A Nebraska woman administered an abortion pill to her pregnant daughter at 23 weeks gestation and then tried to burn the baby’s body.
The arrest of a Nebraska woman who administered an abortion drug to her daughter after the prescribed gestation limit, and the arrest of her daughter for trying to burn and then bury the aborted child, have prompted a whole genre of misleading media coverage.
Forbes reported that “Facebook Gave Nebraska Cops A Teen’s DMs So They Could Prosecute Her For Having An Abortion.” NBC explained that “Facebook turned over chat messages between mother and daughter now charged over abortion.” The Daily Beast claimed that “Facebook Turned Over Messages in Disturbing Abortion Case Against Teen and Mom.” More than a half-dozen other outlets framed the story similarly.
This is how news outlets decided to headline the story of a mother who killed her daughter’s 23-week-old baby at their house, burned and buried the body, talked about it in Facebook dms, had them seized by a search warrant, and were charged with multiple crimes for it. pic.twitter.com/SIJNatjfoE
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 10, 2022
However, these headlines bear little resemblance to the story told in the underlying articles. Celeste Burgess, a 17-year-old Nebraskan, faces no criminal charges for having taken abortion pills provided by her mother, Jessica Burgess.
The younger Burgess took the pills despite being 23 weeks pregnant. While abortion in Nebraska is prohibited after 20 weeks gestation, which makes it more permissive of abortion than the vast majority of developed Western countries, there is no mechanism within the law that punishes a woman for having had one performed, as is the case with every other pro-life state law.
Only Celeste’s mother faces charges for administering the abortion drug without being a licensed physician and for having done so beyond the 20-week limit, as medication abortion taken after ten weeks of pregnancy greatly increases the risk of complications and oftentimes necessitates further medical care.
The crimes Celeste Burgess is accused of are “removing, concealing or abandoning” a dead body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting. After the pills caused the death of her unborn child, Burgess and her mother tried first to burn and then to bury the remains. She and her mother initially told investigators that she had miscarried.
At 23 weeks, a fetus usually weighs over a pound, is about a foot long, and is undergoing rapid brain and muscle development. Shining a flashlight on the mother’s belly at this stage of development will oftentimes result in movement from the baby, whose eyes are especially sensitive to light. Around 25 percent of prematurely born children at this age survive outside of the womb.
The crimes that the Burgesses are alleged to have committed all occurred prior to the Supreme Court’s release of its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Facebook was served with a search warrant by detectives who discovered messages of the two women discussing their intention to get the “thing” out of Burgess and burn the evidence afterwards.