Seattle Occupier: "I Didn't Know That a Cop Would Murder a Baby that's Not Born Yet"
Last week our hero, 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, became a prominent face in the Occupy movement after the Seattle Police Department let loose their pepper spray on a crowd near Westlake. The Seattle PI's Josh Trujillo's photo of her face spread like wildfire. We've heard a lot from Dorli on getting sprayed and the importance of activism, but until now, not a whole lot from the other most famous face of Trujillo's photos: 19-year-old Jennifer Fox, who says she was three months pregnant at the time of the protest. Now, report Occupy bloggers, The Stranger, and a host of other publications, she says she miscarried as a result of the pepper spray...and getting hit in the stomach by officers.
Fox says when she was initially examined after the incident, and the baby was fine -- but on Sunday, she started getting cramps, she says, and doctors at Harborview told her they couldn't find a heartbeat, and diagnosed a miscarriage. As of today, no medical records have been presented to the media to confirm any of this information.
While some are touting this as the "first fatality" of Occupy, as a pro-choice lady, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the precedent that statement sets for personhood and murder. Additionally, the potential for a miscarriage for a 19-year-old homeless woman is on the high end, anyway -- and there is no actual evidence yet that Fox's involvement in the protest was actually the cause of the tragic occurrence.
Equally concerning, however, is the potential precedent that pregnant women are delicate flowers that cannot do anything remotely risky or active, and the idea that she shouldn't have been at the protest in the first place (read any comment thread on any of the linked articles) -- and the assumption that if you participate in a peaceful protest, you are going to get hit with a bike and pepper sprayed. This is not the case -- Fox is homeless and has been staying at the Occupy Seattle camp for a while -- but what if, like Dorli, she was walking past and decided to join for a minute?
Here's an intense video taken of Fox before medics arrived:
Fox says she is "trying to get lawyers."
