CLEVELAND — An Ohio mom who successfully fought criminal reproductive charges after suffering a miscarriage at home continues the fight for pregnancy justice in federal court.
Attorneys for Brittany Watts, now 35, filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month against medical workers, members of law enforcement, and a hospital in Warren, Ohio, where, they allege, she was deprived of essential care and criminalized. After a multi-day ordeal in which Watts, then almost five months pregnant, suffered immense pain and was told at the hospital that her pregnancy was not viable, she left the hospital, frustrated at what she described as medical personnel ignoring her, and went home, where she miscarried in a bathroom. As she recuperated from the end of her pregnancy, police interrogated her and later arrested her in the death of the fetus.
The lawsuit asks a federal jury to hold the defendants accountable for the ordeal Watts suffered—both during her miscarriage and the following months when she was charged with a felony and feared for her freedom. It also seeks compensation for Watts, who is now in nursing school and told her lawyer, Julia Rickert of the Loevy + Loevy law firm in Chicago, that she wants to insure the reproductive rights of women, especially Black women.
“I don’t want what happened to me to ever happen to any other woman,” Watts said in a statement published on her lawyer’s website.
The lawsuit names employees at St. Joseph Warren Hospital — nurse Connie Moschell, nurse Jordan Carrino, and Dr. Parisa Khavari — its parent company, Bon Secours Mercy Health, Warren Police Det. Nicholas Carney, and Carney’s employer, the City of Warren. It charges them with medical negligence, multiple violations of Watt’s constitutional rights, the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), medical privacy rights, malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The action is filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division.
“What they came up with—an abuse of corpse charge—was an insult to every woman who has ever suffered a pregnancy loss. It was a cruel affront to the letter and the spirit of the law, not to mention common decency,” said Watts’ lawyer, Julia Rickert, a partner at the Chicago-based law firm Loevy + Loevy, said in the statement published to the firm’s website.
In Ohio, a fifth-degree felony abuse of a corpse carries a one-year prison sentence and $2,500 fine.
Black News & Views did attempt to reach out to all of the defendants for their side but in most cases, could not reach them or did not receive a response to messages.
Mercy Health, the hospital’s parent company, provided a statement to Black News & Views.
“We remain steadfast in our mission and our commitment to the patients and communities we serve with compassion and integrity,” the statement read. “Due to patient privacy, Mercy Health will not discuss these legal proceedings.”
The city of Warren’s communications officer via email declined to comment, citing the pending lawsuit. Khavari could not be reached. She is no longer listed as an employee of Mercy Health and the phone number to her private practice in Warren is out of service.
RELATED: No indictment for woman arrested in fetus death after she miscarried
Watts’s case has drawn national attention and interest, particularly from reproductive rights advocates monitoring the shifting threats to women’s health and civil liberties since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the protections of Roe v. Wade. The following year in November, a majority of Ohio voters responded in passing the Reproductive Freedom Amendment, known as Issue 1, that enshrined reproductive rights and protections into law.
Watts’s ordeal began in September 2023, when she began bleeding in her 21st week of pregnancy. In fear for her life and the health of her pregnancy, she went to St. Joseph Warren Hospital for help. There, she was told her placenta had partially detached, causing premature rupture of membranes, draining the amniotic fluid from her uterus. Doctors explained that her fetus could not survive inside or outside her womb.
Medical records show her doctors concluded that she was at serious risk of uncontrolled bleeding, blood clots, infection, multi-organ failures, and respiratory arrest. They recommended inducing labor immediately, or else Watts faced losing the ability to have future children, worsening illness, chronic pain, permanent disability, or death.
Despite the seriousness of her condition that the doctors noted, the hospital provided Watts with no treatment during 18 hours spent there over two days, according to the complaint. She returned home.
Less than three days later, she suffered a miscarriage on the toilet before collapsing on the bathroom floor. No sound of movement came from the toilet because the fetus had died in utero, her attorneys said. Watts believed the fetus was not likely to be intact and flushed the toilet, then trying to scoop the overflowing contents with a bucket, unsure if she was scooping fetal remains. A disoriented Watts returned to St. Joseph and was admitted with the placenta still in her body and a worsening infection.
“The nurse was rubbing my back, comforting me, telling me everything was going to be okay,” Watts’ lawyer quotes her as saying. “Little did I know, that nurse was the one who called the police.”
The lawsuit alleges the nurse Moschell at St. Joseph called 911 and falsely reported that Watts may have given birth to a live baby and abandoned it in a bucket. After police raided Watts’s home, a detective interrogated her at the hospital, with the reporting nurse present, and both were unwilling to accept her account of what happened at home, according to the lawyers.
An autopsy on the fetus showed it had died in utero and had suffered no physical injury. The complaint alleged the detective and nurse did not accept Watts’s story and “searched for a way to ensure Watts was charged with a crime,” the law firm said in a statement.
On Oct. 5, 2023, when Watts was recovering at home, police handcuffed her outside and took her to the police station. In court, she was arraigned on charges of felony abuse of a corpse and faced up to a year in prison. Word of her arrest spread quickly, and private details of her medical trauma, identity, home address, and phone number were publicized by online trolls, leading to threatening phone calls. Months later, a grand jury ruled there was no basis to conclude a crime had been committed.
Vulnerability of Black women in the national reproductive debate
Women like Watts are “canaries in the coal mine” in a post-Dobbs nation in which pregnant women will increasingly face “hyper-vigilant policing,” Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, has said.
Black women like Watts, Goodwin told the Associated Press, will be particularly vulnerable, as they are already 10 times more likely than white women to have child protective services and law enforcement called on them when seeking prenatal care.
“Pregnancy outcomes for people of color are so much more likely to be questioned and to result in criminalization,” Jessie Hill, law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told The New York Times.
In a 2024 letter urging President Biden to take action to protect pregnant people, Congressional Democrats wrote that “when individuals like Watts cannot seek medical care for pregnancy-related conditions without fear of discrimination and criminalization, our health care system and our justice system have failed.”