Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Don't Protest While Pregnant

Even if 19-year-old Jennifer Fox's claim is true (she's saying a reaction to pepper spray caused her miscarriage), I'd like to warn her against pressing a lawsuit for this one. Yes, there are sympathetic women judges, old enough to be her mother, in some courts...and if I were one of them and she brought this suit before me, she just might find herself in contempt of court.

If you know you're pregnant and want to have a healthy baby, you should be staying warm and dry, eating a healthy balanced diet, getting rest and exercise and medical checkups...not camping on city streets, getting yourself into the middle of violent confrontations, and being exposed to pepper spray.

If Fox had innocently done a day's work in a building where the air was "freshened" with sweet, fruity scents containing tropical fruit enzymes, and had a miscarriage, I'd uphold her claim. If she'd called the police to remove a burglar from her home, and they'd come out in time to catch the burglar and used pepper spray on him, and she'd had a miscarriage and felt ungrateful (or hormonal) enough to sue, I'd at least try to take her claim seriously.

But according to Fox's story, her exposure to pepper spray was 100% voluntary and she had only herself to blame.

At The Blaze (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/did-this-occupy-seattle-protester-really-miscarry-after-being-pepper-sprayed/), some of the more rational commenters are suggesting that the father of Fox's baby-not-to-be would have a claim against her for recklessly endangering the life of his offspring. I'm not saying that we need to give unwed fathers that kind of legal status--if the father of a child wants to have any legal rights at all, he should be required to marry the mother of the child--but I am saying that for a pregnant woman to continue living in a tent in winter, much less mix it up with drugged-out protesters and stressed-out cops, is super-stupid. And for her to expect society to protect her from her own stupidity shows contempt for the rest of society.

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