The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
The lawsuit by an Ohio woman who was arrested and charged after having a miscarriage is still ongoing, and attorneys for the woman have added two more members of hospital staff to the parties alleged to have violated the woman’s rights.
Brittany Watts’ miscarriage made national headlines after the Warren resident was arrested, despite her claims that she went to St. Joseph Warren Hospital in Youngstown twice for care and waited for hours without receiving the proper medical attention. Attorneys for Watts say she was diagnosed with “placental abruption,” which could have endangered the pregnancy.
Still, she claims she waited eight hours at the hospital with “no meaningful treatment or guidance,” only to leave and come back the next day.
When she returned the next day, she was told her “pregnancy was doomed” and she risked hemorrhaging, sepsis and death,” according to the lawsuit.
Attorneys say she went 10 more hours being “effectively untreated” before going home again and suffering a miscarriage in her bathroom.
After her miscarriage, Watts said she returned to the hospital, where hospital staff reported a crime to police, and officers questioned her, with court documents saying investigators suggested Watts had “birthed a live baby and hidden it ‘in a cabinet.’”
Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse, but a grand jury declined to indict her on the charges.
Watts is now suing the hospital and individuals that were involved in her time at the hospital and her arrest, claiming they “violated her constitutional rights, committed medical negligence, inflicted severe emotional distress and deprived her of her liberty without probable cause, among other misconduct.”
The lawsuit against St. Joseph Warren Hospital, its parent company Bon Secours Mercy Health, the city of Warren, and its police officers cites violations of her Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, along with violations of the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which establishes the right to receive emergency treatment regardless of insurance status or the ability to pay.
The suit was filed in January of this year in U.S. District Court. Along with the allegations of constitutional rights violations, Watts is accusing hospital staff of medical negligence, unauthorized disclosure of confidential medical information and emotional distress.
Law enforcement are accused of malicious prosecution and false arrest, according to the lawsuit.
The court has been working through document deadlines and other procedural parts before it can consider a decision in the case.
Aug. 1 was a deadline to add parties to the lawsuit or amend certain documents. Before the deadline passed, Watts’ attorneys filed a document requesting that a worker from the hospital’s risk management department and a police officer at the hospital be added as parties.
According to the request, a hospital nurse involved in Watts’ care said she contacted both of the individuals to advise her on the situation.
After talking with the risk management staffer and the police officer, the nurse called 911 to “falsely report that (Watts) had committed a crime when she miscarried at home,” according to Watts’ attorneys.
“If (the nurse’s) account is accurate, these individuals participated in violations of (Watts’) rights, including by initiating a malicious prosecution and by violating her medical privacy rights,” the attorneys stated in a filing to the court. “They are rightfully defendants in this case.”
The newly amended complaint claims that although the hospital staff and law enforcement involved “knew 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.”
A status report filed by lawyers on both sides of the case said mediation by Bon Secours Mercy Health and St. Joseph Warren Hospital was “unsuccessful.”
Parties in the case, including the hospital, acknowledged to the court that Watts was told “the baby was too early from a gestational age for any reasonable chance of survival,” and that a doctor “recommended induction of labor, documented proceeding with treatment before Ms. Watts was on ‘death’s door.’”
Watts was also told that “a delay could increase the risk of hemorrhage and/or sepsis, and … the treatment plan was not initiated or completed because Ms. Watts left St. Joseph Warren Hospital a second time against medical advice,” according to a response to the lawsuit filed in March.
The city of Warren, law enforcement and hospital staff have all denied wrongdoing in the case.