An Ohio lawmaker plans to introduce legislation requiring county jails to report pregnancy outcomes.
State Rep. Terrence Upchurch, a Democrat from Cleveland, called it “problematic” that Ohio does not require jails to report pregnancy outcomes. The lack of data, he said, raises questions over whether women receive proper maternal care in jails.
Upchurch said he plans to work across party lines to craft a bill that would require jails to report lost pregnancies to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. Currently, jails are only required to report when an incarcerated adult dies.
“All babies should count, whether they're born in the system or whether they're born to a mother who's not incarcerated,” Upchurch said. “That's the kind of message that we need to be sending across Ohio.”
The move follows a Marshall Project - Cleveland and News 5 Cleveland investigation that found the state does not require counties to report miscarriages or stillbirths for incarcerated women.
Incarcerated women deserve proper healthcare to have a safe and healthy childbirth, said Upchurch, president of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus.
“This is something that we need to take a hard look into,” Upchurch said. “I plan to work with my colleagues in my caucus and in the majority on finding a legislative solution.”
Upchurch made the declaration about a proposed law after learning how Linda Acoff’s calls for help went unanswered in the Cuyahoga County Jail. A Marshall Project - Cleveland and News 5 investigation detailed how Acoff, nearly five months pregnant, screamed in pain for hours inside her cell. A nurse, who was later fired, offered only extra sanitary napkins and a dose of Tylenol.
Her condition only worsened before Acoff’s cellmate alerted a jailer, and she was taken by stretcher from the pregnancy pod.
Left behind were the remains of Acoff’s fetus, a girl lost at 17 weeks, according to the Cuyahoga County medical examiner. It was later determined that Acoff lost her pregnancy due to a common, but untreated, infection.
“It was shocking and a bit disappointing,” Upchurch said about Acoff’s treatment inside the jail.
Antoine Hare, Acoff’s boyfriend, said the couple was looking forward to being parents. He now hopes Ohio lawmakers act to make sure pregnancy outcome reporting is prioritized.
“I hope people can hear it, and they’ll do something about it,” he said.
Medical experts call the lack of reporting for pregnancy miscarriages and stillbirths a blind spot for women’s healthcare behind bars.
Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, a former board member of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, helped author a national study that tracked pregnancy outcomes in U.S. prisons and five large jails. The study estimated that 55,000 pregnant women enter jails each year.
The lack of reporting requirements makes it impossible to know whether any of the country’s more than 3,000 jails are failing pregnant women, Sufrin told the Marshall Project - Cleveland and News 5.
“Without data to show that there’s a problem, we can’t address the problem,” Sufrin said.
The idea of reporting requirements is not new. In October 2024, the Ohio Jail Advisory Board, which establishes state jail standards and policies, briefly discussed requiring that pregnancy outcomes be reported as critical incidents.
The discussion ended without any movement.
Upchurch was surprised to learn that the board took no action. Now, he said, Ohio lawmakers must act.
“This exposes several issues with our criminal justice system,” Upchurch said, “and particularly the way we run our jails and prisons here in the state of Ohio.”
Dr. Michael Baldonieri, an assistant professor of reproductive biology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and a member of the Ohio Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review Committee, said change is needed.
“[Lawmakers should] see this as a tool to collect that information and give [incarcerated people] the access to the healthcare that they deserve,” he said.
