When Brittany Watts woke up at her Warren, Ohio, home on Sept. 22, 2023, she knew she was miscarrying.
Her 22-week-old fetus had been declared nonviable by doctors several days prior. Bleeding and in pain, she spent a total of 19 hours in the hospital over a span of two days, begging to be induced.
But an ethics group at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital had concerns about Ohio’s abortion laws and how they applied to Watts’ case, ultimately resulting in hours of delayed care.
Watts, frustrated with the lengthy wait times, said she left the hospital both days against medical advice. She said she miscarried alone in her own bathroom.
When Watts returned to Mercy Health for medical care following the miscarriage she says a nurse rubbed her back and told her everything would be okay before calling the police at the direction of the hospital’s risk management team and asking them to go to her home to find the fetus.
As Watts recovered in her hospital bed, officers from the Warren City Police Department searched her home. They eventually found the fetus, lodged in the traps of the toilet.
Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse – a felony charge that was ultimately dismissed earlier this month after an Ohio grand jury declined to indict her.
CBS News reviewed more than 600 pages of medical records as well as 911 transcripts and police records to understand what happened, and why Watts believes doctors, police and the state of Ohio failed her.
“I don’t want any other woman to go through what I had to go through,” Watts told CBS News in an exclusive interview.
Watts is a 34 year old medical receptionist who started leaking fluid 21 weeks into her pregnancy and it was determined that the fetus was not viable. Over the next four days she was tortured by the medical profession in her hometown because they couldn’t decide if they could induce her pregnancy to expel the non-viable fetus. It got worse and worse:
Watts arrived at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital at 8:28 a.m. local time. At 12:57 p.m., according to records, her doctor had requested an “inpatient consult to ethics.”
Records show that around the same time, a different doctor at the hospital examined Watts, and confirmed she had an abruption and premature rupture of membrane. Her white blood cell count was more than twice what it had been in the past, doctors said, and she needed immediate treatment before she found herself “on death’s door.”
“Because of this, mom is at great risk if she completely abruption in terms of hemorrhaging and dying. It does not make sense to me to wait till mom has bleeding to death before we deliver a nonviable pregnancy despite the fact that there is a heartbeat,” the doctor wrote.
He continued, “I feel we would be endangering the mother by waiting for hemorrhage and/or sepsis or her to stop to the fetal heartbeat.”
According to medical documents, staff at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital had also become concerned about Watts’ use of the phrase “abortion.”
A note from the clinical ethics committee consultation, issued around 3:30 p.m. local time, reads in part, “Extensive conversation with [REDACTED] re: staff concerns about Brittany’s verbalization to staff that she wishes to terminate the pregnancy and continues to mention she feels strongly that she is getting or consenting to an abortion. To clarify, ethics supports induction of this patient if it is the professional judgment of the physicians that Brittany is at high risk of bleeding and or serious infection that could lead to death. To be clear with Brittany, if induction occurs, there should be a well documented conversation with her (informed consent) that the procedure is only to prevent harm to her, and is not intended to terminate a potentially viable pregnancy.”
Ohio law bans abortions after 22 weeks, with exceptions for life-saving care. Watts, according to records, was 21 weeks and six days pregnant.
They took forever and didn’t tell her what was going on so Watts decided to go home and wait it out as is her right as a human being.
On Sept. 22, just before 6 a.m. local time, Watts said she felt something happening.
“I get up, and I go to the bathroom. I sit down on the toilet and I’m just, I’m doubled over. And then that’s when I hear ‘splash.'”
Watts looked down, and saw the toilet was filled to the brim with blood and tissue. She immediately began cleaning herself up – using disinfecting wipes and her shower to wash off the blood.
“I tried to make an appearance of the bathroom being clean. I grabbed a plunger because the toilet was kind of to the top,” she said. “I grabbed a bucket and I just tried to scoop out water and tissue and all the matter. And then I take the bucket outside and I dump the bucket.”
“All while thinking, ‘Wow, did that really just happen?’ in my mind. I’m like, ‘No, this is a dream. I’m dreaming.’ But it really happened. Like I’m really awake right now. This is really what life is like now.”
After cleaning up, Watts tried to go about her day. She went to a previously scheduled hair appointment, but as the hairdresser began perming her hair, she noticed Watts was uncomfortable and expressed concern for her health. Watts told her she was “just menstruating,” but the hairdresser insisted that she see a doctor and arranged a ride to the hospital.
When she arrived, Watts was given immediate medical attention. She was given an IV – dehydrated after losing so much blood.
“The nurse comes in and she’s rubbing my back and talking to me and saying, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay,'” Watts said. “Little do I know, there’s a police officer that comes into the room a short time later. And I’m wondering, ‘Why is a police officer coming in here? I don’t recall doing anything wrong.’ And little do I know the nurse comforting me and saying that everything was gonna be okay was the one who called police.”
What a horrible person. She didn’t need to call the police. And, according to Watts she lied on top of it. I would guess she’s a right wing freak.
“She says the baby’s in her backyard in a bucket,” the nurse told the dispatcher. “And I need to have someone go find this baby or direct me on what I need to do.”
The nurse told the dispatcher she believed the bucket was near Watts’ trash.
“Oh, I’m going to be sick,” the dispatcher responded. “Did she say if the baby was alive or not?”
“She said she didn’t wanna look,” the nurse said. “She said she didn’t want the baby, and she didn’t look.”
Watts told CBS News she never said that she didn’t want her baby.
“I said I did not want to look. I never said I didn’t want my baby. I would have never said something like that. It just makes me so angry that somebody would put those type of words in my mouth to make me seem so callous. And so, so hateful.”
So the cops came to the house with a warrant. They looked at the bucket and didn’t find anything and then searched deeply into the toilet and came up with fetal remains. They arrested Watts for “abuse of a corpse” a felony that carries up to a year in prison.
Ohio law defines “abuse of a corpse” as the treating of a human corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable family or community sensibilities.
Her attorney says it’s a very rare charge and that she struggled to understand why police were involved at all given that the corpse in question was fetal remains.
“In the course of representing her, I was met time and time again with, ‘You can’t flush a fetus,'” Timko said. “And I would say, ‘What do you want her to do with it?’ To which there’s no response.”
Of course there is no response because what they really wanted was to punish her for failing to take her non-viable fetus to term, come what may.
Watts says the Warren City Prosecutor’s Office accused her in court of disregarding the fetus and simply going on about her day, citing her hair appointment.
“What do you want me to do in that situation?” Watts said, referring to the prosecutor’s argument. “Don’t you go about your day? I mean, yes, you seek medical attention, but miscarriages happen all the time. Whether you’re at home, whether you’re at work, whether you’re out in the general public, or at the store, you never know when things like this are going to happen. So who are you to say that I went on about my day? You don’t know what I did. You don’t know where I was. You just know that I went and got my hair done, but do you know where I was after that? No. You don’t.”
How dare they. She had a miscarriage and they do happen all the time. Apparently, a woman who has one is required to call the coroner, give a statement to the police, enter into a formal period of mourning and hold a full scale funeral every time they have one.
The Grand Jury declined to recommend indictment, thank God. But it should never, ever have come to that. These people are fanatics and there are millions of them all over the country who are searching for any way to punish pregnant women regardless of the circumstances. Of course miscarriages are now suspect. And birth control is on the agenda as well. They want as many women available for their ritual sacrifice as possible.
If they have to further undermine the democratic process to get that done, so be it:
Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are attempting to prevent voters from having a say over abortion rights, building on anti-abortion strategies seen in other states, including last year in Ohio.
Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the efforts are evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undercut democratic processes meant to give voters a direct role in forming state laws.
“They’re scared of the people and their voices, so their response is to prevent their voices from being heard,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “There’s nothing democratic about that, and it’s the same blueprint we’ve seen in Ohio and all these other states, again and again.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, voters in seven states have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to curtail them in statewide votes. Democrats have pledged to make the issue a central campaign topic this year for races up and down the ballot.
A proposal passed Wednesday by the Mississippi House would ban residents from placing abortion initiatives on the statewide ballot. Mississippi has among the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, with the procedure banned except to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest.
In response to the bill, Democratic Rep. Cheikh Taylor said direct democracy “shouldn’t include terms and conditions.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you this is just about abortion,” Taylor said. “This is about a Republican Party who thinks they know what’s best for you better than you know what’s best for you. This is about control. So much for liberty and limited government.”
There is no better illustration of the authoritarian, Christian nationalist agenda of the GOP than this issue. And you’d better believe that giving this inch means they’ll take a mile. It won’t stop at abortion.