Nebraska Woman Who Helped Daughter Kill Grandchild in Womb, Then Burned and Hid Body, Sentenced to 2 Years
Jessica Burgess, age 42, of Norfolk, Nebraska was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison for the crime of assisting in killing her grandchild with pharmaceuticals and desecrating the body and burying it in a field.
The child was reportedly 29 weeks old, which is well within the age of viability when some children born prematurely can survive outside the womb with medical assistance. Full-term babies are considered 37-42 weeks.
Notably most media outlets when covering the case refrain from explaining how far along the baby was, leaving out the point of development a child would be at by 29 weeks.
Burgess obtained ‘abortion pills’ for her 17 year old daughter Celeste in her third trimester in 2021. Typically abortion pills work in two stages, first by killing the child, and then a second pill induces the cramping necessary to expel the child’s body. The baby died from the pills and was expelled from the daughter into a bathtub. The duo then burned the baby’s body and buried it anonymously in a field with the help of a friend.
Celeste wrote to her Mother about the murder of her baby, “I will finally be able to wear jeans.”
Jessica Burgess pled guilty in July. Many charges were dropped in exchange for the plea deal.
A report from the New York Post explains that in one of the messages, Celeste Burgess talked “about how she can’t wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body.” Celeste Burgess received 90 days in jail in July.
At Jessica’s sentencing this week, the Judge rejected the defense’s request for mere probation, explaining, “I shudder to think, Ms. Burgess, that you have such disrespect for a — call it a human fetus, call it a stillborn child — that you would treat it like yesterday’s trash and not give it some respect in its treatment and disposal,” the judge said. “Our society expects more; it demands more.”
Left-wing outlets were outraged that the mother and daughter were prosecuted at all. The left-wing Daily Kos said, “What was the mom supposed to do? Make a lifelong commitment to raise the kid?” Left-wingers at Salon.com were upset that Facebook turned over the messages to the police in response to a subpoena from law enforcement. Left-wing Politico not only used the most extreme euphemisms to dehumanize the baby, but also got basic facts like the baby’s developmental weeks, wrong in its opening sentence, “A Nebraska woman has been charged with helping her teenage daughter end her pregnancy at about 24 weeks…“
Norfolk, Nebraska is a town of 25,000 about 113 miles Northwest of Omaha, Nebraska. There are roughly 13,000 third-term abortions every year in America. There are about 500 arrests relating to the murder of children by their parents each year in America.
