A little something to get your blood boiling on a Monday morning:
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…. 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.
The authorities learned about the abortion after Whalen wound up having to take her daughter to a hospital after all—the girl was suffering from severe side effects. But Whalen shouldn’t be in jail. The politicians and anti-choice activists who’ve done all they can to make safe and legal abortions harder and harder obtain—by shutting down clinics, scaring women away from clinics, regulating clinics out of existence—are the ones who should be headed to jail, not this working mom.
Reuters notes that there was an abortion clinic 74 miles away, in Harrisburg, implying that a safe and legal abortion was a 90 minute drive away. Not true:
Restrictions on Abortion
In Pennsylvania, the following restrictions on abortion were in effect as of July 1, 2014:
• A woman must receive state-directed counseling that includes information designed to discourage her from having an abortion and then wait 24 hours before the procedure is provided.
Jennifer Whalen is a single mom who works full time as a nursing home aide; she most likely makes minimum wage or close to it. Whalen couldn’t afford to take two days off work to drive back and forth to Harrisburg; she certainly couldn’t afford a hotel room in Harrisburg. So she did the best she could for her daughter under a very difficult circumstances—and make no mistake: those circumstances are difficult by design. Anti-choice politicians have intentionally made safe and legal abortions harder and harder to obtain and then they turn around and condemn Whalen. And then there’s this: Whalen doesn’t have health insurance and she is paid poverty-level wages for the important work she does. Our economic system impoverishes a working people like Whalen and then persecutes them for the choices they make under duress.
If pro-choice activists created an online fundraiser for Jennifer Whalen and her daughter—to cover the costs of an appeal, to pay for her their living expenses while Whalen isn’t working—I would donate. And I bet I’m not the only one who would.
Why isn’t she on ObamaCare? With her income level it would be highly, highly subsidized.
The real crime here (and act of gross stupidity) is giving illegally obtained prescription drugs to her daughter without the advice of a physician. She could easily have killed her daughter. That is the act that should be punished here.
Making access to abortions easier “may” have given her a better choice but that assumes there is enough demand/paying customers to justify a clinic where they live. There is a whole lot of rural land in the US and tens of millions of people that have to travel hours from their farm/ranch/small town to see a doctor.
You should just be a dumb motherfucker in private where no one can see it. If you’re married, give your wife my deepest condolences.
“The rate of chlamydia among black women was over six times the rate among white women. The chlamydia rate among black men was over eight times the rate among white men.
39.7% of all cases of syphilis were among blacks, who make up 14% of the total population. The overall 2012 rate for blacks was 6.1 times the rate for whites. In 2012, the rate of P&S syphilis among black men was 5.7 times the rate among white men; the rate among black women was 16 times the rate among white women.
Black men aged 20–24 had a gonorrhea rate of 1,903.7 cases per 100,000 men, which was 16.4 times the rate among white men in the same age group. Black men aged 15–19 years had a gonorrhea rate of 1,012.3 cases per 100,000 men, which was 26.2 times the rate among white men in the same age group.”
http://www.cdc.gov/std/stats12/minorities.html
“Although blacks make up only 13.6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 50.3 percent of all diagnosed cases of HIV. Additionally, the rate of HIV diagnosis among black men is eight times that of whites and two times that of Hispanics, and the rate for black women is 19 times that of whites and four times that of Hispanics.” –
http://madamenoire.com/107615/8-important-statistics-that-black-america-should-pay-attention-to-now/#sthash.Zcb4OtZ4.dpuf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBqjZ0KZCa0
Hey how about policing the spam in your comments? Also, why does this show up in the “Most Commented” list?