A Nebraska woman has pleaded guilty to providing the abortion pill to her
teenage daughter, who is 17 years old when she was pregnant.
There's more to this story, however, than what appears on the surface,
so buckle up for that, but here are the details.
Jessica Burgess admitted to helping her daughter end her pregnancy in
the spring of 2022 before the Supreme Court reversed Roe V Wade.
That is an important detail to this story.
So at the time, the state of Nebraska had a ban on abortions past 20 weeks.
Now, Madison County prosecutors claim that in April of 2022,
Burgess gave abortion pills to her then 17 year old daughter Celeste, who
gave birth to a stillborn fetus estimated to be at about 29 weeks gestation.
So the reversal of Roe V Wade had nothing to do with the abortion laws
in Nebraska at the time, because the reversal hadn't happened yet.
They did have a ban on abortions past 20 weeks at that point, when this happened.
And the prosecutors allege that, well, the fetus was at 29 weeks gestation.
To make matters worse, apparently they had, after the stillbirth,
Celeste and her mother disposed of the remains,
cops discovered that the fetus was burned and buried.
Okay, look, I'm in favor of reproductive rights, but the debate for
me, I think, ends once you get to a point where a fetus is viable outside the womb.
Now, third trimester abortions do occur specifically because
of problems with the fetus, meaning the fetus is no longer viable,
it's gonna be born a stillborn, or if the woman's life is at risk.
In those cases, of course, I believe that abortion is justified in the third
trimester, that is not the case in this story.
>> Yeah, so, guys,
there's a giant misunderstanding I think both definitely in the right wing and
I hope not in the left wing, but maybe, which is how Roe V Wade works.
I know most of the left understand this perfectly,
which is that it's not abortion anytime you want.
It's illegal in the third trimester because at that point,
we view the fetus to be an independent human being,
basically, in terms of the law, once it reaches roughly viability, right.
And so this is a pre row reversal case anyway.
So in most of the states, 29 weeks is way too late.
And so the right wing thinks you can go all the way to the pregnancy, and
now they have this insane new thing where it's after birth abortion,
which is by definition not a thing, right.
>> That would be considered murder.
>> Exactly, there is no abortion after birth.
Anyway I can't believe how insane that is and how they actually believe that.
Anyways but for the left, no,
there's only two scenarios in which the third trimester should,
that it's okay to get an abortion, and those are the two that Anna mentioned.
Doctor says, well, the baby is not gonna be born alive anyway, or
the life of the mother is in jeopardy,
in which case you let the doctor decide that and we save the mom.
There's no question about that.
But it's no longer just a choice, right.
In the first two trimesters, I believe, and the great majority of the American
people believe it should definitely be a choice and that's your distinction.
So this is a story that would have happened and a crime that would have
happened and be considered a crime pre or post reversal of Roe.
>> Right, exactly, remember, again, just to reiterate, Roe v Wade
protected a woman's right to choose up to the point of viability, right.
So it ensured that states did not pursue or
pass legislation that ended up providing an undue burden
to women should they seek to get an abortion prior to viability.
Viability was always the main question when it came to reproductive rights.
Now, the teenager who carried this out with the help of her
mother has also pleaded guilty.
Celeste Burgess, 18, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of concealing or
abandoning a dead body.
In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dropped two misdemeanor charges of
concealing the death of another person and false reporting.
She faces up to two years in prison, and her sentence hearing or
sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 20.
Jessica Burgess initially pleaded not guilty to five charges for
which she faced eight years in prison.
On Friday, though, she pleaded guilty to three charges tampering with human
skeletal remains, false reporting, and abortion after 20 weeks gestation.
And the state dismissed the other two, concealing the death of another person and
abortion by someone other than a licensed physician.
She now faces up to two years in prison.
So that was the plea deal that the mother was willing to take.
>> Look, different states have different rules for if the mom is charged,
if there's a doctor involved, the doctor is charged, or
anyone aiding the mom is charged, right, different jurisdictions, different rules.
But of course, what we're worried about now under the new regime,
now that rule has been overturned, is that they're gonna say, okay, well,
it used to be that in the third trimester, we arrest people.
Now we're gonna start arresting them in the second trimester, the first trimester,
and we're gonna lock up a lot of moms and a lot of doctors, and
we're all worried to death about that.
>> Yeah, I mean, there are several states now who have an effective abortion ban,
effectively, it's an abortion ban.
Texas is one of them, with their six week abortion ban.
That just means abortions are banned.
Most women do not know they're pregnant at six weeks.
Florida passed a similar law, and
so that will have some pretty significant consequences on people for sure.
I do wanna go to the prosecutors handling the case here, because the prosecutor
handling the case said that it's the first time he has charged anyone for illegally
performing an abortion after 20 weeks, a restriction that was passed in 2010.
I give you that information because it's important to
know that what we're talking about here is very rare, okay?
There isn't, like,
this prevalence of 17 year olds looking to get an abortion at 29 weeks gestation.
So I wanted to give you that perspective from the prosecutor.
Before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade in June,
states weren't allowed to enforce abortion bans until the point at
which a fetus is considered viable outside the womb at roughly 24 weeks.
Even though Nebraska kind of went against that and had a 20 week abortion ban.
But even that is irrelevant, they broke the law even.
>> So, you remember when Trump was asked, I think it was by Chris Matthews in
the 2016 race, hey, what should happen to mothers who have an abortion?
He said they should go to prison, right, because he hadn't thought it through.
He didn't know anything, he didn't know the polling on it.
He just blurted that out.
And then everybody was like, what, no, that's crazy.
And then even Trump had to backpedal because and
he almost never backpedals because it was so deeply unpopular.
But Republicans, what did you think was gonna happen when
you took away pro choice as a law and rule, right?
Yeah, if you make it illegal, you're gonna start arresting a whole bunch of moms and
doctors.
So this is not one of those cases, because it's 29 weeks, but
soon there'll be tons and tons of cases where, yeah,
red states start imprisoning doctors at a significant rate, right?
Otherwise, of course, you can't get an abortion in those places,
nobody does them and it's brutal.
>> No, doctors are gonna get arrested because look,
what they have accomplished is the chilling effect they were looking for.
Doctors are terrified to provide abortion services,
even in cases where they know the service would be legal.
>> And so what they're gonna have to do next is women are gonna get desperate
because they don't all have the money to fly to Paris to get the operation, right?
So they're gonna start doing it on their own.
They're gonna ask their mom, and if it's in the first two trimesters,
where it should be perfectly legal and
they should get good medical procedure to do that with the help of a doctor.
But instead, they'll do it on their own, and
then they'll start happening to arrest the moms and
the dads and the woman involved, right?
And so if you don't arrest them, then it's not really illegal, and so
they're gonna start arresting them, just buckle up.
>> There's so many examples of arrests already happening.
So let's go to graphic six here.
The group National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which supports abortion rights,
found 1331 arrests or detentions of women for
crimes related to their pregnancy from 2006 to 2020.
So again, well before the reversal of Roe.
So I would imagine that with some of the more draconian laws in some of these red
states pertaining to the reversal of reproductive rights,
those numbers are gonna shoot up for sure.
Over the last two decades, at least 61 investigations have been initiated against
pregnant women or individuals who aided them in self managed abortions,
defined as abortions that occur outside a clinical setting,
including those that use pills, herbs, physical force or other means.
According to an abortion rights group that studied the cases,
most of them were based on statutes not related to abortion.
Look, guys, it's really important to protect reproductive rights.
So people, women are getting the care that they need and
are able to make the decisions that are right for them,
from everything from contraception to abortion, okay,
before things get to 29 weeks, before you're dealing
with a desperate 17 year old with a viable 29 week fetus.
That what happened here was wrong, let me just put it that way, and
I'll end it there.
>> Yeah, that 1300 number is going to be intensely higher soon.
And when they start arresting the moms and their family members for
abortions that happen in the first two trimesters, we have to fight back.
One of the great ways to fight back is vote out all the Republicans who keep
passing these laws.
And so that's just stone cold reality in Republican legislators
in these red states are voting against what their voters want.
Not just their Democratic voters, no, the whole state.
Montana, Kentucky, Kansas, they're all saying, no,
we want abortion to be legal in the first two trimesters.
And the Republican legislators won't listen to them, so vote the bums out.