Yes she violated the law but the notion of greeting a year in jail for trying to help your 16 year old daughter with an unwanted pregnancy does not seem like justice.
And I’ll stop you there.
I don’t agree with this law and it probably wouldn’t pass judicial muster in the long run, but it remains the law until adjudicated otherwise.
She imported foreign medication and administered it. The daughter then had to go to the hospital.
Huh. I was surprised to read that she’d have had to travel 74 miles to the closest clinic.
(Although the article seems to suggest she could have had an abortion at a local hospital if she had health insurance)
I’m originally from Pennsylvania and I don’t tend to think of it as a State where it’s difficult to get an abortion. I’m from the Philadelphia area, though, and it’s easy to forget how different the culture is in the middle of the State. I used to accompany my high school girlfriend to Planned Parenthood where she’d get free birth control pills without any question of parental consent. We could have gotten two, three abortions a week and no one would have batted an eye.
Yeah, it sounds like this is not just a minor thing. I question how prison will help in this case, but the same goes for a lot of crimes.
It’s a shame that she felt she had to say what the cause of the abortion was. Women on Web advises not to say anything, as treatment is exactly the same either way. Women on Web also don’t send to the US because abortion is legal, but they are extremely concerned with the amount of requests they are receiving from women who are in situations like the girl in the article.
Very sad.
So, I gather that this was something you take after you are already pregnant, not the “morning after pill”? something that ought to be taken under a doctor’s supervision?
I’m think it’s terrible that they were forced into this situation, but she took a real chance with her daughter’s health, it sounds like. This type of thing makes me really angry at the unavailability of a legal medical procedure, but it sounds like what she did, while safer than a coathanger, wasn’t terribly safe.
I know a lot of people are going to deliberately misuse this to claim that abortion isn’t safe, which simply isn’t true-- the daughter could have had a safe procedure if anti-choice people hadn’t been chipping away at women’s rights over the last 25 years, and this just goes to show what they have actually accomplished. I hope people see this for what it is and start writing their congressmen and senators about making a legal procedure safe and available, but I’m not all that hopeful.
I know that 70 miles isn’t “close”, but is it really all that far when you’re daughter’s future is at stake? Not that I agree with either the law or the punishment, but it does seem that mom made a poor choice.
Call planned parenthood. One would hope that someone there would give you the best advise.
Maybe they haven’t got a car.
Maybe, there are still thousands of options that come before what she did. PA is not Saudi Arabia, and while getting an abortion should not be that difficult that does not excuse what she did.
Yeah, it’s not at all clear to me that “forced into this situation” is an accurate description.
Do we even know that it was really the daughter’s choice at all, and not the mom putting pressure on her by telling her something like “take these pills or I’m kicking you out”? As that article mentioned, there have been cases where people have tricked pregnant women into taking abortion drugs when the woman didn’t want to have an abortion.
Prosecuting people for doing medical procedures without a medical license seems completely valid to me. The daughter could have had serious complications that the mom was not knowledgeable enough to handle and could have died.
Do we even know for sure that the daughter truly gave informed consent to taking the pills?
Did she understand what her options were as far as services available to her as a mom, adoption, etc.? Or the potential risks of taking the pill without medical supervision?
We don’t know that she even understood what she was doing, since she was doing it without medical supervision,
Another possible side effect of abortion-inducing drugs is that they don’t always kill the fetus. The fetus might remain alive but potentially disfigured/harmed by the drugs. That’s one of the reasons why it is a bad idea to use these drugs without medical supervision.
I also fail to see how this is in any way the “anti-choicers” fault (as a side note, I do think that it reflects poorly on people who use terms like “anti choice” or “pro-abortion” - is it really that hard to use respectful language towards people’s views, instead of making yourself look like you are too brainwashed by your own side’s propaganda to understand where the opposition is coming from?)
Washingtonville PA has a population of 273 people. I am sure there are many medical services that are not available right in town.
I am sure that there have been people who had to travel outside of town for other services such as an oncologist or a pediatric neurosurgeon. That is not anyone’s fault. It’s just one of the side effects of living in a small town that doesn’t have as many services as a large town does.
If there is not in fact an oncologist in town, would you support cancer patients trying to order chemotherapy drugs online to give themselves chemotherapy without a doctor’s supervision?
74 miles just doesn’t seem that far; I would expect that the girl’s classmates (and maybe the girl herself) went that far just to see rock concerts.
Yeah, and maybe the haven’t a single relative or friend who would help them out. Maybe they don’t know where the bus station is. Maybe they didn’t want to miss Wheel of Fortune.
Or maybe we should stop inventing excuses for people’s bad decisions.
It’s of course possible that they don’t have a car- but most places where a person can function without a car have good enough public transit/cabs to get you to a bus station/stop (like the one 12 miles away in Danville) where you can get a bus to a larger town/city
It sounds like RU-486, not the morning-after pill (which is a combination of certain types of BCPs). Plan B (morning after pill) is also OTC, IIRC.
I forget – since I’ve had an IUD for a decade, and live near Boston – how tough it must be for women in areas without clinics and/or without access to doctors who practice medicine without bringing *their *religion into it.
Agree that I don’t know how the hell prison and a fine will help anything.
So they sent the mother to prison , do they give any thought to what that 16 year old is doing now?
Well at least she’s not pregnant.
I would imagine she’s getting medical care, since her mother basically induced a miscarriage without any medical aid whatsoever. I’m not saying the abortion pill isn’t safe – but you don’t just order it yourself and take it like you would an Advil. There’s a damned good reason people are concerned about abortions being formed without consulting a doctor in the first place.
I’m pro-choice, but I’m also anti-DIY abortion.
So, I take it you won’t be investing in my new business venture: Abortion Depot.