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In recent years, medical authorities have tried to impress more and more upon pregnant women the importance of being careful about what they ingest (especially in the early states of pregnancy). What's good for a pregnant mother isn't necessarily good for the child she carries; substances that an adult woman can tolerate without harm may still have deleterious effects on a fetus. Two activities pregnant women are strongly urged to avoid are smoking cigarettes and drinking alcoholic beverages, to the extent that those two products now carry government-mandated warning labels directed at mothers-to-be: In this context, many people found it anything from puzzling to ludicrous to see a newspaper photograph of a woman expressing concern about the effect of jackhammer noise on her unborn child while visibly puffing away on a cigarette. So much so that quite a few readers believed the picture to be part of a phony, mocked-up newspaper article, but it was the real thing: The photograph accompanied a 20 September 2004 article published by the Times of Roanoke, Virginia, about complaints over a road construction project which had been disrupting traffic in that town: The article included a picture of an obviously pregnant woman holding a cigarette above the following caption: The perceived disparity between Ms. Williamson's words and her actions didn't escape notice, as scanned copies of the Roanoke Times article in which she appeared began circulating on the Internet, most of them featuring a variety of snide, reader-added comments. Within a few days the photograph had sparked so much controversy that Roanoke Times columnist Joe Kennedy penned an article about it the following week: Joe Kennedy visited with Mellissa Williamson and her partner — and their new son — a few months later:
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