Mother Who Gave Daughter Abortion Pills Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison
Pennsylvania mother Ann Whalen has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for giving her 16-year-old daughter pills to cause a miscarriage.
Whalen's daughter became pregnant in 2012 and decided that she did not want the baby; Whalen told police that she could not find a local abortion clinic and did not want to take her daughter out of the state to have the procedure, which would have been 74 miles away, according to Reuters. Instead, she went online and ordered the pills from a company abroad.
Unfortunately, after taking the pills, the girl (now 18), experienced extreme abdominal pain and bleeding and was hospitalized with an "incomplete abortion and a urinary tract infection," records state. The hospital informed police of the situation, which led to Whalen's arrest. She was charged with giving her daughter pills to induce abortion – Pennsylvania law requires that a physician be present for the procedure.
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Whalen was ordered to serve 18 months in prison, pay a fine of $1,000, and perform 40 hours of community service after being released. Her lawyer, Michael Banks, told the press that Whalen knows "her decision was poor."
According to the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate in Pennsylvania decreased by 9 percent from 2008 to 2011. Abortions in the state accounted for 3.5 percent of all abortions in the U.S. in 2011.
Her case has been compared to that of John Andrew Welden, who tricked his girlfriend, Remee Lee, into taking abortion-inducing pills. She lost her baby, and Lee was sentenced in a Florida courtroom in 2013 after being charged with murder under the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act. He could have been sentenced to life behind bars but instead took a plea deal that put him in prison for at least 13 years.
"Every day is a nightmare for me ever since this began," Lee told CNN. "Even hearing the guilty (plea) yesterday, it's hard to believe it, it's hard to read it and know that this actually happened to me. There's just no words for the horror I wake up with every day that this is my reality. There's no escaping it, there's no turning it off."
