A recent New York Times headline misrepresents the details of a case involving a Nebraska teen who burned and buried the fetal remains of her illegal chemical abortion.
The headline, “Nebraska Teen Who Used Pills to End Pregnancy Gets 90 Days in Jail,” fails to mention that girl was sentenced for illegal burying and subsequently burning the fetal remains, implying instead that the 90-day sentence was handed down in response to a violation of the state’s abortion law.
Celeste Burgess, 19, was sentenced Thursday to 90 days in jail after pleading guilty in May to a felony charge of removing or concealing human skeletal remains. When she was 23 weeks pregnant, beginning her third trimester, Burgess took abortion pills her mother had ordered for her online. But while her mother, Jessica Burgess, was charged with violating the abortion statute, the daughter was not, even though she was past the 20-week cutoff.
The mother was charged for administering the abortion drug without being a licensed physician and for having done so beyond the 20-week limit. Medical abortions performed after ten weeks of pregnancy can endanger the mother and fetus as it increases the risk of complications. The teen, meanwhile, was accused of “removing, concealing or abandoning” a dead body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting.
While the Times report underlying the misleading headline does relay the facts of the case, it ties Burgess’s sentence to the raging national debate over whether and to what degree abortion should be restricted, prominently quoting a law professor who suggests the actions of Burgess and her mother are a predictable response to pro-life laws passed in the wake of Dobbs and a “harbinger of things to come.”
“This case is really sad because people resort to things like this when they’re really desperate,” Professor Donley of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law said, “and the thing that makes people really desperate is abortion bans.”
The report fails to explicitly specify that the Burgesses crimes occurred prior to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe.
Prosecutor Joseph Smith told the Times that the case began as an investigation in 2022 into the unearthing and relocation of human remains. The two initially lied to investigators and said that Burgess had miscarried. With the help of her mother, then 17-year-old Burgess buried her aborted baby, dug it up, drove it north of town, buried it again, then transferred it for a third time, the detective on the case discovered.
While the beginning of the article notes that Burgess and her mother “tried to burn the evidence” of their crime, it is not until the twenty third paragraph of the report that the reader finds out the gruesome details that help explain the sentence Burgess received.
A man who assisted the women in the process eventually reported to the police that the two also tried to burn the fetus. The detective revealed after an examination that the-remains had been exhumed and showed signs of “thermal injuries.”
At 23 weeks, a fetus usually weighs over a pound, is about a foot long, and is undergoing rapid brain and muscle development. Shining a flashlight on the mother’s belly at this stage of development will oftentimes result in movement from the baby, whose eyes are especially sensitive to light. Around 25 percent of prematurely born children at this age survive outside of the womb.
The Times headline is in keeping with the tenor of coverage elicited by the Burgesses arrest last summer, when a host of mainstream outlets implied that she had been arrested for having a late-term abortion.