Abortion proponents in the United States will now have another “horror story” to tell people as they seek to influence governmental policy. If you follow this debate, you’ve no doubt heard the dire warnings about how if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, ‘conservatives will start locking up women and doctors.’ Well, that’s not exactly what happened in Nebraska this week, but it was close and somebody did get locked up. The 42-year-old mother of a previously pregnant 17-year-old daughter pleaded guilty this summer to obtaining abortion pills and giving them to her child, resulting in a miscarriage. This week she was sentenced to two years in prison. But when you learn the details of what actually transpired, you might find that she still got off kind of easy. (NBC News)

A Nebraska mother who pleaded guilty to giving her teenage daughter pills for an abortion and helping to burn and bury the fetus was sentenced Friday to two years in prison.

Jessica Burgess, 42, pleaded guilty in July to tampering with human remains, false reporting and providing an abortion after at least 20 weeks of gestation, which is illegal in Nebraska. Madison County District Judge Mark Johnson sentenced her Friday to one year in prison for each count…

Her attorney, Brad Ewalt of Norfolk, sought probation, but the judge balked at that request. He said Burgess demonstrated that she knew she was breaking the state’s abortion law by initially lying to investigators about it and by going to “extraordinary means” to obtain the pills online instead of through a Nebraska medical provider, according to the Norfolk Daily News.

Looking at the initial description from NBC News, you might be tempted to think that the woman’s daughter had rung up a positive pregnancy test, she ordered some Plan B for her and they just moved on with their lives. But that wasn’t the case at all. (Disturbing content warning.) Her daughter Celeste wasn’t just “a little pregnant.” She was twenty weeks along in her term, fully into the third trimester, and close to the 24-week point where babies are considered viable outside the womb. (Some do survive if they are prematurely born at 20 weeks and can be put into a premie ICU.)

The mother had to order the drugs online from some dubious source rather than getting a prescription from a doctor. She then gave the pills to Celeste and the result left them with a body to dispose of. She helped her daughter burn the fetus and bury it in a field. That clearly was a bridge too far for the judge, who chastised her, saying that he “shuddered to think” that she was able to take the remains of a human baby and “treat it like yesterday’s trash and not give it some respect in its treatment and disposal.”

In case you were wondering what happened to the daughter, she previously pleaded guilty to slightly lesser charges and was sentenced to 90 days in jail and two years of probation. She served her time over the summer and had just been released on September 11, just in time for her mother’s trial. So that comment I included at the top about “locking up women and doctors” has actually already come true, except there was no doctor involved in this particular crime.

The judge arrived at the two-year sentence for Jessica Burgess by breaking the crimes up into separate findings. He lumped the charges of tampering with human remains and false reporting into one single-year sentence and then tacked on another one-year sentence for the abortion itself to run after that.

This debate has seemed to reach the point recently where some of us have begun talking about abortion in rather pragmatic, sterile terms, with discussions involving “reasonable” cut-off dates and trends in national polling. And those things are really impossible to ignore when you consider how many other crucial issues and crises are on the line in next year’s elections. But a story like this can be a shocking reminder of the underlying reality when an expecting mother chooses to terminate a pregnancy. There are more lives involved than just hers, and the entire spectacle can quickly turn gruesome.

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