Hospital Staff Failed To Treat Her Miscarriage, Then Accused Her of a Crime

A new lawsuit alleges that, after failing to treat a placental abruption, medical staff conspired to have Brittany Watts arrested for her miscarriage.

When Brittany Watts began bleeding at 21 weeks pregnant, she went to her local hospital seeking help. Instead, she was repeatedly denied treatment. When she miscarried at home, hospital staff accused Watts of deliberately harming her fetus, and Watts was eventually arrested and charged with a felony.

While a grand jury later declined to indict Watts, she filed a lawsuit earlier this month, accusing hospital employees of fabricating evidence that she had harmed her baby and failing to properly treat her miscarriage symptoms. 

On September 19, 2023, Watts went to St. Joseph Warren Hospital in Warren, Ohio, after she had begun experiencing pain and bleeding. Doctors told her she had experienced a placental abruption, an extremely dangerous condition in which the placenta separates from the wall of the uterus before birth. But instead of receiving treatment, Watts waited for eight hours without care or information about her condition. 

According to Watts' lawsuit, she eventually went home and rapidly declined by the following morning. When she returned to the hospital, she was told that her water had broken, her cervix was dilated, and an infection had started. Her doctor allegedly told her that she risked "hemorrhaging, sepsis, and death" unless her fetus was removed.

Once again, instead of inducing labor or performing a dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure, doctors left Watts to languish without treatment—leaving her untreated for more than 10 hours. Watts once again returned home.

According to her lawsuit, Watts eventually miscarried in her toilet at home on September 22. The baby had already died, and Watts claims she didn't realize she had passed her fetus because it was obscured by a considerable volume of tissue, blood, and clots.

"Confronted with this bloody mess, Ms. Watts did what was reasonable: she flushed the toilet. The toilet began overflowing," the suit states. "Ms. Watts did her best to clear the toilet, removing some of the bloody mess with a bucket."

Watts yet again returned to the hospital seeking care. This time, instead of merely ignoring her needs for care, Watts found herself falsely accused of committing a crime. According to the suit, a nurse called the police and "falsely told them that Ms. Watts had given birth at home, did not want the baby and so did not look to see if it were alive, and had come to the hospital without the baby." The suit adds that the nurse "falsely suggested the baby could be alive and that Ms. Watts may have done something wrong or illegal."

As Watts awaited treatment, a nurse and a police detective, "conspired to interrogate Ms. Watts and accuse her of harming the fetus," the suit claims. "They worked together to fabricate evidence to falsely implicate Ms. Watts in criminal conduct. They knowingly created reports and hospital notes that contained blatantly false information. As a result, Ms. Watts was arrested and charged with a felony: abuse of a corpse. She faced a year in prison for simply having a miscarriage at home."

The suit further claims that the police detective "later provided flatly false information in police reports, including that Ms. Watts had seen and touched the fetus, writing that she told him she had 'taken the fetus out of the toilet and placed it in a black bucket.'"

While Watts was later cleared of wrongdoing, her case is still a terrifying example of alleged medical malpractice and police abuse.

"It's a shocking case," Julia Rickert, Watts' Attorney, told WFMJ, a local news station. "She was in the hospital for several days following the miscarriage, a hospital stay that could've been avoided if she had gotten proper care when she was at the hospital pre-miscarriage," 

"Ms.Watts was in a medical crisis, an emotional crisis and the people who should have been looking out for her, more than anyone else, the medical professionals, and police officers instead persecuted her," Ricket added.