According to the Ohio lawsuit filed on August 21, 2025 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Eastern Division:
Brittany Watts, who is a nursing student and a resident of Ohio, was 21 weeks pregnant when she started experiencing pain and bleeding and went to St. Joseph Warren Hospital seeking medical care, on September 19, 2023. Doctors at the hospital told her she had developed placental abruption, which endangered her pregnancy. Eight hours later, she returned home after receiving no meaningful treatment or guidance at the hospital.
By the following morning, Ms. Watts’s condition had significantly worsened and she returned to the hospital where she learned that her water had broken prematurely, her cervix was dilated, and infection had set in. The doctor told her that her pregnancy was not viable, and that she was at risk of hemorrhaging, sepsis, and death until her fetus was removed.
According to her lawsuit, the doctors did not provide her with proper medical treatment for 10 more hours. She again returned home untreated.
In the early morning hours of September 22, 2023, Ms. Watts went to the bathroom and painfully miscarried. Inside the toilet bowl was a mess of tissue, blood, and blood clots that allegedly included the deceased, under-one-pound fetus, which Ms. Watts never saw.
Ms. Watts flushed the toilet and the toilet began overflowing. Ms. Watts did her best to clear the toilet, removing some of the bloody mess with a bucket.
Ms. Watts returned to St. Joseph Warren Hospital for a third time, never suspecting that anyone there would intentionally harm her. But while the hospital staff should have been treating Ms. Watts with great care, the defendant nurse and other defendants allegedly decided to call the police to falsely report Ms. Watts had committed a crime.
The lawsuit alleges that despite the defendants knowing “Ms. Watts had committed no crime, they saw to it that she would face criminal charges for having an experience shared by hundreds of thousands of women every year. To that end, as Ms. Watts lay in a hospital bed hooked up to I.V.s and awaiting urgent treatment, [Defendants] conspired to interrogate Ms. Watts and accuse her of harming the fetus. 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.”
“Fortunately, the evidence was finally evaluated by a grand jury and the truth won out. The grand jury declined to return an indictment, finding instead that there was no probable cause to support the criminal charge. The prosecutor who had presented the case to the grand jury publicly concurred with the grand jury’s decision, stating that Ms. Watts’s alleged actions did not amount to a crime.”
As a result, Ms. Watts “demands a trial by jury pursuant to Rule 38(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure on all issues so triable” and “respectfully requests that judgment be entered for Ms. Watts against Defendants jointly and severally for the damages described above.”
If you or a loved one may have been injured (or worse) as a result of medical negligence in Ohio or in another U.S. state involving a miscarriage, you should promptly seek the legal advice of an Ohio medical malpractice attorney, or a medical malpractice attorney in your state, who may investigate your miscarriage medical malpractice claim for you and represent you or your loved one in a miscarriage medical malpractice case, if appropriate.
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