The War on Women: Nebraska Style
By 
Just what Republicans really, really, really want:
A Nebraska teenager who used abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy was sentenced on Thursday to 90 days in jail after she pleaded guilty earlier this year to illegally concealing human remains.
The teenager, Celeste Burgess, 19, and her mother, Jessica Burgess, 42, were charged last year after the police obtained their private Facebook messages, which showed them discussing plans to end the pregnancy and “burn the evidence.”
Prosecutors said the mother had ordered abortion pills online and had given them to her daughter in April 2022, when Celeste Burgess was 17 and in the beginning of the third trimester of her pregnancy. The two then buried the fetal remains themselves, the police said.
Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s abortion law, furnishing false information to a law enforcement officer and removing or concealing human skeletal remains. She faces up to five years in prison at her sentencing on Sept. 22, according to Joseph Smith, the top prosecutor in Madison County, Neb.
Madison County went 75-22 for Trump in 2020 and last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1936. So yeah, I think we can safely say that imprisoning women for terminating their pregnancy is not exactly causing a political upheaval out there.
Greer Donley, an associate professor of law at the University Pittsburgh School of Law, said in an interview on Thursday that the case was a “harbinger of things to come,” as a flurry of Republican-led states have enacted abortion restrictions and more women in those states have sought abortion pills as a workaround.
“This case is really sad because people resort to things like this when they’re really desperate,” Professor Donley said, “and the thing that makes people really desperate is abortion bans.”
Nebraska Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, had commended prosecutors for enforcing Nebraska’s 20-week law.
The executive director, Sandy Danek, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. But she said in an interview last year that accountability should extend to providers that mail abortion pills to states like Nebraska that require an in-person physician to oversee medication abortions.
“This disturbing act may become more commonplace as the abortion industry continues to promote the do-it-yourself abortion where there’s no medical oversight for risks and complications,” she said
The excitement over turning the Nebraska prison system into a place to throw all the sluts is palpable.