WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Democrats in Congress are seizing on a pervasive misrepresentation of a grisly child killing out of Nebraska in their attempt to turn the public against pro-life laws by claiming they subject troubled pregnant teenagers to criminal prosecution.

Last week, 19-year-old Celeste Burgess was sentenced to 90 days in prison and two years’ probation for removing, concealing, or abandoning a dead body when she procured abortion pills to kill her preborn baby at 23 weeks, then burned and buried the body. Earlier this month, her mother Jessica pled guilty to assisting with the crime.

Celeste was not charged for taking abortion pills, which have been illegal past 20 weeks in Nebraska since before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, though her mother was charged with helping facilitate the abortion. Despite the facts of the case, many in the press attempted to present it as proof women and girls were starting to be thrown in jail simply for taking abortion pills.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota called the situation a “freighting [sic] violation of privacy and autonomy,” and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu of California said a Twitter Community Note correcting the record was “stupid” on the grounds that “Putting women in jail for concealing an abortion as compared to having an abortion is not the winning message that Republicans think it is.”

The Twitter community note at the bottom of the tweet is stupid. Putting women in jail for concealing an abortion as compared to having an abortion is not the winning message that Republicans think it is. https://t.co/H40YEemmsI

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 22, 2023

Lieu got pushback and a Community Note of his own, noting that the law at issue was not about “concealing an abortion” but rather about concealing “human skeletal remains.” He shot back by claiming that thinking “a fetus is a baby” is a “religious belief,” when in reality it is a settled biological fact that fetuses are whole, living, and genetically distinct human beings.

You have the right to believe a fetus is a baby. You do not have the right to jam your religious belief down other people’s throats. That’s why Democrats will flip the House next year, because of people like you who want to lock women up for concealing an abortion.

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 23, 2023

Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions, with available data so far indicating those states could effectively wipe out an estimated 200,000 abortions a year, and discrediting abortion defenders’ long-running predictions that abortion bans would only force women to continue aborting through more dangerous and illicit means.

The specter of women being jailed for aborting has long been one of the abortion lobby’s most potent talking points, despite the fact that current pro-life laws expressly state that only abortionists or other facilitators may be subjected to penalties.

Meanwhile, abortion allies pursue a variety of tactics to preserve abortion “access,” such as easing distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, attempting to enshrine “rights” to the practice in state constitutions rather than the U.S. Constitution, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, and making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors. 

President Joe Biden has called on Congress to codify a “right” to abortion in federal law, which would not only restore but expand the Roe status quo by making it illegal for states to pass virtually any pro-life laws.