Nice little constitutional right you have there …
by digby
Honestly, this is just sad:
A Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to up to 18 months in prison for obtaining so-called abortion pills online and providing them to her teenage daughter to end her pregnancy.
Jennifer Ann Whalen, 39, of Washingtonville, a single mother who works as a nursing home aide, pleaded guilty in August to obtaining the miscarriage-inducing pills from an online site in Europe for her daughter, 16, who did not want to have the child.
Whalen was sentenced on Friday by Montour County Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary Norton to serve 12 months to 18 months in prison for violating a state law that requires abortions to be performed by physicians.
She was also fined $1,000 and ordered to perform 40 hours of community service after her release. The felony offense called for up to seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine.
Matthew Bingham Banks, Whalen’s lawyer, previously told Reuters criminal prosecutions of this kind were not common.
Whalen told authorities there was no local clinic available to perform an abortion and her daughter did not have health insurance to cover a hospital abortion, the Press Enterprise newspaper of Bloomsburg reported.
Her daughter experienced severe cramping and bleeding after taking the pills and Whalen took her to a hospital hear her home for treatment, the newspaper said.
The closest abortion clinic to Whalen’s home is about 74 miles away in Harrisburg.
The truth is that medical abortion is the future and I’m fairly sure it has the anti-abortion zealots very nervous. This article in the New York Times Magazine is a must read if you’re interested in the basic human right to choose when to reproduce:
Almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries, primarily in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Persian Gulf, where abortion is either banned or severely restricted. The World Health Organization estimated in 2008 that 21.6 million unsafe abortions took place that year worldwide, leading to about 47,000 deaths. To reduce that number, W.H.O. put mifepristone and misoprostol on its Essential Medicines list. The cost of the combination dose used to end a pregnancy varies from less than $5 in India to about $120 in Europe. (Misoprostol is also used during labor and delivery to prevent postpartum hemorrhage, and global health groups have focused on making it more available in countries with high rates of maternal mortality, including Kenya, Tanzania, India, Nepal, Cambodia, and South Africa.) Gomperts told me that Women on Web receives 2,000 queries each month from women asking for help with medical abortions. (The drugs are widely advertised on the Internet, but it is difficult to tell which sites are scams.)
[…]
Gomperts designed her program — based on the radical idea of providing abortions without direct contact with a doctor — for women in countries where abortion clinics are nonexistent or highly restricted. But her model is invigorating abortion rights activists in the United States, where the procedure is simultaneously legal and increasingly hard to access. In their eyes, medical abortion, delivered through a known, if faraway, source, could be a transformative response: a means of access that remains open even when clinics shut.
Women will always have abortions. They always have. The only question is whether or not to punish them for doing it and force others to go through pregnancy and childbirth against their will.
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