Ohio lawmakers have proposed a new bipartisan bill, House Bill 542, mandating all county jails and prisons to report pregnancy outcomes. The proposal was introduced to the Ohio State house on Oct. 22 by State Representatives Terrence Upchurch (D) and Josh Williams (R).
Upchurch and Williams sponsored the bill to address problems not covered by the state’s current mandate of county jails to primarily report in-custody deaths. The state does not currently require counties to report miscarriages or stillbirths of pregnant women who are incarcerated. However, after the addition of the bill, each county’s correctional facility “shall report to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction the pregnancy outcome of each pregnant inmate who resided at the facility at the conclusion of the pregnancy [no later than the thirty-first day of December of each year].”
“This is an opportunity to demonstrate that we are a pro-life state by protecting pregnant women and promoting healthy, pregnant outcomes,” Upchurch told The Marshall Project – Cleveland, a nonprofit news organization focused on crime-centered news. “All babies should count, whether they’re born in the system or whether they’re born to a mother who’s not incarcerated.”
The Marshall Project reported the issue after Linda Acoff, a 29-year-old detained in Cuyahoga County Jail, miscarried her 17-week child in February 2024. After hours of calling for help, she was finally seen by a nurse only to be offered extra sanitary napkins and Tylenol.
Eva Kadirvel, Vice President of Case for Life, pointed to the “serious gaps in care,” of expectant mothers in prisons. She described how, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, “nearly half of incarcerated pregnant women go without essential prenatal testing or appropriate dietary adjustments, and some have even been forced to give birth without medical assistance.”
On behalf of Case for Life, Kadirvel added, “We hope this legislation will lead to real, practical support for pregnant women in prison, ensuring they receive the medical care and basic respect they deserve. We also hope it will draw more attention from the public and policymakers to the serious gaps in our criminal justice system and encourage much-needed, compassionate reform.”
Michael Baldonieri, Assistant Professor in the Department of Reproductive Biology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, described the historical mistreatment of expecting women in a particularly “high risk” time, pointing to Acoff’s situation.
“I would love to see this bill take this reporting requirement further to include all correctional facilities and additional specific information that can lead to meaningful conclusions and actions to improve the health of the incarcerated population,” Baldoniere said.
While this may result in improvements to women’s health, some people, like the staff at CWRU School of Law’s Reproductive Rights Law Initiative (RRLI), had concerns about the bill’s true intention. They were unsure whether the bill would truly lead to better care for pregnant inmates, or whether it would primarily be used to criminalize and stigmatize abortions more than they currently are.
Maggie Light-Scotece, staff attorney and lecturer at RRLI, pointed out the lack of content in the bill to change the level of care in correctional facilities, despite Rep. Upchurch’s statements about the goal of the bill to “[protect] pregnant women and [promote] healthy, pregnant outcomes.”
“Nothing in the bill actually changes the level of care institutions must provide pregnant individuals, nor does it do anything to punish institutions who fail to provide appropriate levels of care,” Light-Scotece said. “All the bill does is give additional private medical information to state agencies without any directive on how that information can be used or protected.”
Scotece pointed to recent cases such as State v. Hollingstead, Skyler Richardson and Britanny Watts in which she believes certain Ohio laws have been “twisted” to single out those seeking abortions or to make other pregnancy outcomes illegal. On a legal level, she described how she would prefer to see greater regulation of the protection of incarcerated individuals’ federal constitutional rights.
Director of RRLI Jessie Hill also acknowledged the intention to increase public knowledge of pregnancy in prisons. She similarly expressed her concerns about how the bill could be used against pregnant women to violate the privacy of patients and further stigmatize abortion.
“It provides no guidance on how reporting is to occur, and it appears to have no guardrails whatsoever to protect individuals’ privacy,” Hill said. “This is troubling of course in the case of abortions because abortion is so stigmatized, but regardless of the particular pregnancy outcome, it’s private, protected health information. It’s not clear to me what interest the state has in knowing this information on an individual basis.”