Tear Gas Could Cause Miscarriage, Report About the Chemical Agent Used in Protests Resulting in Spontaneous Abortions Reveal

One irony innate in street protests where police attack protesters with chemical weapons in tear gas form is that it can cause spontaneous abortions, commonly called miscarriages.

As specified in a Scientific Report, following the recent ruling by the Supreme Court toppling abortion rights, people have gone to the streets to protest.

In several places, police attacked protesters using tear gas. Specifically, in Arizona, law enforcement even fired canisters from the government buildings' windows.

This means that the authorities are using dangerous, unregulated weapons against unarmed civilians, potentially violating the human rights of protesters by terminating pregnancies that, based on the Supreme Court ruling, those same protesters do not have constitutionally protected right "to terminate themselves."

Link Between Chemical Weapons and Miscarriage

Researchers worldwide have identified the link between chemical weapons. Observers at the United Nations could record miscarriages following the use of tear gas by Israeli police on Palestinian civilians during uprisings in 1988, resulting in stricter rules on when such weapons should be used.

Toxicology researchers led by the University of Chile's Andrei Tchernitchin discovered enough evidence that links spontaneous abortion and a specific type of tear gas to convince the government of Chile to suspend the use of tear gas in 2011.

The Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Prize-winning organization, contended in 2012 that Bahrain had violated the UN guidelines on using chemical weapons based on increased miscarriages.

Such weapons should not be used on any individual under any condition. Essentially, the 1925 Geneva Protocol was created to prohibit the use of chemical weapons in the military during warfare.

Tear Gas

A similar World News Era report describes tear gas as a "euphemistic name" for many crowd-control chemicals with chlorine, including CS or o-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, CR or dibenzoxazepine, CX or phosgene oxime, and CN or chloroacetophenone.

While all these chemical compounds do lead the eyes to produce tears, they mainly stimulate pain receptors and make victims cough and vomit.

Police are claiming they are using such chemical weapons to disperse people, but the physical outcome frequently includes disorientation, panic, and respiratory problems.

The most commonly used tear gas is CS, from its discoverers Ben Corson and Roger Stoughton's initials.

The Danger of Tear Gas

Notoriously, the United States Army exposed volunteers from the ranks of soldiers to increasingly larger concentrations and measured their responses, a test that led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to declare CS as "Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health."

Aside from that arguably unethical investigation, chemical weapons have been mostly used on the general public minus testing to identify the harm they may cause to an individual.

This means that the CS chemical component itself may not be causing miscarriage or pregnancy loss, but tear gas is very demonstrably hazardous to both physical and mental health that it hardly matters from the perspective of human rights.

A weapon that's stressing the body or mind of a person so much that they are spontaneously aborting is not better than a chemical that does the same thing through a more direct biochemical process.

Related information about the effects of tear gas is shown on South China Morning Post's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Pregnancy in Science Times.