cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
This isn’t subversion, or any sort of theocratic hellscape.
Girl could have gotten an abortion 100% legally up through 20 weeks of preganancy. At 24 weeks the fetus becomes viable outside the womb. At 28 weeks she (with the assistance of her mother) took meds to kill the fetus and induce a stillbirth, commenting that she couldn’t wait to be able to wear jeans again.
She goes through natural labor to pass the stillbirth outside of any medical facility or supervision, burns the remains, and buries them on a farm. When questioned by police, she and her mother admit to using Facebook Messenger to discuss their plans.
The only thing in any way related to the romanticized fiction of some sort of downtrodden freedom seeker you’re talking about is that using encrypted communications would have prevented their discussions from being available to be subpeona’d. That said, admitting to police you even had those discussions in the first place kind of defeats the damn purpose.
We don’t even know if she had an abortion. May she had a miscarriage and was just trying to avoid what’s happening now, being accused of having had an abortion.
Now that sounds a lot like theocratic hellscape…
She took abortion drugs…
Allowing her to just get an abortion would have avoided this entire situation in the first place.
Eh 28 weeks seems kind of late for an abortion though.
I think I’m missing something here. She was allowed to just get an abortion, for 20 weeks. This was all before the godawful Roe v Wade repeal.
It was also in a state that didn’t change their abortion stance after Roe v Wade was repealed. Nothing was stopping her getting an abortion for the first 20 weeks like you said.
I’ve taken the liberty of re-reading the article and have some things to point out 1. the girl was 17, a literal child, something you seemed to forget in your comment 2. You mentioned that she wanted to wear jeans again and that that was the motive, but the word ‘jeans’ wasn’t even mentioned, which makes me wonder if you’re tampering with anything in your comment coming from the article. All that considered you have a good point with some things such as in this specific situation such as them confessing to conspiracy was not a good idea, but I will still say use something end to end encrypted when doing something like this.
It might not be in this article but there are others that state that one of her messages about doing the abortion was that she couldn’t wait to wear jeans again.
She should have legally gotten an abortion in the first 20 weeks of the pregnancy. I’m all for abortion and reproductive rights, but not when it’s a viable baby already like it is at 28 weeks. She had 5 months to abort legally and easily and she didn’t. Not only did she then illegally abort it, but she burned the stillborn baby and buried it. That’s not ok.
This is really interesting (and awful) context.
This isn’t a simple “my body my choice” type situation.