justice.

A police officer arrived at the hospital and, alongside one of the nurses, interrogated Watts while she lay in her hospital bed, according to the lawsuit. In police reports, the lawsuit alleged, the officer “set out to present a false version of the facts to make it look like a crime had been committed: that Ms Watts had given birth at home to a live baby and caused it to die”.

Watts was arrested in early October for felony abuse of a corpse – a charge that could have landed her behind bars for a year. In January 2024, however, the grand jury declined to indict Watts. Afterward, a local county prosecutor issued a statement declaring that his office had decided that Watts did not violate the law.

Watts is now seeking extensive damages for both her initial treatment at the hospital and her later criminalization. Her lawsuit argues that its defendants variously violated Watts’s constitutional rights as well as federal and state law, including a federal law that protects patents’ access to stabilizing care in medical emergencies.

An attorney with the Warren law department said that the department would not be able to comment on pending litigation, while the Warren police chief did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The officer named in the lawsuit declined to comment to a local Ohio news outlet.

In a statement, the hospital where Watts sought treatment, Mercy West, also declined to comment on Watts’s lawsuit, citing patient privacy.

“We remain steadfast in our mission and our commitment to the patients and communities we serve with compassion and integrity,” the statement added.

The arrest and subsequent notoriety of the case were “overwhelming” for Watts, said Rickert, who added that Watts “was not someone who had ever sought the spotlight”. The ordeal did, however, lead Watts to decide to enter nursing school.

“She feels strongly that that is not how medical care should work,” Rickert said. “She wants to be in a position to provide people with better care.”