A mother and daughter in Nebraska are facing felony charges after the mother helped her daughter get an abortion at around 23 weeks pregnant. The felony charge comes after investigators uncovered Facebook messages between the mother and daughter about the planned abortion. Authorities were able to obtain the Facebook messages that outlined the plans for the abortion after securing a search warrant.

Investigators say that 41-year-old Jessica Burgess told her then 17-year-old daughter, Celeste Burgess, through a Facebook message that she had obtained an abortion pill to help her end the pregnancy. Burgess also instructed her daughter on how to use the pill and how the fetus would be disposed of afterward. In court documents, a detective detailed that the daughter told her mom via Facebook message that she couldn't “wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body,” and that the daughter was looking forward to being able to wear jeans again.

Both the mother and daughter are facing felony abortion-related charges. This felony charge comes just one month after the pair were handed down other charges. The previous charges included a single felony for removing, concealing, or abandoning a body, along with two misdemeanors of concealing the death of another individual and falsifying a report.

Madison County Attorney Joe Smith details that this is his first time in 32 years filing theft charges in an abortion-related case. Officials explained that the abortion took place later than the state law allowed. Under Nebraska law, abortions are legal up until 20 weeks of pregnancy. In this case, Burgess helped her pregnant daughter receive an abortion when she was roughly 23 weeks along, although authorities allege that the teen may have been up to 29 weeks pregnant at the time of the abortion.

The prosecution comes just weeks after the landmark Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Officials detail that the abortion and investigation occurred before the Supreme Court made its recent decision.

According to officials, the mother and daughter lied to authorities during the initial investigation and explained that the teen had given birth to a stillborn baby. In reality, Burgess helped her daughter get the abortion via abortion pills and then helped her daughter bury the fetus in a grave north of Norfolk, Nebraska. Court documents detail that a 22-year-old man helped the mother and daughter bury the fetus, but he has only been charged with a misdemeanor.

After investigators located the fetus, they described it as having “thermal wounds.” The injuries were consistent with Facebook messages that detailed the mother and daughter planning to “burn the evidence afterward.”

In a Forbes interview, Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shared that the search warrant they received did not make mention of abortion. The warrants concerned charges related to a criminal investigation and court documents indicate that police at the time were investigating the case of a stillborn baby who was burned and buried, not a decision to have an abortion." Stone explained.

The search warrant which uncovered the conversation the mother and daughter had over Facebook has raised the suspicion of pro-abortion groups and activists. The warrant has led to an accusation of the impact the overturning of Roe v. Wade had on the investigators who probed deeper into the case after the mother and daughter initially explained that the baby was stillborn.

Officials throughout the state have also shared their reactions to the state’s decision to prosecute the mother and daughter. Nebraska State Sen. Megan Hunt shared that the state was “prosecuting people for their pregnancy outcomes.” She detailed that the mother and daughter need “help and support … not prosecution.”

Hunt explained, “True justice would mean ensuring that people have all the resources and the support they need to make decisions about whether they want to have a family, when they have a family, and how to support the families they have with dignity. How did we fail this young woman? That is a bigger question that we need to ask ourselves as a culture.”

Nebraska is one of a handful of states that tried to pass trigger laws in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v Wade. Such laws would immediately make it illegal to have an abortion. Nebraska, however, failed to pass its proposed trigger law.

Pro-abortion activists have also contested the state's decision to prosecute, detailing that women who seek abortions are criminally punished for making a decision based on a lack of access to resources. According to the group National Advocates for Pregnant Women, 1,331 women have been arrested or detained for crimes related to abortion or their pregnancy between the years 2006 and 2020.