To serve and protect? Pregnant woman miscarries after being pepper sprayed

Recently, there have been several incidents of violence between protesters and police throughout the various occupied cities. Yesterday, we wrote an update about Chancellor Katehi at UC Davis, where peacefully protesting students were sprayed with pepper spray. This incident has entered our cultural consciousness so deeply that there’s even a new meme making the rounds in which a cop from the UC Davis protest is depicted casually pepper spraying everything from works of art to the Beatles.

However, as the police begin to deploy increasingly violent tactics, things are getting out of control. This story is really horrific.

“I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,” she says. “I was screaming, ‘I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.'”

At that point, a Seattle police officer lifted his foot and it hit her in the stomach, and another officer pushed his bicycle into the crowd, again hitting Fox in the stomach. “Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut,” she says.

She was fine for a couple days, until she started feeling sick.

Jennifer went to the doctor and found out her baby had no heartbeat. “They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too.”

The Buzzfeed link above has images and video of Jennifer after the incident. Please note, they are difficult to see.

Meanwhile, in a land far from reality, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show to discuss the UC Davis pepper spray incident. Here’s how that went down:

Bill O’Reilly: “First of all, pepper spray — that just burns your eyes, right?”
Megyn Kelly: “It’s like a derivative of actual pepper. It’s a food product, essentially.”

O’Reilly continued to defend the officer saying, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police. Particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.”

In the video Fox and O’Reilly carry on about what the legal issues might be, and what their instincts (gah) are about whether this was “reasonable use of force.” Watch at the risk of being enraged.

I’d ask them whether they think that kicking a woman who’s telling you she’s pregnant is ALSO a “reasonable use of force.”