I generally avoid wading into shark-infested waters, but sometimes things people say are so egregious that I just can’t ignore them. If you are not in the mood for a rant I encourage you to just skip this blog post. I am sure that once I get this out of my system, my posts will return to their usual blather.
This morning someone that I follow on Facebook posted an article about a tragic incident in Omaha in which a relatively new mother was gunned down shortly before she was to start her maternity leave. The TL;DR version of the story is that this cop gave birth back in February to a premature infant who needed to remain in the NICU. She chose to postpone her maternity leave until her baby was ready to come home.
Let’s put aside the issue of our country’s skimpy parental leave policies that forced a new mother to continue working so that she could spend her (likely) unpaid parental leave with her infant at home. What really got me was a response from someone I follow on Facebook (I am posting it in its entirety):
This is a really sad incident and I pray for the family and other officers involved. However this does raise some interesting questions about family leave and the effects of childbirth on new moms. Many women day [sic] they don’t think clearly after childbirth.
I don’t say this to blame the officer, but we have to fix this family leave issue. Despite the well documented postpartum “mom brain” but having a baby in the NICU would be distracting also.
My heart breaks.
Despite saying otherwise, this commenter was, in fact, blaming the victim. Yes, I imagine having a newborn in the NICU is distracting. There are plenty of things in our lives that draw our attention and our emotional reserves, but that doesn’t justify assigning them as cause.
There is absolutely nothing in this article that suggests that the shooting was at all the officer’s fault. She was a 7-year veteran, wearing her vest, who arrived at the scene after initial gunfire had been exchanged with the suspect. She never fired her weapon.
The only reason the article even mentioned the fact that she was a new mother was because she was hours from being able to take her daughter home for the first time.
And how much of the postpartum “mom brain” the commenter mentions is due to the sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn? Would the commenter have said that a new father was “distracted” or had “dad brain” if the officer in question had been a man? Given that this person is someone I have been Facebook friends with for a few years, I feel safe saying I doubt it.
I know that I shouldn’t be feeding the trolls or giving this post more eyeballs than it might have otherwise. However, there are some statements that people just need to be called on. And to me, this was one such response.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.