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 On May 30, just five days after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, Charlie Stewart joined hundreds of protesters outside the Ohio State House in Columbus. Stewart, who uses they/them pronouns and identifies as gender nonconforming, had gone out that day to protest police brutality with members of the Black Queer & Intersectional Collective, a grass roots, radical queer organization based in Columbus.

 

“People thought that they could bring their children” because it was during the day, Stewart says. “Every radical organization that I know was there, as well as other organizations that are more politically affiliated; a lot of establishment Democrats were out.”

 

Nonetheless, tensions between police and protesters were high. Activists had taken over a street corner and police were trying to contain the crowd. When one woman stepped into the street, police pepper sprayed protesters, hitting several Black elected officials, including Congresswoman Joyce Beatty. Stewart recalls how medics rushed to help those who had been maced, and the crowd started to move when police deployed tear gas canisters.

 

“You couldn't even understand which direction you could go to get away from everything” because police were throwing cans in different directions at the same time, Stewart says. “That day I was exposed to tear gas, I think, four times.”

 

Stewart stayed out at the protests that weekend, but when they woke up Monday morning they were in too much pain to go to work. 

 

“I started feeling a lot of cramping,” Stewart says, the worst cramps they’d ever had. “A few hours later, I started my period.” What was strange, though, was that Stewart’s period had just ended the week before. 

 

Stewart says they were teargassed at protests multiple times, which they say resulted in them having a period four times in one month. 

 

On May 31, a Black pregnant woman in Austin said she was shot by police in the abdomen with rubber bullets. That same day, the Colorado Doula Project shared a post on Instagram about other potential dangers to pregnant protesters. "Tear gas is an abortifacient,” the post read, and explained that the chemical had been linked to higher rates of miscarriage and stillbirth. The Colorado Doula Project's post quickly made its way onto Twitter, where protesters like Stewart began sharing the reproductive health impacts they had felt after exposure to tear gas. Some tweeted about breakthrough bleeding despite their use of IUDs; other trans people shared that despite taking testosterone, they were also having periods.

 

Since the Black Lives Matter protests began, police have deployed tear gas in 100 American cities. As the United States grapples with the effects of a respiratory pandemic, watchdog groups, activists, and public officials have raised special concerns about the safety of tear gas, a compound that was banned for use in wartime by the Geneva Convention. Although research is limited, some have suggested tear gas may also be linked to higher rates of miscarriage, and anecdotal evidence has suggested it may cause changes in menstruation, though there's not enough research to definitively prove that. For many Black protesters on the front lines of demonstrations, the use of chemical weapons is not only a reminder of the police violence they are protesting against, but of a long legacy of state violence in their reproductive lives.

 

Public health researchers have been studying the reproductive health impacts of tear gas since the 1980s, at least. In 1987, Physicians for Human Rights raised concerns about the unknown impact of tear gas on fertility in South Korea, and in 1988, a United Nations spokesperson said that Israeli use of tear gas, sold by the United States, had caused several Palestinian women to miscarry. Most recently, in 2012, Physicians for Human Rights documented cases of miscarriage that were potentially linked to tear gas exposure in Bahrain.

 

Andrei Tchernitchin, a toxicology expert at the University of Chile, began studying tear gas in the 1980s, during the country’s military dictatorship. He remembers asking students to donate blood for a study after Chilean police officers deployed tear gas canisters near the university’s medical school. Tchernitchin and his team were curious how the tear gas had affected students’ hormones; they also noticed that their eosinophils, a type of white blood cell involved in “the nongenomic mechanisms of action in the uterus and can impact several estrogenic responses including fetal development,” would degranulate after exposure to toxic agents. The results of Tchernitchin’s study were inconclusive, and his team did not publish, but they did share their findings with the Chilean press: There was a risk that tear gas could cause miscarriages.

 

Decades later, in May 2011, when Chilean police gassed protesters demonstrating against a hydroelectric project, a Spanish newspaper referred to Tchernitchin’s research, and the Chilean government temporarily banned tear gas. But Chile quickly resumed using tear gas on protesters after the Interior Ministry concluded that though the chemical did degranulate white blood cells, it could not be proven to cause miscarriages. Without funding to pursue further research, Tchernitchin has continued studying the relationship between tear gas and reproductive health by looking at toxins that act on the same receptors in the human body. There’s not enough research yet, but there is reason to believe that tear gas exposure could have a range of impacts, including irregular menstruation and altered fetal development through epigenetics.  

 

“I think the scariest thing about chemicals is that we don’t know enough,” says Stewart. They’ve called for the end of purchasing and using tear gas, and for “some extensive research on the effects of the tear gas and [to] be as transparent as possible” about the findings. On June 16, Columbus police announced they would stop using tear gas and “limit” pepper spray use.

 

Arneta Rogers, a reproductive justice and gender equity attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, says the legacy of coercive or experimental government involvement in the reproductive health of Black people may make this use of tear gas especially traumatizing for protesters.

 

"The police's use of tear gas and other chemical agents is an affront to the bodily autonomy of everyone protesting state violence against Black people,” she says. “There are many concerns about the harms of tear gas, especially for people who are pregnant, or wish to become pregnant. That the police continue to use it on Black Lives Matter protesters is particularly disturbing given the state's record of forced sterilization, and long history of controlling the bodies, sexuality, and reproduction of Black women, femmes, trans, and nonbinary people."

 

In her 2015 paper “How Police Brutality Harms Mothers: Linking Police Violence to the Reproductive Justice Movement,” Rogers connected police brutality to “reproductive justice” by looking at the right of parents to raise their children in neighborhoods free from state violence. Reproductive justice, a term Black women activists and the founders of Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice coined in 1994, describes a framework that goes beyond the white feminist, pro-choice reproductive health movement to include a person’s right to have children, to not have children, and to parent those children in safe and sustainable communities. Historically, Black Americans have contended with issues of reproductive injustice in the form of police violence, forced sterilization, and involuntary examinations.

 

As a queer activist, Stewart is especially aware of the toll that reproductive violence could take on the transgender community. “To brutalize us with chemicals that mess with our hormones in a way that forces” menstruation on trans men regardless of whether they’re taking testosterone, “it’s just such a vicious form of state violence, and it’s going to cause a lot of dysphoria,” they say.

 

But Stewart also sees violent police tactics as an ongoing part of broader oppressive systems. “If it’s not slavery and prison, then it’s ‘how are we able to harm Black and Brown bodies in a way that intimidates and instills fear,’ so we stop, we stop fighting for our rights. Or we become so traumatized that we have to focus on healing instead of fighting,” Stewart says. “That's the most violent that you can get, when you take someone's ability to produce and to have children.”

Source: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/protestors-say-tear-gas-caused-early-menstruation