Grand jury declines to indict woman for abusing corpse for flushing fetus down toilet after miscarriage

Brittany Watts (WKBN/YouTube).

Brittany Watts (WKBN/YouTube).

An Ohio woman who suffered a miscarriage and was charged with abuse of a corpse is suing the hospital and doctors that she says failed to give her proper care — and the police department that she says falsely arrested her.

Brittany Watts filed the federal lawsuit against Bon Secours Mercy Health, which owns St. Joseph Warren Hospital, where Watts was treated, along with three of its employees last week in the Northern District of Ohio Eastern Division. In addition, Watts also is suing the Warren Police Department along with its detective who investigated the case.

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The lawsuit begins:

In September 2023, Plaintiff Brittany Watts experienced an expectant mother’s worst nightmare — the pregnancy she very much wanted ended in a miscarriage. Ms. Watts should have received proper medical care to address her pregnancy complications and should have been able to privately grieve her pregnancy loss. Instead, Defendants deprived Ms. Watts of the medical care she requested and was entitled to. And after she miscarried, when Ms. Watts was in the hospital and most vulnerable, Defendants reported her to the police, interrogated her while she was tethered to her hospital bed with IVs, and caused her to be falsely charged with a felony. She was eventually cleared by a grand jury, but the harm remains. Ms. Watts now brings this lawsuit seeking redress for Defendants’ misdeeds and to hold them accountable.

Watts, then 34, was just over 21 weeks pregnant on Sept. 19, 2023, when she began experiencing pain and bleeding. She went to St. Joseph, a Catholic hospital, where doctors told her she was suffering from placenta abruption and admitted her. However, Watts went home about eight hours later after she “received no meaningful treatment or guidance,” her lawyers wrote. Her condition “significantly worsened” the next morning and she again returned to the hospital. Doctors informed her that her “pregnancy was doomed,” and she was at risk of “hemorrhaging, sepsis, and death,” until the fetus was removed according to the lawsuit.

But, her lawyers said, Watts “languished in the hospital — effectively untreated” for another 10 hours so she returned home. The next morning she went to the bathroom and “painfully miscarried.” Hidden in the toilet was the fetus which Watts says she never saw. She cleaned up some of the mess in the toilet and put it in a bucket and flushed the toilet, which overflowed. The fetus, less than a pound, had gotten trapped, according to the suit.

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