Controversial Claim of the Day

Controversial Claim of the Day: Jennifer Fox, the pregnant protester who was pepper-sprayed along with 84-year-old Dorli Rainey during last week’s Occupy Seattle march, has reportedly miscarried.

The 19-year-old homeless woman, who says she was three months pregnant, penned an email to local blogger Ian Awesome with the terrible news.

“It hurts,” she writes. ”It’s upsetting. I was ready to have a kid, because my family was going to support me in taking care of the child. Her name was going to be Miracle.”

She later spoke with Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger to provide additional context. “I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,” Fox is quoted as saying. “I was screaming, ‘I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.’”

She says a police officer then “lifted his foot and it hit her in the stomach” just before a second officer struck her again with his bicycle. “Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut.”

An initial ultrasound at Harborview Medical Center following the incident did not reveal any complications. It wasn’t until yesterday that Fox says she “started getting sick, cramps started, and I felt like I was going to pass out.”

She was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where doctors informed her that she was having a miscarriage. She told The Stranger: “They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too.”

Fox acknowledges having worried about her condition prior to joining the protests, but says she “didn’t know it would be this bad,” adding “I didn’t know that a cop would murder a baby that’s not born yet…I am trying to get lawyers.”

When asked, Fox claimed to be unable to provide The Stranger with medical records to prove her miscarriage and/or the doctors’ diagnosis, but said she would ask her Harborview case worker for copies.

The newspaper promised to follow up.

Video captured in the immediate aftermath of Fox’s pepper-spraying posted after the jump:

[slog.]