USA: Ohio woman sues hospital and police after she was arrested over miscarriage

Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who was charged with abuse of a corpse after having a miscarriage, has filed a federal lawsuit accusing some of the medical professionals who treated her of conspiring with a police officer to fabricate the criminal case against her.

The lawsuit, which was filed last week and names the professionals, the officer, the hospital where Watts was treated and the city of Warren, Ohio, as defendants, is the latest development in a case that first made national headlines in late 2023 when Watts was first charged. Although a grand jury ultimately declined to move forward with the charge against Watts, the case sparked fears about how the fall of Roe v Wade and subsequent wave of abortion bans could endanger pregnant women and lead to police treating miscarriages as crimes.

“This case is a perfect example of the broader implications of the overruling of Roe v Wade in the Dobbs case. Brittany was not seeking an abortion,” said Julia Rickert, one of Watts’s attorneys and a partner at the civil rights law firm Loevy and Loevy. “But the repercussions of the Dobbs decision meant that her pregnancy and her choices and her medical crisis were viewed in a different way.”

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Source: The Guardian, 16 January 2025