Islam Times - Seattle protester suffers miscarriage

Islam Times - A pregnant woman has had a miscarriage five days after being pepper-sprayed and struck by police during the Occupy Seattle protests in the US.

Jennifer Fox, 19 years old, claims she was hit in the abdomen twice - once by a police officer's foot and once by an officer's bicycle - while the police tried to disperse protesters in Seattle on 15 November.

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

She added that one officer lifted his foot and hit her in the stomach and another pushed his bicycle in the crowd, again hitting her in the stomach.

“Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me,” she continued. “My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut. They diagnosed that I was having a miscarriage. They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too.”

Fox says she is homeless and had been camping with Occupy Seattle since it began in Westlake Park.

Students from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) gathered on Tuesday to protest the controversial use of pepper spray against University of California - Davis protesting students by campus police.

On Friday, police officers violently confronted anti-corporatism protesters camping on the UC Davis campus, spraying a chemical irritant on students who were sitting on the ground and arresting 10 of them.

The Occupy movement emerged on September 17 when a group of demonstrators gathered in New York's financial district to protest social inequality and high-level corruption in the country.

Despite police hindrance and mass arrests, the Occupy movement has now spread to major US cities, and inspired similar pushes across the world, including those in Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal.