A Nebraska woman pled guilty on Friday to giving her 17-year-old daughter abortion pills illegally last year and then helping to burn and bury the deceased baby.
According to the Associated Press, Jessica Burgess, 42, pled guilty as part of a plea deal to “providing an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, false reporting, and tampering with human skeletal remains.” Charges of concealing the death of another person and abortion by someone other than a licensed physician were dropped.
Last October, Jessica’s lawyer had asked for the dismissal of those charges based on the claim that the infant was not a legal person. “Fetuses do not become legally ‘living’ until they are born alive and breathe independently,” he said at the time. “Fetuses delivered dead by miscarriage or abortion are not legally cognizant ‘persons’ under Nebraska and federal law.”
Burgess procured the abortion pills for her daughter, Celeste, who was 29 weeks pregnant at the time, though chemical abortion is only approved by the FDA through 10 weeks of pregnancy and abortion was only legal through 20 weeks of pregnancy in the state of Nebraska.
Messages between the two women show Celeste writing that she couldn’t wait to get “this thing” out of her, and how excited she was to be able to wear jeans again, while Jessica instructed her how to use the abortion pills.
After Celeste took the pills, she took her child and threw it into a plastic bag. She and her mother then burned and buried remains, which were later recovered. An autopsy showed that though it was possible the baby was stillborn due to the chemical abortion, there was also the possibility the child was born alive as “the placement of the fetus into a plastic bag raises the possibility of asphyxia due to suffocation.” There were also “thermal wounds” on the baby’s body.
In May, Celeste pled guilty to one count of removing/concealing/abandoning a dead human body as part of her own plea deal. She is expected to be sentenced on July 20 and faces up to two years in prison. Jessica is set for sentencing on September 22.
