Jennifer Anne Whalen, the Pennsylvania mother who reportedly obtained abortion pills online and gave them to her teenage daughter to help terminate her pregnancy has now been sentenced to 9 to 18 months in prison for the violation of the Pennsylvania state law requiring abortions to be performed only by licensed decisions. Whalen was also asked to pay a fine of $1,000 and render 40 hours of community service.
Whalen's attorney, Matthew Banks, had earlier said that his client, who is a nursing home aide and single mother, admitted that her "decision was poor." Whalen pled guilty and received subsequence sentencing. In 2012, Whalen's then 16-year-old daughter became pregnant and reportedly told her mother that she wanted to end her pregnancy. Whalen's unlawful act was discovered two weeks later when the teenager started experiencing "severe cramping and bleeding" that required her to be taken to the hospital. It was there that doctors discovered that the cause of her condition was "an incomplete abortion and urinary tract infection." After both mother and daughter admitted that the teenage girl had taken the pills, doctors called the police and Whalen was charged in December 2013 for illegal abortion.
In the state of Pennsylvania, the abortion law also requires that women under the age of 18 receive parental consent before having an abortion. For nonsurgical abortions, the procedure must be performed when the pregnancy is less than nine weeks along. The patient must then take 1 to 3 days off of school for the entire process. A transvaginal ultrasound is required and counseling must be given to the teen after the procedure.
Whalen purchased the abortion pills online from a European vendor and claimed that she was unaware that she needed a doctor's prescription to obtain the pills. Other reasons that she indicated for this medical misdemeanor is that they did not have enough insurance coverage to cover for a hospital abortion and that they did not want to travel 75 miles to Harrisburg where the nearest abortion clinic was located.