A woman from the United States has been accused of assisting her adolescent daughter in terminating her 24-week pregnancy. The issue came to light when Nebraska Police used a warrant to gain access to her Facebook messages and discovered messages in which the two discussed medications for inducing abortions and planned to burn the foetus afterwards.
Until June, states in the United States were not allowed to enforce abortion bans until a foetus was considered viable outside the womb, which is around 24 weeks. The authorities stated in one of the court submissions that the 17-year-old girl ‘talks about how she can’t wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body,’ a detective wrote in court documents. ‘I’ll finally be able to wear jeans,’ she says in one of the messages. The daughter, who is now 18, is being tried as an adult at the request of prosecutors.
According to the couple, the teen gave birth to a stillborn baby in the shower early on April 22. According to them, they wrapped the foetus in a bag, packed it in a box, and buried the body with the assistance of a 22-year-old man several kilometres away from their home. According to the man, the mother and daughter attempted to burn the 23-week-old foetus.
The mother and daughter initially claimed they forgot the date of the stillbirth, but the daughter later confirmed the date by consulting her Facebook messages, after which the cops sought the warrant. Meanwhile, Facebook stated that it ‘always scrutinises every government request we receive to ensure it is legally valid’.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta’s parent company Facebook, tweeted: ‘Nothing in the valid warrants we received from local law enforcement in early June, prior to the Supreme Court decision, mentioned abortion. The warrants were for charges related to a criminal investigation, and court documents show that at the time, police were looking into the case of a stillborn baby who was burned and buried, not a decision to have an abortion’.
The social media giant stated that it will ‘fight back against requests that it believes are invalid or overly broad, but the company said it gave investigators information in about 88 percent of the 59,996 times when the government requested data in the second half of last year’.
Post Your Comments