Abortion pills and jail time: Where do we stand?

A single mother in Pennsylvania has been sentenced to 12 to 18 months in prison for buying abortion pills online for her 16-year-old daughter, violating a state law that prohibits abortions from being performed except by physicians.

Jennifer Ann Whalen bought the pills from a website, claiming she did so because there was not a clinic in the area to perform the abortion, and that her daughter did not have health insurance to cover the cost. Her daughter was taken to the hospital due to severe cramping and bleeding after ingesting the pills.

There is one main question to ask here: What would drive someone to go to such lengths to obtain abortion pills? What would cause a mother to endanger the life of her daughter, to wade into the murky depths of the Internet for medical aid?

The question here is not one of whether or not abortion is morally acceptable. For people who believe abortion is necessary, this story may cause an outcry against the supposedly unfair practices of Pennsylvania law on abortion. For those who oppose abortion, this is one more drop in the bucket of cases in which supposedly irresponsible adults seek an “easy way out” of a situation they caused on their own.

The meat of the article, instead, lies not in a moral argument or even in the prosecution of Whalen herself; it is her explanation of her misconduct – the reasons she gave for buying the pills online.

Whalen claimed she had no choice but to buy the abortion pills online, explaining that she was too far from an abortion clinic to have the procedure done by medical professionals. She also claims her daughter did not have the insurance to pay for the procedure in a hospital, although the Pennsylvania law is too ambiguous in the article to assert whether or not this is a reasonable claim. According to the article, the closest clinic was 74 miles away from the mother and daughter’s hometown.

This is obviously an act of desperation. No reasonable parent would buy pills from a website, not knowing where they come from, what is actually in the pills or if they’re harmful. I certainly find it irresponsible that the mother would purchase the pills without truly knowing what is in them or how her daughter will react to them. We already know she had an adverse side effect; extreme bleeding and cramping is not something to take lightly. There was obviously a lack of judgment here.

So we must ask ourselves: Is it better to ban abortions, to close clinics and force women who would have sought abortions anyway to resort to unsafe methods? Or is it logical, even if morally questionable, to allow these clinics to stay open, to give these women a safe way to have an abortion and to ensure that their lives will not be put in any immediate danger? Do we value the lives of the unborn more than the already living? Do we consider a fetus to have more human rights than the mother herself?

To me, abortion clinics are a “necessary evil,” and we should provide these services with the knowledge that we may be saving lives, however few and far between they may be. When we put the value of an unborn baby over that of the mother, we oftentimes wade into questionable waters that can be seen as unwelcome control in the lives of the people.

Should women be in total control over their bodies, with no interference of the state? Or does the local, state or federal government have a duty to interfere should they deem it necessary? This is difficult to discern, but we seem to swing in the direction of allowing for total control over oneself. We are the masters of our own bodies – to have someone take away our autonomy is a great affront to our beliefs as Americans. We should think about this before jumping to conclusions, or making other moral arguments.

When we get to the brass tacks of this particular case, this woman made two grave mistakes that may have cost her daughter her life. It is our duty to prevent other women from making the same mistakes, whether out of desperation or necessity.